I can feel the thigh I'm looking at. It's like a bridge between the chair I'm sitting on and the ottoman my feet rest upon. That thigh is part of me. It's mine. Yet at the same time it is distant, as if it wasn't properly 'mine.' It is, after all, a hunk of meat. The only reason it isn't taken off me is because a) I'm not sitting in a wrecked plane in the middle of the Andes and b) we've evolved enough as a group of animals, I guess, that most people have my well-being in their heads (well not my particular well-being, but they see me as an indispensable part of the community, an anonymous guarantee of their own survival). And if they leave my thighs alone, I'll leave theirs alone too. That's how things go down here.
But there are exceptions to those who don't want to harvest my meaty thighs. Somewhere out there, I might be on a list with several others who've been designated as healthy and good to eat, and my time might be coming. Maybe my entire life has been charted, since birth, according to the growth of my thighs, or even only the right thigh. He had a good run this year, they said after I finished fifth grade. He almost made the cross country finals, but since he didn't, he picked up kickboxing, which grew his thighs more than would a typical race around the countryside. It also made things easier for us. For we didn't have to send a man with a camera into the forested areas of the countryside, where the race was being run; all we had to do was confiscate the tapes at the kickboxing center and track the growth based on that footage.
I've been pretty oblivious half the time, too, so it would be easy for them to keep track if they wanted. I've always been this way. When, for instance, my parents threw a surprise party for my nineteenth birthday a few years ago, I was completely unaware of the preparations. Do you know how much work it takes to throw a party of that size? I only figured out what was happening when my friend Graeme started playing the bagpipes as I approached the cottage. I knew only then that something special was going on around front. The strange cars parked on the road and in the driveway were perhaps slightly extraordinary, but still did not arouse my suspicion.
I wouldn't say that I'm oblivious in general; on the contrary I'm quite an alert person. I read the newspapers, watch the news on t.v., have a pretty good idea of who's hot in Hollywood, and can carry a decent conversation about all of these things with my friends. Maybe the only time I'm truly oblivious is when things are planned around me that immediately concern me, such as the surprise party. But I need to narrow down my point: the kind of obliviousness I'm talking about refers only to a lack of awareness about people scheming around me--I have never picked up well on hints, especially if my survival isn't threatened. Of course, the aforementioned scheme would threaten my survival--nobody can survive without a thigh.
But imagine being a creature that lives in order to die. A chicken, for instance, is hatched into the world for its eggs and its meat. Neither of these things properly belong to it; they belong to the farmer who has a plan for this living thing that involves nothing but its death. Its life is charted according to its value. It is only kept alive because it is not yet ripe. Once it is ripe, it is sent, with the others it has lived alongside, to be killed as quickly as possible. Then it is forgotten. Even at the dinner table, where thanks are rarely given anymore, it isn't singled out or remembered for the life it led, for the ultimate sacrifice it made for the people sitting around that table. It's contribution is judged as no more praise-worthy than the buttered beans and squash that are piled up next to it. Thank god for this good food. Then the head of the house is commended for his superb cooking skills, his expert marinade and his timing on the barbecue. "This chicken is wonderful, Byron!" says granny, and everybody at the table eventually gets to murmuring in agreement.
Parodies that stage characters who are excessively concerned about the life and well-being of the meat that they are about to eat are funny, but they end up only covering up the issue. A scene from the show Portlandia is the only example that I am aware of. A man and woman sit in a restaurant, waiting for the waitress to attend to them. When the waitress arrives at their table, they ask for the special of the day. The waitress tells them that it is a chicken dish of some sort. Right away, the man is cautious about how the chicken will be prepared--as if one way of preparation was less harmful or insulting to the life of the chicken than another. The woman then begins asking about the chicken itself--its name (!), origin, owner, etc. While outrageously funny, this scene is viewed by meat-eaters everywhere as an example, perhaps an extreme one, of the crack-pot, oversensitive ways of those who are concerned for the lives of animals
-scene erases the chicken once again- the overly concerned people are the object of humour and therefore attention
On one hand, stepping back in a kind of horror, or anxious amazement, at how his friends were so familiar to him--the startling fact that he was not alone in this world
Our rule over various creatures is not questioned very often any more.
Nobody inquires any more, it seems, about what it is like to be a certain animal. It is dismissed as poetic hippy language and it is forgotten, like so many mysterious things about human life.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that people are generally only concerned about their own lives. Granted, some people seem utterly indifferent to the lives of others. They even get slightly hostile when you raise an issue about someone else. After these hostile encounters, one wonders to oneself whether or not one was too intrusive about things, or indeed whether or not one has a life of one's own, or whether or not one has lived well. Very few people reach the final question.
The Metamorphosis is a strange tale. In it Kafka forces our everyday routines, the things we do unthinkingly, into the light. This is one of his great achievements, to make what is regular seem odd, ill-founded, absurd. These absurdities are always hilariously portrayed--his scenes make you stand back, shake your head quickly a few times, re-read with squinty eyes, and finally laugh in a strange, unprecedented way. The scene where Gregor's sister Grete is playing her violin for the lodgers (who invited her in) in the living room is a typical example. Grete plays for a while (her parents watch her hand(!) anxiously while she does) and, strangely, the narrator says that the lodgers appeared bored and disappointed. When Gregor wanders into the middle of the living room, bits of food attached to him via the dust that has built up around his shell, the lodgers perk up and react angrily when they find out that they weren't informed that they'd been living with such an interesting creature. This is a hilarious observation to me, and one that I think reveals the absurdities of human judgment (which is a recurring theme). Gregor does not know that this is why they appear angry. He is given over to his perspective in this regard, confined to his own interpretation of their reaction.
Another thing that Kafka fixes on is the absurdity or magnificent arbitrariness of the human body, its startling presence, its appendages. This comes out in his characters' fantastic desires to be bugs, or in the case of Gregor, transformation into the body of a bug. Is it that the body is strange to Kafka? The instruments unfamiliar? Coetzee picks up on this in Elizabeth Costello, where he says "Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking deviced mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies."
No comments:
Post a Comment