Eating Onions and Other Root Vegetables, Continued

So it may in fact be true that I have very little empathy for root vegetables, at least not to the point of not eating them, as practitioners of the Jain religion do. But my feelings about the matter are not at zero, so I have to reconcile them somehow. Undoubtedly the vast majority of people in the world do not think twice about the the fact that they kill the vegetables that they eat. Even now, at the age of almost 53, I have not lost the childlike habit of attributing emotions to nonhuman life forms and even to inanimate objects. This propensity in children is apparently the reason why a book like Goodnight Moon was so popular. Children are natural animists and everything is relatable and communicable. And as I said, I have never outgrown the impulse. I will select the ugly apple from the pile at the grocery store because no one else seems to want it. When I see someone pluck a leaf off of a tree I cringe. I feel the same way about a car getting scratched, however, or even worse, some crazy person taking a hammer to a statue, but the feeling in these cases is qualitatively different from how I feel when human beings do things to living things be they other humans, nonhuman animals or plants. I recall one time trying in vain to keep our family's German Shepherd from stepping, unbeknownst to him, on a pretty little caterpillar. I must have been all of six or seven, I imagine.

So about this problem of reconciliation. Irrespective of scholarly work on the origins of religion, I somehow feel that this need to reconcile a contradiction that is central to being a human being is at the root of religious practice. Interestingly, a young Brazilian filmmaker just released a fictional ethnography, an idea that I love, in which fisherman spear fish so that they can eat them, but then cradle them in their arms while they die, murmuring comforting and apologetic sounds as they expire. Such is the nature of sacrifice, something that humans have practiced since hunter gatherer times. Should it be the same when one eats a potato? I don't see why not, but it is surely better to have it take the form of mindfulness or some other modern psychological-emotional exercise or practice, such as being aware of where the potato came from, what it took to grow, who harvested it, et cetera. The point is not necessarily to not eat potatoes, pace Jainism, but to eat them with some kind of humility and realization of what such an act entails.

Greetings from the Valtellina!

For the next month or so, I will be writing from Talamona, a small town just east of Morbegno, as if that will tell you anything. Morbegno is a somewhat bigger town that is at the mouth of the Valtellina, just east of Lake Como. Bellagio? Where George Clooney has a house? At least I think he still has a house there. He did at one time.

In any case, it is very cold here, and it is nice to hear the local dialect, which will come in handy in creating my Franco Fasiolo character. Frécc! is what one hears out on the street often: Cold! And boy is it.

Typical for small towns in Italy, there are three grocery stores, one that rivals any supermarket in the United States, and two smaller ones, one of which is very good in both quality and price, all within walking distance in this town of 5,000.

It is in this nice small one that I set this post. Something about the change of scenery, and the extreme cold, has given me my appetite back. Before I left, I could barely eat a peanut butter sandwich, and had cut out wine and coffee all together. I actually felt quite good.

But something about the change made me instantly begin again with the wine, coffee and tea, and I actually bought a two-pack of canned tuna with which I made pasta, and then another single that I used to make a sandwich.

Today I was in the market and saw other things that looked appealing: sausages, a pork roast, slices of veal . . . I almost bought the veal, along with butter and white wine. I already had capers at home, to make veal piccata. Somehow the tuna was the gateway protein, leading first to veal and then to pork, a dangerous path.

Then I thought of the poor baby calf that was slaughtered to make the veal, probably after leading a miserable life, and I just couldn't do it. I sadly but also solidly put the other makings for the dish back on the shelf and continued with my shopping, worried that I might get to the point where I just can't eat anything anymore because of the moral and ethical implications.

So why, I thought on my walk back to my apartment, can I still eat vegetables, given what I know, from the latest research, about their sentient abilities? Certainly a big part of the difference is that many plants can be eaten without harm; in fact, they thrive on it. See my earlier post on pruning roses. And if I am going to be completely honest, I don't think any amount of research is going to make me feel bad about eating an onion or a clove of garlic. I am not a Jain, after all, as much as I admire their philosophy. Briefly, Jains will not eat any plant that must be killed to be harvested: so no root vegetables (garlic, onion, carrot . . . ) but certainly apples and things like peas and beans do not present a problem because these can be picked without killing the plant from which they originate.

I think it all goes back to a philosophy I developed when I was in my early to mid twenties or so, one of a sensual morality. If doing something repulses me, it is wrong, and no amount of rational thought will change my mind about it. Could I or would I kill a calf so that I could eat its meat? Not a chance. I would starve first.

But there is something about the ontology of an onion that removes it so far from the realm of my senses, the theater in which my sensual morality flourishes, that it does not pose a problem for me to kill it and eat it. And I doubt if any amount of scientific research on the sophisticated lives of onions will change how I feel about it.

EXCERPT: Davos (4)

Franco thought of what kind of wordless performance he could present to his interlocutors. A dance? Was that goat trying to tell him something with her gush of urine? It produced such a tender sense of vulnerability and empathy in Franco. Isn’t that what is needed? All of these words and reasons did nothing. It was like a water balloon exploding, not linear at all. Maybe that was the trick. Multiple stories all at once. Here it is my friends, everything you need to know, all at once. No, not know. Feeling, not reason, is what is needed, a dance, a gush, an opera in which everyone sang their song on stage at the same time, cacophonous and opaque, but communicating nonetheless, but feeling and empathy, and not knowledge, not reason or argument, flows and fluency. Don’t they see the florid and fruiting fig tree? Franco thought, don’t they see it, and feel it? This is what they need. The noisy fig tree that speaks nothing at all yet says everything.

Now Franco found himself amid the trees, beautiful and terrifying in their number and anonymity. They soared above him and blotted out the light, and trapped the moisture, like big wicks that sucked the water from the earth and the air, storing it in their cells, thousands and millions of cells, in their pulp and in their bark, cells in every twig and stem and leaf. Franco was thirsty and had already drained the measly two bottles of water that he had brought with him. He felt the lightness of dehydration that was thrilling and worrisome at the same time. So different he was from a tree, who could just suck moisture from the air. Maybe he could also, and the moist air felt good on his sweaty skin, but he could still feel the dryness inside of him. His legs felt skinny, as if they weighed hardly anything at all, and again he had the feeling that as he walked he was not really moving forward, but was just pushing off in space, floating, without ever gaining traction that would make forward movement possible. Or he was moving forward, but there was no way of telling, since everything that surrounded him seemed the same, the lack of differentiation in the landscape yielding space without dimension or direction. It was a trick of the trees, and of the oblique road whose slope was not a slope, but exhausting nonetheless. Franco’s thirst was gone, and hunger was a distant memory. He knew then that he was in trouble.

Animal Rights Scholars

I was listening to a leading animal rights scholar speaking on National Public Radio (NPR) the other day. In elucidating his position in favor of animal rights, he made sure to point out that animals are sentient beings that deserve rights because they have interests. He then went on to contrast this special condition of animals, which of course includes human beings, with plants that are an example of beings, perhaps he said entities, that are not sentient and that do not have interests (!).

Why do animal rights scholars so casually and confidently make this assumption? Are they aware of the science around the topic? Do they even have an interest in it? It seems not. They just blithely make the same mistake that people who ascribe rights only to human beings do. Can't they take just that one extra step? What can we think of our academic system when it is populated with such parochial and illogical thinkers?

Pruning Roses

I read that we prune roses for our own human purposes. It makes sense to me. But it seems that roses and many other plants, trees included, do much better and look much healthier when they are pruned or trimmed. I can only think that the way plants are situated domestically often protects them predators to whom they would be exposed and in concert with whom they have evolved. So isn't human pruning just a substitute for the foraging that would be done by other animals under wild conditions? A theory based on the agency of allergies comes to mind, one that is often applied to both biological and sociological dynamics. For example, the proliferation of allergies in modern industrial society is theorized to be the result of human immune systems being undertaxed. Without anything to do, they produce bodily reactions that are then pathologized as various diseases, specifically as autoimmune disorders. I think the same malaise can be seen in plants that are not regularly trimmed or nibbled on. In other words: Viva la parassita!

Taxonomy as Prayer

Apologies for the title, because I am not going to write about either taxonomy or prayer, which will probably come as a relief to you. The phrase simply captures a dynamic and process that I do want to explore, which is the phase shift that occurs when intense engagement with the physical world evolves into a a more abstracted involvement. Sigmund Freud called it the 'oceanic feeling', if I am correct in aligning my simple thought with one of the many insights of such an original thinker. As a young researcher, he took to dissecting the brains of mice in an attempt to discover the origin of the soul, finally abandoning that approach for another that eventually came to be psychoanalysis and psychotherapy achieved through talking, which involves essentially the same shift from the concrete to the abstract which I have in mind.

I remember once, in a graduate seminar, expressing my desire to break down a house into its myriad components, using a simple tool such as a spider diagram. I was immediately and roundly chastised by one of the professors present, saying that a house is not a home, and that my approach to understanding the house would be overly reductive. Well, yeah. That was the whole point. Or one of the points. My instinct was to break down the house - into doors, siding, windows, latches, nails, et cetera, down to the most infinitesimal piece imaginable, decomposing also the raw materials into their constituent elements: fiber, vapor, molecules, atoms, electrons . . .

By doing so, my aim was to completely exhaust the material nature of the house, just as I suspect that Freud was trying to completely dismantle the physical structure of the brains of those poor rodents, with the feeling that once that was done, the spiritual will become accessible. It is clearly a Baroque exercise, looking for truth in the irreducible. It also has its Romantic version, however. Many times over the past year, as I have toiled away at refurbishing my house, I have fallen into faint revelries in the midst of one task or another. I recall standing on a ladder while working on some pipes, struggling with a wrench to fit a length into a tight space, gaining a fraction of an inch with each turn, all while making sure to not lose my balance, but so absorbed in the task that I felt perfectly comfortable, pipe and fitting here, pipe dope there, feet planted firmly on the ladder, the wrench a mere extension of my arm . . .

Then I looked up and saw the clouds scudding across the sky, and there it was. That revelry. That feeling. Probably the thing that Freud felt as he sat hunched over his work.

It happened another time when I was snaking out a sewer line in my driveway. Seated on the concrete, I struggled to get the snake up the mainline to clear it, again gaining an inch or two with every turn. There must be something in the rhythmic nature of the work that sets one up to shift from one phase to another. So after minutes - hours? - of wrestling with this snake, I was prompted to look up, who knows shy, and gazed into the middle distance, immersed in that same intense feeling, of somehow being connected to something much bigger or markedly different from everyday reality.

Who knows. Maybe this is just the same as a runner's high, something which I have also experienced. But its source is somehow rooted in a different place, more cognitive somehow, because as demanding as the pipefitting or drain snaking was, I was not at all exhausted in a physical sense, and there was no rush of endorphins.

But back to the house. My idea, or my instinct, was to pulverize the house to the point that the constituent elements both disappeared and also then perhaps blew away or recombined to produce something new, something of a new order, in a new phase. From dust you came and to dust you shall return. Had the professor been more patient, I think he would have seen how I got from house to home by destroying the house, or at least by breaking it down so methodically and exhaustively.

So to do this with plants would, I think, help enter that new phase of understanding, helping to discover that ultimate container that I mentioned in my earlier post. Trunk, branch, stem, leaf, fiber, cell . . . Not to do this materially necessarily, but in one's imagination, and to do it to oneself also . . . Again, I think this is what people are talking about when they speak of being at one with nature, when they go hiking or fishing or whatever . . .

This idea gets at the point of an even earlier post in which I talk about walking in the Oakland Hills and was looking for some possible point of juncture with the trees that surrounded me, as fellow beings. What is that common core?

Unequal Equality and the Need for an Ultimate Container

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The quote above is from Animal Farm by George Orwell. It came to mind when I was thinking of my gradation of multi-ontological personhoods, the idea being that every or most things can be a person, according to various scientific and philosophical understandings, but that they are, by virtue of their varying natures, different kinds of persons. In other words, I have posited a gradation, spectrum or range of personhood, organized not by value but by characteristics - by qualities but not by quality.

It is all a bit of a cheat, or at least a potential cheat, because what is the point of creating a category of something if all of the things within that category are in fact radically different, or inhabit the category for radically different reasons? What I need is a bigger container in which I can put my personhood container, in order to provide an overarching rationale or model of personhood, but of course that does not really solve the problem, since I would in turn need another container for the that container, and so on. 

I noticed the same problem when listening to a cosmologist give a year end summary of the current thinking about the beginnings of the universe. It all came off as kind of funny to me, because apparently the reigning ideas are that the universe came from nothing, that it has its own rules, that the stuff inside the universe is not like the universe itself, that all of our physics breaks down before the Big Bang, and that we should not be surprised if the universe turns out to be unlike anything we have ever known before. In other words, the container that we have needs to fit into another container to give it a rational and meaningful context, and so on. So it is the same problem.

I suppose what resolves the rational contradiction for me is that it all just feels right. As a teenager I developed this idea of a sensual morality. Something is wrong if it feels wrong. It was the argument I used for being a vegetarian. Of course, now that I know more about plants, I feel bad about eating them too. So the new task is to somehow reconcile the idea that somethings have to die in order for other things to live. This is the central problem of being human, and in my view the central problem, or one of the central problems, that animates religious, philosophical and scientific thought.

There are many ways that this is done, but as far as I can tell they all suffer from the ultimate container problem.