The Physics of Sorrow

V. THE GREEN BOX

THE EAR OF THE LABYRINTH

It hadn’t happened to me in a long time. I was looking through newspapers from 2010 and I ran across a short report, probably forgotten and buried by the incoming news from the following day. But for me it turned out to be one of those exceptional events that launched me back into that forgotten “embedding”. Something I haven’t experienced in years.

BULL LEAPS INTO CROWD, INJURING 40

AT A BULLFIGHT, THE ANIMAL IS KILLED.

Thursday, August 19, 2010, Tafalla

Forty people were injured in an unusual incident in Spain. The accident took place during a bullfight. The bull, which had just been led into the arena, looked around, then swiftly leapt over the barrier and began attacking the crowd. The unfortunate incident occurred in the city of Tafalla. The panic-stricken spectators tried to run away, but were hampered by the amphitheater seating. The infuriated animal lunged at various groups of terrified spectators. The toreador tried to hold the bull back by pulling its tail. It took a whole fifteen minutes to get the situation under control. In the end, they were forced to shoot the bull.

An amphitheater, of course, is a labyrinth. One of the most commonly found circular labyrinths, made of concentric circles intersected by transverse corridors. The bull lifted its gaze and recognized the Labyrinth — the ancestral home of his great-grandfather, the Minotaur. And since animals have no sense of time (just as children do not), the Bull saw his ancestral home and recognized the Minotaur within himself. He remembered all the days and nights. no, wait, that’s human language, there were no days there, he recalled only that endless night, a sum of all the nights in the world. Once again, he remembered the only two faces he had ever known. His mother’s face, as she held him in her lap. The most beautiful face he had ever seen. The face he had come closest to. And the second face — that of his killer. Also beautiful. Human faces.

Now his killer (likely a distant relative of Theseus) was standing down in the arena, in the center of the labyrinth. It wasn’t the fact that the scene would repeat itself and he would once again experience the softness and vulnerability of his body, that sacred softness and vulnerability that only proved his essential humanity, no, it wasn’t that that caused him to do what he did. There was something else. The sudden realization that if his killer was standing before him, then his mother’s face must be somewhere nearby as well. Up there in the audience. Those two faces went together. The scene repeats itself. The labyrinth twists and turns back not only space. Time has coiled up, swallowed its own tail and if something can happen, can be changed, now is the moment.

I turn my back on the killer, clench all my muscles, and clear the barrier. Like a lost child, I see my mother in the crowd and race toward her, nothing can stop me now. If only I could press my face against hers again. If only I could snuggle up to her. I’m three. And I’m looking for my mother. Some other people are screaming and falling at my feet, but they’re not my mother. I’ll recognize her. I just hope I don’t miss her, that she hasn’t already left. Just a little farther, just a little farther. Now there’s one who looks like her, but it’s not her. What about that one? No. No. The howl that escapes from the cave of my throat is terrifying. The only word that in all languages — those of humans, animals and monsters — is one and the same:

Moooooooooom.

The labyrinth of the amphitheater catches that cry, ricochets it between the walls of its corridors, diverts it toward the dead-ends, cuts it off, and sends it back slightly distorted to the labyrinth of the human ear like an endless

Mooooooooo.

And there’s the switch. The tiniest of switches. The labyrinth has turned that short “o” into a long “ooh.” If man had only known that it was the same word, that very same “Mooooom”. the history of the world and history of the death (I wouldn’t be surprised if they turned out to be one and the same story) would be different.

A terrified creature is looking for its mother. Human or animal — the word is the same.

But the myth is repeatable and the death of the Minotaur has to happen again. Before finding his mother, before snuggling up in her lap, before returning to her womb, that most primordial, soft, and pulsating of caves. Because that would already be another (unacceptable) myth.

Death catches up with him right when he seems to have caught sight of a familiar shoulder and locks of hair hurrying away. It’s the first time they kill him that way. From a distance. Without a sword or a spear. Without seeing his killer’s face.

WITHOUT A FACE

Without seeing his killer’s face. If a General History of Murder exists, which includes not only historical events, but also murders in mythology, as well as in all legends, rumors, and novels, it would be clear what a warm and human act it is — to be face-to-face with the one who will kill you. Cruel, yes, but cruel on a human scale. Death comes from another person, with a specific body, hand, face. A face we can only appreciate today, when murder has become dehumanized, if we allow ourselves to borrow that notion. This is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps dating back several centuries to the invention of gunpowder, a trifling span of time.

Even language has not yet gotten used to this. We say “in the face of death,” but this is already a phrase from a bygone era. Death has lost its face and therein lies the new horror. There is no face.

Several random examples. Achilles killed Hector and that was an epos, it was history, a dance between the killer and the victim. A ritual, in which the victim has the right to his moves, his gestures, and his lines. (Now that’s why a Homer of modern gunfire is impossible.) Even when Lycomedes tricked Theseus and was about to push him off a cliff on the island of Scyros near Euboea, there was again the touch of a human hand, presence.

What happened afterward? Here we’re not even talking about the slaughterhouse of war. Kennedy is riding in his limo, he smiles, makes a painful grimace, slumps down. That pantomime of death, which we’ve watched stamped on film, says it all. Achilles has become invisible. Theseus, yet another mythical serial killer, is hidden in the crowd and shoots from there. You don’t have time to get ready, to mentally say farewell to a few people, to make bequests, to leave behind your final words, to make smart remarks, to zing your killer with a cutting line, to fix your hair. The full-stop of the bullet, which arrives before the first word of the sentence. An anonymous piece of lead from an unknown perpetrator. There is something deeply unjust about that. Something that radically goes against every nature.

No animal would do that.

NO ANIMAL WOULD DO THAT

The animal in me. So here’s the new moral law — side by side with “the starry sky above me.” The basic question, the litmus test, the divider between good and evil — could what I’ve thought up be done by an animal? Step inside the skin of your favorite animal and find out. If it wouldn’t do it, then you shouldn’t do it, either, or you’ll be committing a mortal sin. A sin against nature. All sins have already been committed. But at least the boundary of the natural remains.

Theseus was a matador. “Matador” means killer, borrowed from Latin. Every butcher in the slaughterhouse shares in Theseus’s sin.

I add this ordinance, which is actually quite relevant, to the box:

ORDINANCE No. 20/2002

For reducing to a minimum animals’ suffering during slaughter

CHAPTER 1: Animal Stress and Pain

Scientific research has shown that warm-blooded animals (this includes livestock) feel pain and the emotion of fear. Fear and pain are very strong causes of stress in livestock and stress affects the quality of meat obtained from this livestock. (Of course, everything is done for the quality of the meat. Less suffering means better taste.)

Animals will also shy at moving things, as well as darkness and they may refuse to enter a dark place. (I’m sure of that, I know this from firsthand experience.)

They are afraid of sparkling reflections, dangling chains, moving people or equipment, shadows or dripping water. (Shadows or dripping water. that’s almost poetry, no, it’s a cave.)

CHAPTER 7: Slaughter of Livestock

Preparing livestock for slaughter

Animals injured during transport or not yet weaned should be slaughtered immediately (out of compassion), but if this is impossible, then no later than two hours after being unloaded. (Because the quality of the meat decreases, following the logic of suffering = bad taste.) Animals incapable of walking should be slaughtered on the spot or conveyed by cart or platform to the proper place for immediate slaughter. When ready for slaughter, animals should be driven to the stunning area in a quiet and orderly manner without undue fuss and noise.

There are three main technologies used to effect stunning: Percussion, Electrical Shock, and Gas.

The most widely used method for stunning is the captive bolt gun. This method works on the principle of a gun and fires a blank cartridge and it propels a short bolt (metal rod) from the barrel. The bolt penetrates the skull bone and produces concussion by damaging the brain or increasing intracranial pressure, causing bruising of the brain. The captive bolt is perhaps the most versatile stunning instrument as it is suitable for use on cattle, pigs, sheep and goats as well as horses and camels, and can be used anywhere in the world.

Bulls: place the gun firmly against the forehead at a right angle 1 cm to the side of an imaginary line connecting the top of the head and a straight line between the eyes. (What mathematics of death, what geometry of murder. )

Calves: the gun should be placed slightly lower than with adult cows, since in calves the upper part of the brain is still underdeveloped. (Man really has thought of everything)

Fig.51. The correct positioning of a stunning gun.

(From “Guidelines for Humane Handling, Transport and Slaughter of Livestock” in accordance with the European Convention for the Protection of Animals for Slaughter.)

Now that’s what I call an innocent, hygienic text, as cold and aseptic as the tiles of a slaughterhouse — washed sparkling clean once the job is done.

No animal would do that.

THE MINOTAUR’S DREAM

I dream that I’m beautiful. Not exactly beautiful, but inconspicuous. That’s what it means to be beautiful, to be like everyone else. My head feels light. My eyes are on the front of my face. I have a nose, rather than nostrils. I have human skin, thin human skin. I walk down the street and no one notices me. Now that’s happiness — no one noticing me. It’s a happy dream.

I walk slowly, avoiding the people coming toward me at first, I keep to the very edge of the sidewalk, near the walls of the houses. But a miracle has occurred. No one rushes to get away from me, no one screams in horror that they’ve seen a monster, children don’t cower behind their mothers, the old folks don’t cross themselves, the men don’t draw their swords. I’m walking down the street. It’s light out. I haven’t seen this much light since I was born. One woman accidentally bumps into me. I’m afraid she’ll scream. She turns around, looks at me from very close up. she doesn’t recognize me. she doesn’t scream. she smiles. and apologizes. No one has ever apologized to me before.

I see people sitting on benches. I sit down, too. Alone. I watch what the people are doing and do the same thing.

They sit and watch other people.

I sit and watch other people.

Then dusk starts to fall. I hear one little boy telling his father: dad, let’s go home, it’s getting dark. The words “dark” and “home” are the first worrisome thing in the whole dream up until now. The dark has always been my home, but now I feel homeless. For the first time I get scared that I’m lost. Which is ridiculous, since I have never gotten lost, I come from the Labyrinth, after all. And the more my fear grows, the more I shrink. A tall man leans down over me, grasps me with his large hand (I notice he’s not holding a sword), and asks me if I’m lost and whether I know my address. I keep silent. And where is mommy, the man asks, can you tell me where mommy went? He shouldn’t have asked that question. I can feel my jaw elongating, my skull growing heavy and hard, but I don’t want to hurt him. Thankfully the dream is coming to an end, since the situation is getting pretty desperate. That’s the moment in which dreams tear apart.

I woke up in the dark in my usual home. That was my happiest dream. One day with people whom I didn’t kill, who didn’t kill me, who didn’t even notice me. There was no bad blood between them and me. I presume that people don’t have those sorts of dreams. In their dreams, they wander through dark labyrinths and battle Minotaurs.

IRREVOCABLE

From time to time I emerge from my refuge and go to Odeon, the art-house movie theater in town. Old black-and-white films are the only thing I feel like watching. I had read that they were showing a Dziga Vertov panorama and I didn’t want to miss that. It was a cold January afternoon, dingy and slushy. As it turned out, five minutes before the film was supposed to start, there were no other takers. They could hardly be expected to show it just for me. Then I noticed two bums loitering around outside, shifting their weight from one foot to the other and smoking. I asked them if they wanted to come inside and watch a film and warm up. They looked at me mistrustfully, like people who were not used to getting such offers. One asked what film. I told them it was a classic, and he nodded, stubbed out his cigarette, and the two of them went in with me. I bought three tickets. The usher looked at us with the contempt of a full-blooded Aryan, but she didn’t dare turn them away. As we went in, I glimpsed how they surreptitiously straightened up their coats and took off their winter hats. They settled into the back row, it was warm in the theater and from what I could tell they blissfully dozed off shortly after the opening credits. It was a silent film and the theater had hired a pianist to accompany the film just as during the 1920s.

An enthusiastic camera, still intoxicated by its own possibilities, climbs over the rooftops, changes angles, lies down on the train tracks. The whole madhouse of 1920s Russia, the drunks, the Pioneers, the bums on benches. And now comes the reason why I’m telling this story — a report about a slaughterhouse. The routine slaughter of a cow, and its subsequent “resurrection” through playing the film backward. The title appears: “Twenty minutes ago, this meat was a cow.” It’s as if the camera is calling: “Lazarus, come out!” And the sliced up pieces of meat turn back into an animal, beef turns back into cow. The intestines slip back into its belly, the steaks plaster its haunches. “And now we’ll put on the skin.” And it’s as if the butchers’ knives have become thick sewing needles, while they themselves are the tailors, dressing it in the skin, which they had stripped off only moments before, they scurry about, ridiculous in their backward movement. Even the pianist’s music speeds up, the key somehow more major.

“And now we’ll bring the cow back to life”—the title on the screen announces. And here, where you expect the culmination, the miracle, the “Ode to Joy” (the pianist’s hands dash over the keyboard), instead we’re in for a shock. The cow’s death throes, rewound, remain death throes. That moment of dying, the electrical shock, the detuning of the body, the horror, the adrenaline, the whites of the cow’s eyes, played backward only intensify the mortal agony, rather than bringing it back to life, as the cameraman had expected. And despite the fact that only seconds later the cow stupidly flicks its tail, it is nevertheless clear to you: the cow is irrevocably dead.

On my way out of the theater, I have to bring back from dreamland the two blissful bums, who have missed the incorrigible death of a cow.

Every year, 1.6 billion cows, sheep, and pigs, as well as 22.5 billion birds are slaughtered by humans for food. We are hell for animals, the animals’ apocalypse.

A TALE OF THE VEGETARIAN MAN-EATER

“Once upon a time, there was a man-eater who was a vegetarian.”

“What’s a vegetarian?

“A person who doesn’t eat meat. Like you and me.”

“And is a man-eater a person?

“Wellll. yeah, it looks like a person, but it’s even scarier.”

“Stop scaring the boy with your nonsense!” A woman’s voice comes from the room next door.

“Mom, I want to hear the story about the vegetarian man-eater. Should I shut the door?”

“Shut the door, so we don’t scare mom.”

“But people are made of meat, right?”

“Yes, we’re made of meat.”

“So that poor vegetarian man-eater must’ve been dying of hunger.”

“He wasn’t only dying of hunger, but from putdowns, too.”

“Wait, can you really die from putdowns?”

“Putdowns are the deadliest thing of all. All the man-eaters were making fun of him, calling him a fruit-eater and grass-grazer. Nobody wanted to talk to him. Because if you didn’t eat people, you didn’t have anything to tell your fellow man-eaters. And they were telling funny stories. ”

“Scary. ”

“Stories that are scary for men, but funny for man-eaters. Each would tell a tale more outrageous than the last and they’d bust a gut laughing. Meanwhile, our vegetarian man-eater just stood off to the side and didn’t have any stories to tell. If he happened to go over to the group of real man-eaters, they would rib him mercilessly: hey, why don’t you tell us how you battled three raspberry bushes and came back home all bloody. That kind of stuff. Or how many cabbages can you behead at once? And the poor vegetarian man-eater would slink off with his tail between his legs. ”

“So they have tails?”

“That’s just a saying. Then one lady man-eater, who was secretly in love with our man. with our man-eater, she went over to him and told him that he should try people meat at least once in his life, he might like it and get himself straightened out. And he’d best try precisely with a vegetarian. ”

“Dinner’s ready,” my mother says, standing in the doorway.

ON THE EATING OF FLESH

My father is a vegetarian. And a veterinarian. He simply does not eat his patients. I can see it now, how the waiters look at him when he orders some meatless dish. Just as the man-eaters looked at the vegetarian man-eater. I can still remember how one of our neighbors was always grilling him about why he refused to eat meat, had somebody been putting him up to it, had he joined a cult by chance, had he read something, how is it that everyone eats meat, but he’s broken away from the collective, if you get what I’m saying? Come on now, man up, order a trio of sausages with a side of beans, or baked kidney pie or lamb’s head. As for me, he’d say, when I grab that head, I first open up its mouth nice and wide and pull out that little tongue, mmm, then I split that little skull right open with a knife and, then, you slurp out the brains with a spoon! To say nothing of those yummy little eyeballs. Here my father would get up suddenly and say he had to go outside, I would run after him to puke in the bathroom. Just take that little lamb, it only eats grass, why don’t you start with that. the neighbor would call after him.

Funny that socialism and vegetarianism don’t go together. Like yogurt and fish.

We know that where the neighbor has been, the police are sure to follow. My father was prepared and when they called him down to the precinct, he explained to them in detail how the human anatomy was adapted to a vegetarian diet — a long gastro-intestinal tract, six times longer than the human body, unlike carnivores, whose tracts were only three times longer; flat molars, alkaline saliva and so on. He even quoted Plutarch and his essay “On the Eating of Flesh” to them, where it is said (he had copied this out in his notebook): “But if you will contend that yourself was born to an inclination to such food as you have now a mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet, or axe.”

They let him go.

My father was proud that he had managed to convince them with anatomy and Plutarch. While they had probably decided he wasn’t worth the trouble, figuring he was slightly nuts, but ideologically harmless.

ANTI-ANTHROPOCENTRIC NOTES

During World War II, in the period between 1940 and 1944, in air raids on European museums, seventeen dinosaur skeletons were destroyed. I can clearly picture these double murders, the crushed dead bones, the toppling of these Eiffel Towers of ribs and vertebrae. No animal would do that. To kill someone who had already been dead for millions of years all over again, to reawaken that prehistoric horror in the black box of its skull.

Actually, has anyone ever counted the bodies of animals killed during wartime? Millions of sparrows, ravens, robins, field mice, torn-apart foxes, scorched partridges, rats, the moles’ ruined bomb shelters, the lightly armored turtles crushed by heavily armored tanks — their giant likenesses. No one anywhere has ever made an inventory of such deaths. We’ve never really stopped to think of the suffering we cause to animals during wartime, during air raids. Where do they hide, what happens in the “wild” brains of our “fellow brethren in pain,” as Darwin called them in his notes.

I love natural history, but not its museums. I don’t see anything natural in them. In the end, they are more like mausoleums. What else could we call a place with gutted antelopes, Tibetan yaks, badgers, does, and rhinoceroses? I’ve never experienced pure, unadulterated joy from zoos, either. But everyone is always forced to visit them once, as a child, since parents are convinced that you’re dying to see the elephant listlessly flapping its trunk or the wolf pacing anxiously in its cage, which stinks of carcass.

I’ll never forget the elephant’s heavy sorrow, which almost crushed me (yet another one of my fits), then the melancholy of the black panther stretched out on the dirty cement, or the undisguised tedium with which the tiger met and saw off its guests. On the way out, I recall, I was filled with animalistic sorrow. I can attest that this sorrow is far denser than human sorrow, it’s wild, unfiltered by language, inexpressible and unexpressed, since language nevertheless soothes and calms sorrow, disarms it, bleeds it, just as my grandfather would bleed a sick animal. When they took me to the Museum of Natural History the next day, I had the feeling that the whole zoo had been slaughtered in a single night, stuffed and brought there. I’ve never gone into such tombs since.

NEGLIGENT MURDERS

Whole columns of ants, over all these years, which I’ve stepped on without noticing it. I have big feet, size 12, which increases their destructive power. And my guilt.

MIRIAM, OR ON THE RIGHT TO KILL

We were talking, or actually, I was talking about the need for an anti-Copernican revolution, how important it was — and I mean vitally important — to oust man from the center of the universe, about death, and animals.

“I lived with a Buddhist for three years,” Miriam said, splitting open a large mussel with her long fingers.

I love such beginnings, with no preface, raw, hard.

“It was a long time ago,” she added, heading off my unasked questions. “Know what the most unbearable thing about living with a Buddhist is?” The mussel sank into her mouth, strong white teeth, pearls and the grains of sand between them, seconds until this magnificent meat grinder had made short work of the flesh. “The vow not to kill. That’s the most brutal part. ” Another mussel.

By the end of the second year, the whole house was swarming with cockroaches. Miriam watched the smug hordes creeping by only centimeters away from her. She had no right to lay a finger on them. She was in love and thus magnanimous. She held out for a whole year. In the evening, she would slip into her sleeping bag and pull the zipper up over her head, leaving only a small hole for air. One night she woke up and saw two cockroaches nestled in the beard of her Buddhist-lover who was sleeping soundly beside her. That was too much. The next day, while the Buddhist was at work (I was amazed that Buddhists work), she bought the strongest spray against such varmints and fumigated the whole apartment herself. It was true mass murder. Genocide! Miriam imitated the infuriated Buddhist, who had come back that evening, stood in the middle of the room, looking around at the dead cockroaches, their stiff little legs turned up toward the ceiling, he had stood there like the last survivor amid an apocalypse.

“Have you ever seen a Buddhist scream?” Miriam asked. “It’s worth seeing. He screamed that I had shattered the whole chain of life, that the world would never be the same, that the karmic. He slammed the door and left. Actually, he already had a mistress.”

For several minutes, the only sound was the cracking of shells and the cold rain outside. I was thinking about that last line and an inexplicable rage was building up inside me against that working Buddhist with his mistress, that shepherd of cockroaches.

“Anyway, the right to kill is inviolable,” Miriam said slowly. Then she carefully placed the last mussel shell on the rocky mountains in front of her.

I will put Miriam’s story in the green box, too, for balance. So we have one of every kind.

THROUGH A LAMB’S EAR

Man needs to shut up for a while and in the ensuing pause to hear the voice of some other storyteller — a fish, dragonfly, weasel, or bamboo, cat, orchid, or pebble. How do we know, for instance, that bees don’t write novels? Have we deciphered even a single honeycomb? Or should we start with fish? What a huge part of evolution remains locked up in the fish’s silence, what knowledge have fish accumulated over all those millennia before us! The deep, cold storehouses of that silence. Untouched by language. Because language channels and drains deposits of knowledge like a drill.

And so, the only storytelling creature, man, shuts up and steps back, yielding the floor to the organic and inorganic ones that have stored up silences until now. Actually, they’ve been telling their tales, but their muted, suppressed narrative has turned into mica and lichen, seaweed, moss, honey, the tearing apart of other’s bodies and the torn-apartness of their own.

I have no idea how to make this happen. Maybe we just need to take the first step. All the world’s classics, retold by animals for animals.

For example, we could retell The Old Man and the Sea through the eyes of the fish, that marlin. Now that’s what I call anti-anthropocentrism. Its battle with the gaunt old man and the sea is no less dramatic. When it comes down to it, the fish is the character locked in a life-and-death struggle throughout the whole story. The old man’s story is a story about the battle against aging. While the fish’s is a story about death. The whole story through the voice of a fish, bleeding, gnawed clean to the bone, yet resisting to the very last.

A marlin can be destroyed but not defeated.

.

Muria (that’s how she spelled her name, with a “u”), a fishing fanatic:

“In the morning, when I get up, I imagine what I’d like to eat if I were a fish, and that’s how I sense what’ll make them bite during the day. The whole trick is to turn yourself into a fish for a while. And you’ll get hungry. Sometimes you’re hungry for a worm, sometimes for corn, sometimes for a fly. And when I figure out what it wants to eat, what I want to eat that day, I stick it on the hook, cast it out into the water and start reeling them in like crazy. To the horror of the other fishermen, who had been laughing at me just a few minutes earlier. Then I toss the fish back right in front of their eyes. Which makes them all the more furious.”

“Ugh, do you really feel like eating a worm first thing in the morning?”

“When I’m a fish, a worm is not to be missed.”

.

“The history of the world can be written from the viewpoint of a cat, an orchid, or a pebble. Or lamb’s ear.”

“What’s lamb’s ear?”

“A plant.”

“And do you think we would figure in a history of the world written by lamb’s ear?”

“I don’t know. Do you think lamb’s ear figures in the history of the world written by people?”

BUFFALO SHIT, OR THE SUBLIME IS EVERYWHERE

I remember how we walked through a historical town famous for its Revival Period architecture, uprising, fires, cannons made from cherry-tree trunks, history rolled down the narrow streets but my father was impressed mainly by the geraniums on the window sills, praising aloud those who had grown such flowers. Suddenly he stopped in a street and started hovering over something on the ground. I went to see what he had discovered. A pile of buffalo shit. It was standing there like a miniature cathedral, a church’s cupola or a mosque’s dome, may all religions forgive me. A fly was circling above it like an angel. It is very rare to see buffalo shit nowadays, my father said. No one breeds buffalos here anymore. And he spoke with such delight about how one could fertilize pumpkins with it, plaster a wall, daub a bee hive (of the old wicker type), how one could use it to cure an earache — you should warm it well and apply it to the ear. At that moment I would have agreed that the Revival-Era houses we were touring and the pyramids of Giza were something much less important than the architecture, physics, and metaphysics of buffalo (bull?) shit.

Even if you weren’t born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven’t read Pseudo Longinus, haven’t heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language. As smoke from a chimney on a winter morning, as a slice of blue sky, as a cloud that reminds you of something from another world, as a pile of buffalo shit. The sublime is everywhere.

SOCRATES ON THE TRAIN

If everything lasted forever, nothing would be valuable.

— Gaustine

The world is set up in such as way that it looks obvious and irrefutable. But what would happen if for a moment we turned the whole system upside down and instead of the enduring, the constant, the eternal, and the dead, we decided to revere that which is fleeting, changeable, transitory, yet alive?

The train was passing through the hot stubble fields in late August, where they still use that barbaric method of stubble burning. The fields had been reaped and to make for easier plowing afterward, someone had set a match to them. I imagined the meadow birds’ scorched wings, the running and squealing mice and rats, the burned up lizards and snakes. Storks were anxiously circling above the burning fields — we’ve got to get out of here ASAP, ASAP. Everyone wanted to run away, the world was heading toward autumn. At the same time, I was returning to the town of T.

In the end, man, if we still insist on seeing him as the measure of all things, is closer to the parameters of the fleeting — he is changeable, inclined toward death, alive, but mortal, perishable, constantly perishing.

I sensed that my imagination was running wild, I needed an opponent. I invented an opponent, clever, with a sharp rhetorical bite, I generously endowed him with qualities and gave myself over to my favorite pastime, Socratic spats.

“So, my dear sir, you propose that we replace the lasting with the fleeting,” my opponent began.

“I suggest that we examine this possibility.”

“Very wellll. Just say it aloud and you will hear how absurd it sounds — to replace the lasting with the fleeting. Illustrate it with a concrete example, isn’t that what you always love to say, my dear fellow? Now then, imagine a nice, sturdy house on the one hand, and a tumbledown hut on the other. Would you exchange the house for the hut? In one hand, I’m holding gold, in the other straw. Which would you choose? Won’t the straw grow moldy after the first rain?”

“Wait, wait, my most noble opponent. You speak wisely and take shameless advantage of your right to peek into my own misgivings. Yet let us look at the other side as well. Imagine a world, in which everyone agrees to a new hierarchy. In which the Fleeting and the Living are more valuable than the Eternal and the Dead. The opposite of the usual world, which we share today. And so, let us imagine what consequences this might have. Immediately many of the reasons for war and theft fall away. That which entices one to theft is that which is eternal or at least lasting, like a bar of gold, for example, or sturdy houses, cities, palaces, land. That is what’s ripe for the taking. No one goes to war over a pile of apples or lays siege to a city for its fragrant, blossoming cherry trees. By the time the siege is over, the cherry trees will have lost their blossoms, and the apples will have rotted.

“And since gold will have lost all of its agreed-upon value (because that’s exactly what it is, a contract value), it’ll just be rolling around on the ground and no one will think to up and go on a crusade for it.

“And speaking of crusades, let’s look at that side of the question as well. The religions that stand behind every crusade or holy war will suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them. The old gods were the Gods of the Eternal in all of its aspects. Is there a God of the Ephemeral? If there are Gods in the new constellation — and why not? — they will be exactly that: Gods of the Ephemeral. Gods of the Fragile and the Perishable. And hence fragile and perishable gods. Sensitive, feeling, empathizing. What more can we say? Mortality raises the price and opens our eyes.”

“But isn’t all of that so fleeting and unstable. ”

“You’re fooling yourself. Let’s take that straw, which you’ve been clutching in your left hand since the very beginning of our debate. That straw used to be wheat, which used to be seeds, which used to be wheat, which used to be. And here, nota bene: the perishable reproduces itself. And that is its first advantage. While the gold, which you’ve been holding in your right hand, is made once-and-for-all, it won’t give birth to gold even if you plant it and water it every day for two hundred years. Let me put it like this, paradoxically — the perishable is more enduring, precisely because of its death, than that which is imperishable and cannot reproduce itself.” (I’ve completely forgotten about the opponent I created.) “What do you say to that, my friend?”

“Wellll, what happens to tradition then? To all of art, to your own pathetic scribbling?” (We’ve left politesse behind, my opponent is pissed off.) “Let me ask you this — that book you’re writing, is it on the side of the ephemeral, or does it uphold the values of the eternal? How long do your own words last?”

“How long do words last?” I repeat this, because I don’t know the answer. “Let us assume that they last as long as the breath with which you utter them. You exhale the word, it’s so light, you fill its sails and send it toward the harbor of the Other. It might perish before reaching shore, it might sink along the way, shipwrecked against the flotilla of another’s words. Whether that is fragility or unfathomable endurance, I cannot say.” (I won’t apologize for this outburst of lyricism here.)

“I’ll ignore the lyrical explanation. So where does that leave your own identity, if you set store by the changeable?” He refuses to give in. “Where does that leave your forefathers, traditions, culture? All of that which was created from constancy? All of that which you call up so as not to forget who you are and where you come from?”

“And what has that identity of yours ever given you, ass-hat?” (Politesse has now definitely been left in the dust.) Blood and wars, busted butts, suicide bombers — there’s your inheritance. There’s only one true identity — to be a living creature among living creatures. To be ephemeral and to value the Other, because he is ephemeral as well.”

“Man is the measure of all things, thus what man creates must endure so as to outlive him.”

(Now I’ve got him — I invented him after all, I have the right to push him into a trap.)

“Exactly, man is the measure of all things. And everything that exceeds this measure and lasts longer and remains after his death is inhuman by its very nature, a source of sorrow and discord as a rule.” (Are you listening to me now? He’s listening, that’s what I invented him for.)

“But. ”

“We live in houses that will continue to live on even after we die. We go into cathedrals, where long lines of people and generations who are no longer with us have trod, as if on Judgment Day. All of this tells you: you pass on, but we remain. We’ve buried plenty before you, we’ll take care of the ones you’ve sired as well. Think up at least one good reason why that which is built of stone should last longer than that built of flesh. I don’t see any particular point or justice in that. We can only wonder what sense of time and the eternal the ones who came before us had, in the dark night of the primeval, living in their flimsy huts, outliving their flimsy huts, outliving their hearths, moving from place to place, measuring out their lives in days and nights, in lighted and extinguished fires. They truly lived forever, even if they died at thirty.”

THINGS UNSUITED TO COLLECTING (A LIST OF THE PERISHABLE)

cheeses — start to stink

apples — shrivel up and rot

clouds — constantly change their states of aggregation

quince jam — gets moldy on top

lovers — get old, shriveled up (see apples)

children — grow up

snowmen — melt

tadpoles and silkworms — anatomically unstable

If we draw the line, it turns out that nothing organic is suitable for collecting. A world with a permanently expiring expiration date. A perishable, shriveling, rotting, deteriorating (and thus) wonderful world.

A PLACE TO STOP

I can imagine the look on the face of the first person to find these notes. He’ll probably think that some monster lived here. Indeed, inside me, the Minotaur shivers, afraid of the dark, but otherwise I look completely normal, I wear the body of a white, middle-aged man, a woman is carrying my child, I sometimes go to the seaside, alone, or travel abroad. I keep up what they call “a normal life” in the upper world. OK, fine, I do pass as quite withdrawn and reticent, but in my line of work, that absolutely goes with the territory. My books sell relatively well, which allows me the time and space to do my own things and guarantees me much-needed tranquility. I don’t give interviews.

I used to be able to take part — a bit sluggishly, true — in lively conversations and at the same time to be somewhere else entirely, in a different body or memory. Sometimes this would show ever so slightly, one or two women with whom I was in closer contact always caught me. I got off the hook using the alibi of a writer. You can be absent as much as you like, they’ll always understand when you want to be left alone or when you don’t respond to repeated invitations. At first they keep calling, then they quickly forget you. Here people forget quickly, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that already.

ANNUNCIATION AND OYSTERS

When I got word from my wife that she was pregnant, I was almost 2,000 miles away from her. I was just preparing to eat an oyster for the first time in my life (me, who had once been able to be a slug) in an old French castle at the opening of a ponderous (and tasteless) writers’ festival. I had never tasted oysters before. Just as I had never had a child before. We had been trying for a few years. So the two things were both happening to me for the first time — the annunciation and the oyster. A French journalist was holding a big oyster in her hand and explaining to me in bad English how to sprinkle it with lemon and suck it out of the shell. I was also holding an oyster in my hand, watching the squirming little body, in my other hand I was clutching a piece of lemon like a laser gun, trying to awaken the killer in me. I thought the lemon would kill it. The oyster’s body, fragile and slimy, resembled both a vagina and a fetus, swimming in its embryonic fluid. At that moment the cell phone in my pocket started buzzing to tell me I had a message, this dulled my hesitating conscience, decisiveness was transmitted via some invisible neural synapses, the muscle fibers contracted, their movement reached the three fingers of my right hand that were squeezing the lemon, and the oyster-embryo writhed beneath the paralyzing lemon juice. I closed my eyes and swallowed it. At that moment, my grandfather passed by, swallowing his living medicine, and patted me on the back. I took out my phone. The text message read: “I took a test, it said YES.” Short and sweet, without unnecessary drama. My wife always catches me at the scene of the crime. I thought I felt the oyster move inside me. I felt nauseated and made a dash for the bathroom. I felt like Cronus, having just swallowed another one of his children. I’ve never tried oysters again.

THE END OF THE MINOTAURS

Someone’s walking around inside me. Someone’s gotten lost in my belly. That’s what she said one winter afternoon, as we were sitting quietly in the room, trying to hear the snow piling up outside. It sounded beautiful and timeless. Lying back in the rocking chair, she had opened up Ancient Greek Myths and Legends and placed the book on top of the protruding oval of her belly, like a roof.

It’s so close, only centimeters away from us, I thought to myself, behind this wall of skin, yet days, weeks, and months have to pass before it arrives.

I wanted to remember all of that, the chair, the window growing bright with snow, the beauty of that phrase, the whole antiquity of dusk in winter. There is no season more ancient than winter. I grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled out a few phrases, mostly for the sake of mnemonics. Despite this, something like a poem came out. Which nevertheless had its own logic, insofar as poetic techniques are a kind of mnemonic device. Is Homer’s hexameter not, in fact, a mnemonic trick, a memory tool? I was trying to describe that night and to enter into the cave, the burrow or house of that belly. And I saw that the places had been switched around. That which was roaming around inside was not the Minotaur, but rather that which would kill him. Let’s call it “Theseus” for the sake of clarity. The umbilical cord is there inside like Ariadne’s thread. So then where is the Minotaur? The answer lay in the anxiousness of the inquiry. The Minotaur was me. Let’s turn that phrase around, so I can’t hide in its tail end. I was the Minotaur. Theseus — he, she, it (the gender doesn’t matter) — was coming to kill me with all the innocence of predestination. There was nowhere to hide, I could only meekly await his arrival. That poem was called “The End of the Minotaurs.” I should look to see where I tucked it away.

She was born early in the morning in winter. It was dark. I was walking back home, the way out of the hospital passed through a strange tunnel. I felt as if I were coming out of a womb, as if I was going down the child’s path. A newborn father. It had been a long time since I had walked around that city at five in the morning, before sunrise. The neon signs were going out, the first streetcar passed by, I looked at the number. Seven. I told myself that this meant everything would be all right. It was exactly 5:07 A.M. A man was opening up his newspaper stand, I asked for every single one of the daily newspapers. He looked at me sleepily and bewildered. After all, nothing all that special has happened today, he said, puzzled.

Oh yes, it has. I paid, took my pile of newspapers, and walked away, happy.

What were the headlines from that day? Was the world’s nursery ready to meet that child?

.

First winter.

First snow.

First wind.

First dog.

First cloud.

For the eye of a child.

For the eye of every newborn — rat, fly, or turtle — each time the world is created anew.

In the beginning, they speak the language of all living creatures, cooing like a dove, gurgling like a dolphin, meowing, squawking, bawling. The linguistic primordial soup.

Dgish, anguh, pneya, eeeh, deeeya, bunya-bunya-bunyaba, batyabuuu.

God does not give language to newborns immediately. And that’s no accident. They still know the secret of paradise, but they have no words for it. When they are given language, the secret has already been forgotten.

Her first steps, she’s wobbling like a royal penguin. As if walking on the moon. She reaches out to grab onto the air. So concentrated and smiling to herself, so fragile. When you look at her, she falls.

While I’m writing about the world’s sorrows, Portuguese saudade, Turkish hüzün, about the Swiss illness — nostalgia. she comes to me, at two and a half, and suddenly snatches away my pen.

Sit here and open your mouth up wide, she says. Then she gets up on tiptoe and looks inside. Wow, it’s really dark inside you, I can’t see a thing.

Come on, let’s play dust motes. You’re the daddy dust mote, and I’m the baby dust mote.