Sea, Snow & Concrete.

pictures were taken from across Europe; England, Ireland, Cornwall, Latvia, Germany, Norway.

Talking with meat: Some Thoughts on Animals and Communication

We cannot talk with animals. We cannot truly communicate; we can read body language and sounds, but we cannot converse, exchanging knowledge and stories. We believe we can, though.

            Communication worldwide is poor. Humans do not know what other humans are really trying to say or what they really mean; between mind and mouth the message struggles to be released. With animals, it is obviously a whole lot worse, but humans have built up a series of communicative myths to enable them to live consciously at peace with the world of nature. This can be seen in the ‘wild’ animal, whom we respect for having a language and endlessly attempt to communicate with or ensnare in some way; the ‘domestic’ animal, whom we talk to, chatter with, but are talking really to ourselves; and the ‘incommunicable.’ Here I will focus on animals that we exploit for meat as the ‘incommunicable,’ but I suppose it could be used to regard all manner of uncharismatic life; insects, fish, plants, pest animals.

            For the ‘wild’ animal, the best example I can think of when it comes to communications are cetaceans. Whales and dolphins have long been celebrated in myth and popular culture for their ability to converse and communicate orally through a series of sounds we have come to call ‘whales song.’ Some believe that, should certain cetacean species have the ability to tell stories, or share knowledge, they may have retained a culture dating back to their inception as a species over two million years ago. The whale song has become revered as mystical and magical; I remember reading a letter someone wrote in protest of the Faroese Grindadrap, where many pilot whales are slaughtered, claiming that whale song was ‘holding the ozone layer together.’ We cannot converse and query with the cetaceans however, or truly domesticate them like we have cats and dogs. For this reason, we mystify and mythologize the wild animal, for the over-powerful language we believe they have, and that we cannot use with them.

            We believe that we have deep understandings and communications with our domesticated animals. When I use ‘domesticated’ here, I refer to those we do not milk, eat, or use for other labours. Whereas with ‘wild’ animals, we give them animal and superhuman traits, we afford out domestic animals human sensibilities. We provide them with a name, a house, food that is not all dissimilar to our own in its process. We talk to them as if they really are going to converse or understand us. They may grow to understand certain signifiers of tone or plosives and other ear-catching sounds our languages make, and perhaps even their own name, but this is all in due course to what these sounds come to mean; food, sleep, pain, affection. The human talking to it’s pet is not talking to the pet, to the personality of the pet so much as to themselves; the human veneers the pet with their human interpretation and understanding of the animal, and talks to it, maybe even reading response in their illusory dressing of the pet.

            Finally, there are the other domesticated animals; the meat. To be able to eat these animals, we must believe that they cannot communicate meaningfully with each other, and especially not to us. Thus we render these animals ‘stupid’ and ‘dumb,’ using these sorts of terms for all animals we eat from bovines to tuna. One of the more powerful tools an animal welfare movement may have is to show that these animals can communicate. How do meat-eaters feel about cows knowing that they build meaningful and emotional connections with each other? It may sound silly now, but this sort of discourse is what turned the globe against whaling.

            Eating meat and treating certain animals as pests is often justified in human discourse as these animals are uncharismatic and stupid, often mystifying their communication as gibberish. Perhaps this will change in time, and we will stop eating certain animals in place of others, or all animals, or none at all.

The history-mining reader in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus.

The fallabilities of recording and understanding history are not new field of J.M. Coetzee’s writings; “the Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” the latter story of his debut Dusklands presents us with a fractured yet whole history; fractured in the different reports and pieces of the narrative as a whole left out, but whole in its presentation; a first person narrative, an appendix from a fictitious descendant of Jacobus, and other add-ons (the use of J.M. Coetzee’s surname for the main character may also be seen as a conscious anchoring of the fictitious history in real history, forcing the reader to judge for themselves.) Later, in Waiting for the Barbarians, we are presented with an unlodged and nebulous environment, in an unnamed land populated by the denizens of ‘the Empire’ and also the mysterious ‘barbarians.’ Here history is a straining force; the barbarians alien approach to time and the importance of history can be unsettling.

            Coetzee’s 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus has a similar unlodged setting, but on a much more drastic scale. I have read some reviews that glance over this, claiming that it is Coetzee simply moving aside the humdrum lynchings of story, setting and other extrapalative description to make room for philosophical waxing in the novel, and space for the reader’s interpretations to blossom upon unanswered and often unspoken questions presented throughout. I believe that this unlodging of history and environment, being unusual in texts, forces the reader, through their discomfort, to mine for histories that are not there.

            The Childhood of Jesus feels very open in terms of space, yet is populated with many characters. The space in question is an unnamed land, where Spanish is spoken, (a similar confusion created as when Coetzee used his own surname for Jacobus?) or, more accurately, the populace has to speak Spanish, as we learn that Simón and David had to learn Spanish on the boat to Novilla, the main city. We know that Simón and David came by boat, from a camp called ‘Belstar,’ and that is about as far back for either of them that we are given. We are allowed some insights into these journeys; David loses a document on the boat supposedly detailing who his parents are, which is how he meets Simón, and Simón comments that the portmaster at Belstar will only allow boats out, not back to Belstar.

            The main characters are the only two we ever really get even a shallow insight into. The other Stevedores that Simón works with at the docks at Novilla engage only in the present, to the extent that they are dubious of ‘moving with the times’ and using a crane to save their heavy lifting, or to acknowledge the accumulation of the days upon days of shipping grain to a store that is overflowing and infested with rats. The epitome of such misplacement of past or future thought is Senór Daga, who acts with no understanding of consequence; he robs and engages in violence, and generally seems to float through his life.

            As such, the reader latches onto the small details we are afforded. David’s history, at least for the most part, we get to witness being built, but Simón’s we have not witnessed. We know small details; he had to learn Spanish, he can drive, his father pushed him high on the swing but he never fell off as a child, we know his hands were soft before becoming a stevedore and we know he is middle aged. This is the most we ever really get to know about any character; Coetzee offers us a line into Inés’ past when Simón says of her past at the luxurious ‘La Residencia; “I have no idea what it was like. I have never understood La Residencia or how you landed up there.” Alas, Inés “does not hear the question, or does not think it worthy of reply.” (Coetzee, p.312) Although it is mainly stressed with Simón and David, it is suggested that every character met is not native to this land, that they too had a history elsewhere, but are now fixed into the present, somehow landing up wherever they landed up, Inés in La Residencia, and Simón and David in the blocks.

            The novel ends with a group of characters breaking free of Novilla and the small and barren satellite towns it grows, onward to the town of ‘Estrillata el Norte.’ (Even the place names appear unlodged from a past or hint at environment; “They strike a town name Laguna Verde (why?- there is no lagoon)”) (Coetzee, p.310) Where they will cut off the short history the reader has been allowed an insight to, namely the histories of the characters in Novilla, thus denying the reader even the relevance of this short record. However, Coetzee’s latest book is a sequel entitled The Schooldays of Jesus, and so we shall have to see what residue of history we can drag across the gap.

Cited:

Coetzee, J.M. The Childhood of Jesus. (London: Vintage, 2014)

Isle

        

  "I will leave behind my terraces and my walls... They will be enough. 

              They will be more than enough."   - Cruso in Foe by J.M. Coetzee.

           It’s Narda. It just won’t get better, the cancer has really charred a hole through his jaw. Probably shouldn’t eat his meat. Good job I don’t have to milk him either. Still, I let him continue grazing with the others on the slopes. Can’t see the benefit in killing him. Maybe it’d leave more grass for the others, but not very likely. I feel the rest of his warm, short coat for ticks and lumps before sending him on his way for whoever I grasp out of the herd next. I often find wounds from play and tease among themselves, or from when they’ve gotten too far into the woods, among thorns and denser brush, or maybe something jagged washes ashore. Ten. I always make sure there are just ten of them. I don’t need any others.

            There wasn’t much more when old da was about. Back then counting the goats was his job. He did it with rough hands and force; the goats would bleat and spring away in confusion renewed daily. It was to feel the meat he said. To feel the bones. There were even more goats when mother was there too, and even more back when the old terraces and the old huts were just the huts and the terraces and people skittered and roamed the Isle completing constant tasks in smiling groups. The goats would skip and tumble about the terraces and be found in the huts. They shrunk the woods with their trampling and munching and browsing. It’s grown back now. It’s even spread.

            The goats have complete free roam of the terraces, no longer filled with rich dirt and crops, but grass and stubble. Gale’s pregnant, so soon I’ll choose an old one to bleed out. Still unsure if Narda’s flesh, hide and bones will be consumable or usable. I don’t like putting out the goat’s sparky little lives, as I find myself openly chattering away to them, treating them as my brothers and equals. It’s not often I have to kill one, though. Just to keep the even ten. There’s the fish of the sea and beach, the birds and their eggs which they lay in crevices in the Northern cliff face, and the leaves and roots and berries and mushrooms of the woods. A good crop to top it off, mainly hardy root vegetables and perpetual greens. I collect the rainwater when it comes, and there’s the stream that comes through the woods around the old huts. There’s a well, too, but I don’t always trust it. Too old. Too underused. I’d go down and clear the tunnel, but I don’t like the thought of the dark, small space. That was old da’s job too.

            I can still talk mother’s language. On stormy nights when the wind and rain roar at the hut an I can hear the sea blast the shore, I whisper some of the things she might say to me, out in the air as it goes from humid to a crisp coolness in the eye of the storm. After storms, the beach is filled with some small an large treasures, and a decent stock of driftwood. I hear my mother’s language in the lapping of the waves of the post-storm morning, a calm swash forever up the bay.

            Old da tried to beat the language out of us. Re and throbbing, he’d scream that on the Isle we talk the same tongue, we have to be part of the same group, we must all be the same. The others would go silent and sad. I remember their voices warbling old un-understandable songs out in the fishing boats coming back in to the bay. Mother would sing her own tongue’s songs when working the terraces, and everyone admired them. Slowly, after old da’s first explosion, the Isle became emptier and emptier, until we had to slaughter more than half the goats and burn their corpses before they rotted. The woods swallowed the huts, once populous, and the terraces got riddle with weeds. Soon, the well started to become untrustworthy. It was just old da, mother, me and the goats. The goats knew nothing. Gleefully, they explored the territories opened up to them. I’ve seen the stories and histories painted on the walls of the old huts. Their colours and patterns once soothed me but now they make me sad, as they are written in some other language that some of the other Islanders brought with them. Somehow I felt their language and writing was much more ancient than I’ll ever truly grasp.

            The goats congregate around old da’s grave, as it makes a sudden and unnatural change in the otherwise naturally sloping topography. When he died, with just me and him on the Isle, he smiled, weak and feverish, rook my hands, and whispered “It’s all yours. I leave it all for you, my lad. The Isle is your inheritance.”

I do not count the seasons as I should. I understand the changes that happen over a year, but no longer have anyone to share the significance of time with. I wait for them. Mother told me about them, the groups, and their many names; “coast guard,” “army,” “police,” “government.” Strange, nonsensical names. They will come, and they will be people, as I am people, and we will finally share the Isle, just like before. Just as it should be.