Living, Dying: Mercy? (Blake: The Human Abstract)

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Dying, Varanasi (Benares): photo by fredcan, May 2009

On his photo Dying, Varanasi (Benares) (brought to our attention by poet friend Aditya), the photographer, fredcan, has this to say:

Varanasi (Bénarès) est aussi la cité de la mort. Plus que n'importe où ailleurs, la vie et la mort s'y juxtaposent, comme pour nous rappeler que rien n'est permanent et que la mort est la seule certitude qui existe.

Je suis tombé sur cette vache à l'agonie, alors que je descendais Harichandra Ghat en direction du Gange, un matin à l'aube. Il n'est pas rare que les vaches tombent en descendant les ghats, se cassent les membres et finissent paralysées. Elles sont alors laissées là, agonisantes. Dans ces cas là, certains viennent s'occuper d'elles, les nourrissent, leur donnent des calmants et les couvrent de couvertures, jusqu'au bout. Il ne viendrait à l'idée de personne de mettre un terme à leur souffrance, puisque, on s'en doute, tuer une vache représenterait un terrible péché pour un hindou.

Varanasi is also the city of death. More than anywhere else, death and life are side by side, as if to remind us that nothing is permanent and that death is the only certainty that exists.

I came across this dying cow one morning at dawn, as I was walking down Harichandra Ghat, towards the Ganga. Sometimes, cows fall down the ghats and break their legs. They end up paralysed and are left there dying. When this happens, some people come and take care of them, feed them, give them drugs and cover them with blankets, until the end. It wouldn't cross anyone's mind to put an end to the animal's suffering, since, unsurprisingly, killing a cow would be seen as a terrible sin for a Hindu.

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William Blake: The Human Abstract

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;

And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Catterpiller and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.

The Human Abstract: William Blake, from Songs of Experience, 1794

William Blake: title page of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794

Black refugees evicted from sharecropping, now living on roadside, Parkin, Arkansas: photo by John Vachon, 1936 (Farm Security Administration/WPA, Library of Congress)

Three families camped on the plains along U.S. 99 in California. They are camped behind a billboard which serves as a partial windbreak. All are in need of work. Billboard reads "Next Time Try The Train. Southern Pacific. Travel While You Sleep": photo by Dorothea Lange, November 1938 (Farm Security Administration/WPA, Library of Congress)

Berlin, morning after the British bomb attack of 23-24 August 1943: amidst their salvaged possessions, two homeless women seated and waiting for evacuation: photographer unknown, August 1943 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

Refugee family in Upper Silesia, waiting in the freezing cold for someone to pick them up to flee their homeland to the west to safety: photo by Blaschka, January 1945 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

Berlin Hauptbahnhof: homeless refugees from Pomerania, East and West Prussia, fleeing westward: photographer unknown, March 1945 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

Homeless cat, Japan: photo by 新 日 本 奇 行 ふたたび, 10 December 2008

Wrestlers of Pehlwani, Varanasi (Benares), Uttar Pradesh, India: photo by fredcan, 10 March 2008.

"...un combat entre pehlwani, les lutteurs de Varanasi (Bénarès). Je suis allé chaque matin pendant plusieurs jours à l'akhara (l'école), mais les combats n'ont jamais vraiment eu lieu. Tout est toujours très aléatoire et imprévisible en Inde, ce qui rend tout projet improbable."

"...a fight between pehlwani, the Indian wrestlers of Varanasi (Benares). I had been going to the akhara or school for several days, but fights never really occurred. Everything is always uncertain and unpredictable in India, which makes all kinds of plans rather unlikely."



View of the Ghat of Varanasi from the River Ganges: photo by mirrormundo, 8 April 2009

for Vincent and Aditya

Signs of the Times: And the Stars Fell on Alabama

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Tuscaloosa Children's Theatre presents the Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the Bama Theatre, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: photo by Carol M. Highsmith, 16 April 2010 (George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs, Library of Congress)

The many masks of the whirling, pulsating stars. A venerable tradition in the time of Andrew Marvell held that momentous historical events were always heralded by unusual occurrences in nature.

A secret Cause does sure those Signs ordain

Fore boding Princes falls, and seldom vain.



Andrew Marvell (1621-1678): from A Poem upon the Death of O.[liver] C.[Cromwell", 1658, in Miscellaneous Poems, 1681

Lightning strikes at the heart of the massive tornado that ripped through Tuscaloosa and continued on to Birmingham, Alabama: photo by Saxon McClamma, 27 April 2011

Tuscaloosa Tornado as seen from UAB campus: photo by Saxon McClamma, 27 April 2011

A large tornado sweeps through Limestone County, south of Athens, Alabama, 27 April 2011: photo by Gary Cosby Jr./The Decatur Daily/AP

Overnight tornadoes left part of Pratt City, Alabama in ruins, 28 April 2011: photo by Marvin Gentry/Reuters

Concrete steps lead to nothing after a tornado demolished a mobile home in Preston, Mississippi, 27 April 2011; the home and one next to it were blown about 100 feet away into a cow pasture; three related women died at the site: photo by Rogelio V. Solis/AP

Andrew Marvell: The Mower to the Glo-Worms

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Noctilucent clouds, Kuresoo bog, Soomaa National Park, Estonia: photo by Martin Koitmäe, 2009

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Ye Living Lamps, by whose dear light
The Nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the Summer-night,
Her matchless Songs does meditate;

Female Glow Worm (Lampyris noctiluca) in field grass, Princes Risborough, Bucks.: photo by Timo Newton-Syms, 2007

II

Ye Country Comets, that portend
No War, nor Prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the Grasses fall;

Contrail across tail of Comet 2004/F4, seen from Cactus Flats: photo by The Starmon, 2004

III

Ye Glo-worms, whose officious Flame
To wandring Mowers shows the way,
That in the Night have lost their aim,
And after foolish Fires do stray;

Laser beam directed toward the centre of the Milky Way from Yepun laser star guide facility at ESO Paranal Observatory, Chile, crossing the southern sky and creating an artificial star at 90 km. altitude in Earth's mesosphere: photo by ESO/Yuri Beletsky, 2010

IV

Your courteous Lights in vain you wast,
Since Juliana here is come,
For She my Mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.

Glow-worm heaven [Lampyris noctiluca swarm], Waitomo Caves, Waitako, New Zealand: photo by milkthebasic, 23 October 2006

for Don

Andrew Marvell: The Mower to the Glo-worms, summer 1650 or summer 1651, posthumously published in Miscellaneous Poems, 1681

Stockyard Fundamentals: John Vachon, Union Stockyards, Chicago, 1941

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The maze of livestock pens and walkways at the Union Stockyards, Chicago: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

The June air of the South Side of the enormous City of Big Shoulders, Killing Floor of the Plains, Butcher to the World, welled up hot and humid, thick with a sharp acrid aroma of adrenalin panic cut by the charged mean stench of animal blood.

The cattle, having been herded and packed into the big prison-like trucks in Kansas, offloaded after the long two-day road transit across the searing summertime prairies and now packed again into the tight plywood rectangles of the Union Stockyard pens, lowed dolorously, their great thirsty pink tongues drooping from their mouths, flags of open submission. The animals now visibly too exhausted to react in any way save by rubbing numbly up against one another, to what was coming -- that thing, in anticipation of which how could they but have been receiving ancient instinctive neural signals -- clouded warnings useless against the encroaching inevitability of the thing -- all this but dimly sensed from outside the pens, yet somehow eerily perceptible all the same, even, or perhaps especially, to the sensitive spiritual receptors of a child.

Assembly-line animal sacrifice may be the sort of transgression against which nature creates and projects its own helplessly protesting fore-echo, a vibrational field signalling imminent violation, released ahead of mechanized murder to fan out upon the windless air in an unseen inaudible fear-plume. No archives exist to help us understand the dark intimacies of the final stages of these routine ceremonies. The tremendous blood-spurting, groaning, eye-rolling climactic moment of the ritual was not kept on film, never described by secretarial accountants in the kind of detailed notation that historical suffering requires, if it is to be acknowledged.

But the dread-emanations of the doomed beasts in their cells, supposing these emanations in fact existed, could not but have been picked up by the men in the hired crews of the factory execution squad; to whom, realistically, such emanations, if they existed, would have been old news long ago. So let's get on with it. These handlers were hardened-looking cowboys, and in their tending not given to great shows of gentleness or kindness toward the frightened milling animals in the fenced communal waiting-stalls. There seemed, too, curiously -- again from the innocent perspective of a child's widening eyes -- a kind of cowboy heroism involved; as though the workings of this vast animal-death factory represented, not unlike the heroic labours of men at war, a form of brave world-saving activity, bringing meat to the tables of hungry people as far away as, for example, Germany.

And thus it was that, visiting this infernal station on a school expedition, one experienced one's original informative vision of the process of large-scale animal sacrifice in actu. The smell, impossible ever to forget that smell. One surmises a Swift (not the corporate slaughterer, but the earlier modest proposer) might conjure impressions of a similar sort of fateful odour arising to invade the senses, to linger in the hidden grey recesses of the brain, had the yards and pens and ramps and walkways been jammed not with frightened beasts en route to the killing chambers, but with people, while cows and pigs and horses and sheep and even perhaps the occasional helpful dog chivvied and herded them along the same baleful courses. But in that latter hypothetical case, one must speculate that the people, having souls, and being sensitive creatures, would at least have kept some brief but memorable notes, so that scholars of the future would be able to remember, and commemorate with reverence, their last feelings, as they went off terrified to die in puddles of their own spilt blood and viscera.

Not of course that gawking kids with goony crewcuts on school field trips were ever going to be conducted by the floor managers, the matter-of-fact priest cult of this infernal temple, into the inner sanctum of the killing-factory buildings -- where, one imagined or indeed knew with a deep certainty that had no rational explanation, the metallic secret heart of the Yards was kept, in the ark of the covenant, a weapon, an instrument, that hung, poised in the air, for a long terrible instant before the final falling of the blow. Over and over and over. There seemed no end to the numbers of animals, there among the waiting-stalls, that awful sultry summer's day.

Ramps, pens and railway track at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Truck full of cattle waiting to be unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Cattle being unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Cattle being unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Trucks parked after delivering a load of cattle, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Removing dead cow from pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Man on horseback and boy looking over cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Handler with cattle in pen at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Owner looking over cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Workman with prod starting to unload pigs from truck at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Workman with prod unloading pigs down ramp from truck at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Pigs in holding pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Pigs in walkway moving toward factory at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Pigs in walkway entering factory building, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Owners, handlers and guests inspecting pens, with transit ramp overhead, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Union Stockyards at mid-day, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Stockyard workers smoking and talking during lunchtime, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Homo Necans: Man the Killer

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American Meat Institute advertisement: Life, 25 October 1943 (Gallery of Graphic Design)

The absence of a predatory instinct in the great ape's genetic makeup was always going to be a problem once the descent from the trees to the forest floor had taken place. Paleolothic man compensated for this lack by displacing patterns of inter-species aggression and redirecting them toward other species. Thus was born hunting, a conduct in which the characteristics of an equal are projected upon the prey, which thus becomes an "enemy". Killing your enemy is OK. From animal sacrifice, in turn, is born religion.

This is the thesis of Walter Burkert in his profound study of ancient Greek myth and religion, Homo Necans: the Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (1992).

Homo Necans means man the killer. Short sentence. Capital offense, sans the tiresome guilt and punishment bits.

You might say that's putting a fine point on it. Or then again you might say, well, that's just connecting the dots.

Swift & Company advertisement: Good Housekeeping, 1 July 1948 (Gallery of Graphic Design)

Making the crucial jump from "sacrificial ritual with its tension between encountering death and affirming life, its external form consisting of preparations, a frightening central moment, and restitution," to the altar and thence the slaughterhouse, Walter Burkert contends, enabled man to become the powerful dominant creature he might never have become had he stuck with patterns of scavenging or gathering vegetation to obtain sustenance. Hard cheese for those other species, thus doomed to the desolate eternal fate of being our chattel, our food supply... and otherwise of little interest so long as they stay out of our way.

"Nourishment, order and civilized life are born of their antithesis: the encounter with death. Only homo necans can become homo sapiens."

Swift & Company advertisement: Life, 24 July 1939 (Gallery of Graphic Design)

Good (Captive Bolt Stunning)

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A steer restrained just before captive bolt stunning, prior to slaughter: photo by Temple Grandin, 2004

It's so good to know they do these things in a more civilized way now.

But still, that glazed expression in the frozen eye --

has the animal spirit already left the locked-up body,

somewhere back there in the electric powered death chute?

Cash's captive bolt pistol: photo by geni, 2008



Meat processing and packing plant, Dodge City, Kansas: photo by Nyttend, 2008

The Jungle (Upton Sinclair: Stockyard Fundamentals, c. 1900)

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The Great Union Stockyards of Chicago, with packing houses in the distance; covered pens for hogs and sheep; open pens for cattle; area of yards, 75 acres; 50 miles railroad tracks; daily capacity 25,000 head cattle, 160,000 hogs, 10,000 sheep and 1000 horses: photo by Charles Rascher for Walsh & Company, c. 1878 (Library of Congress)

It was the incarnation of blind insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs: it was the Great Butcher — it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh.


Upton Sinclair: from The Jungle, 1906

In the heart of the Great Union Stockyards of Chicago: photographer unknown, for Kelley & Chadwick, c. 1909 (Library of Congress)



View of the elevated railway track near animal pens in the New City community area of Chicago: photographer unknown, for Chicago Daily News, 1907 (Chicago Historical Society/Library of Congress)



Man washing two cattle carcasses with a fountain brush in Swift & Company plant at the stockyards in the New City community area of Chicago: photographer unknown, for Chicago Daily News, 1909 (Chicago Historical Society/Library of Congress)



Splitting backbones and final inspection -- hogs ready for cooler, Swift & Company, Chicago: photo by H.C. White, c. 24 February 1906 (Library of Congress)



Panoramic picture illustrating the beef industry, Chicago: photos by George R. Lawrence, c. 1900 (Library of Congress)



Panoramic picture illustrating the pork industry, Chicago: photos by George R. Lawrence, c. 1900 (Library of Congress)



A half-mile of pork -- Armour's great packing house, Chicago: photographer unknown, c. 1890, from Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views (New York Public Library Digital Collection)



The last process in dressing beef: washing with boiling water: photographer unknown, c. 1890, from Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views (New York Public Library Digital Collection)



From Kansas plains to the corners of the globe they go; Union Stock Yards, Chicago: photographer unknown, c. 1870-1900, from Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views (New York Public Library Digital Collection)