Excuse time - my lack of posts in the last week and a half comes from me being extremely behind in my coursework, after making a journey to Victoria, BC to present a paper at the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Conference on The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (a fascinating autobiography of a 19th century black cowboy that I'll be devoting a post to in the near future). While I'm almost up to speed on my class reading, the busyness has left no time for comps reading. Fortunately, one of my courses this semester explores the rhetoric of sound, noise, voice, music, and silence in 19th and 20th century American writing, and hence, some of the reading for this course overlaps with what I'll have to read for my CAE. This week, the "overlap" text is poetry from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
In the English courses I've taken throughout my undergrad, MA, and first year of PhD coursework, I've always found that the reading I do for class seems to mesh in intriguing ways with whatever personal or moral quandry is currently circling in my head. This phenomenon can be both exhilarating ("HA! English DOES relate to real life, haters!") and maddening, because sometimes the text you're reading, in a coincidental, mystical kind of way, seems to point you towards a solution or decision you were hesitant to make. I'm not saying I open a book, read a line that seems to magically suggest a radical course of action in my life, and then blindly follow that like I'm a religious devotee and the novel or poetry is my spiritual scripture. Rather, decisions and issues in my life always seem to find relevant, searing echoes in the books I'm reading, and those books help me realize what I've kind of, sort of, already decided subconsciously.
For the last month or so, I've felt increasingly uneasy about eating meat. I don't eat a ton of meat to begin with--I rarely cook meat other than chicken, fish, and, occasionally, ground beef. For me to go a day or two without eating meat is not unusual. But my ever-developing, ever-weepy sadness when it comes to the suffering of animals, lately, has made me realize what a jarring inconsistency it is for me to be eating meat. But I've tried to maintain a feeling of disconnect between the animals I love, that I don't want to suffer, and the meat on my plate. Example: on Friday, while on campus, I saw a turtle sitting near a footpath, and a woman was letting her toddler pet the turtle's shell. I don't think the woman or the child were doing anything wrong at all by petting the turtle--it was kind of a cute scene. But for the rest of the day, I couldn't stop thinking about whether the turtle was scared, whether it got to a safe place that it could hide from humans stopping to look at it, touch it, etc. Instead of killing spiders I find in my house, I save them and put them outside; the idea of killing a bug (other than a mosquito, I guess) upsets me a little. These kinds of incidents always leads me to a kind of general, weird despair in which I ponder how animals' habitats and their ability to live a life undisturbed by humans has been diminished by the rapid rate of urbanization.
Then I went home, cooked a chicken breast, and chopped it up to put in a salad.
It was a good salad, but I felt a little weird about chopping it up, a little weird about eating it, and for the first time in a long time, I let myself actually ponder the actual, individual chicken it came from while I was cutting it up. I began to think, and I've been thinking about it ever since then, that this inconsistency in my feelings and my actions just isn't palatable to me anymore. If I truly feel that way about the suffering of animals and about human invasion of animal habitats, how can I still be eating meat? It's almost worse than someone who doesn't care or think about animals at all, and continues to eat them--at least that person is operating in congruency with his or her moral convictions about animals. If I keep eating animals when the thought truly upsets me, does that make any sense at all? I feel like it doesn't.
So this weekend, for my class next week, I've also been reading poems from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass collection, specifically his famous poem "Song of Myself." As I've tried to come to a committed decision about whether I should stop eating meat, old Walt just keeps hitting me right over the head with the right answer. Note that I'm not trying to rigorously argue that Whitman is advocating vegetarianism in this poem (although I definitely think you could do a lot with Whitman's poetry in connection with ecocriticism). Rather, so many lines in "Song of Myself," as I've read it this weekend, seemed to coalesce perfectly with all the thoughts I was having about committing to vegetarianism:
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long....
...Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things."
This passage resounded with me because Whitman highlights the materialistic impulse behind so many destructive human forces in the world--and animals are not part of that system.
"Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me."
A poetic, nineteenth-century expression of karma, as I read this I couldn't help thinking "and why shouldn't this apply to animals and to all living things that are destroyed or degraded?"
"My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.
I believe in those wing'd purposes."
Lovely, and one of my favourite passages in the poem. As Whitman contemplates walking through a wooded area, disturbing birds to flight with the noise of his tread, he validates their existence with meaning by believing in their "wing'd purposes". They are not simply accessories to the environment, existing for his visual consumption and poetic expression. By acknowledging purpose and meaning to their flight, he validates their existence as beings as such, and when I read this passage, I realized that,while I believe I share this same belief about animals as beings, I refuse to let that belief influence what I choose to eat. This passage reminded me of Romantic poet John Clare's beautiful, heartbreaking poem "The Fallen Elm", in which he mourns the cutting down of his favourite trees as if they were people.
Like I said, I'm not trying to assert that Whitman wants us to be vegetarians. But, like so much beautiful poetry and literature does, Whitman's poem was sort of a signpost for me. By bringing out some of my own beliefs about animals, it helped me to realize that, actually, I'd sort of subconsciously already made up my mind.
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