Oedipus in Kolonáki

To the Great Dionysia I've fled,

with me my mother shall not wed.

My father’s grave on Afric's shore

I've honored properly—no more.

I asked three questions of the Sphinx,

"ingenuously," the creature thinks

(in the twenty-first century Thebes,

all Aspies are disdained as dweebs):

Should I have stayed where I was born

and nursed my swollen feet forlorn?

Should I have sought a fresh solution

different from the Revolution?

Should I have loved whom Heaven sent?

(If so, I wonder where she went!)

“No and Yes, and maybe No,

for loving ever is a trial,

even when you're good to go,"

the demon answered with a smile.

“Screw those eyes! Just do your best.

Take your medicine like the rest.

Antigone’s in the nice café

having a drink across the way.

Theseus, they say, is coming later.

Creon—naturally—’s a waiter.”

Then, vanishing at last it queried:

“So where'd it suit you to be buried?”

Note: Oedipus, "though racked with grief, / by the gods' grim design still reigned over the Kadmeians," the Odyssey asserts (Od. 11: 275–76, trans. Peter Green; see also the Iliad, trans. id., 23: 679, p. 432n8), and Hesiod says he died a wealthy landowner (Works and Days 162–63). The idea that he died at Kolonōs, just outside Athens, may thus have been an Athenian invention—perhaps by the octogenarian Sophocles himself in his last play, Oedipus at Kolonōs.

Since Kolonōs was evidently named for an eponymous hero, my identification of it with Kolonáki, named for a column standing there, where I lived and caroused in the 1960s, is unsustainable. Se non è vero, è ben trovato!

December 12, 2024

The Blood of Beasts

Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism (Red Wheel, 2020)

Matthew Scully, Fear Factories: Arguments about Innocent Creatures and Merciless People (Arezzo Books, 2024)

Long ago—it was around 1963/64—some friends and I attended a showing at the National Film Theatre in London of Georges Franju’s short film Le Sang des Bêtes (translated as Blood of the Beasts), shot in 1949 at two Paris abattoirs (the French transitive verb abattre = "slaughter, shoot, knock down . . ."). The seats in the NFT clicked softly as they automatically went up when vacated, and I remember this sound throughout the showing as, one after the other, patrons simply couldn’t take the ghastly scenes of animal butchery anymore and fled the theater.

Most unpleasant for an English audience was the slaughter of horses—horsemeat being commonly consumed in France but not in anglophone countries (for reasons apparently going back to an Anglo-Saxon prohibition in the eighth century CE, or earlier, when eating horses was perceived in England as a barbaric pagan custom).

My friends and I stuck it out to the end, but we became vegetarians for the following few months. Then, one by one, alas, we lapsed back into meat-eating, or "carnism," to use Melanie Joy’s useful term.*

I shall not, in the usual habit of book reviewers, attempt to summarize Joy’s book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. Suffice it to say that the horrors of today’s industrial farming in America that it meticulously recounts are vastly more awful than anything Franju filmed and occur on an almost unimaginably greater scale. According to the Animal Kill Clock, over 124 million pigs, 36 million cattle, and 8 billion chickens have been slaughtered so far in 2024 for food in the United States (and, with Thanksgiving just past, we should not forget the several hundred million turkeys that gave their lives in celebration of that holiday).†

In a cogent review, inter alia, in a current New York Review of Books (12/19/24) of Matthew Scully's Fear Factories: Arguments about Innocent Creatures and Merciless People , Martha Nussbaum notes: "Both cows and pigs are herded along a mechanized production line on the way to extinction. They see their end and shriek in terror." In one vast plant Scully visited, 1,300 animals are killed every hour. In Iowa, ground zero of US hog slaughter, an "ag-gag" law seeks to restrict reporting of these horrors—in contempt of the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

The brief existences of animals destined for slaughter by the meat industrial complex are lived under conditions of intolerably tight confinement (e g., pregnant sows stuck in metal "gestation crates" in which they can't even turn over), and they end up butchered in killing factories by poorly paid workers, often undocumented immigrants from Central and South America and Asia, with little if any training, in circumstances that, as described, might have made even a hardened Nazi concentration camp Kapo flinch.

These animals have increasingly been shown to be highly intelligent—pigs are widely conceded to be at least as smart as most dogs—and to have a considerable capacity for empathy, even with humans.

Pigs are often maligned as "dirty," but a Yorkshire farmer once showed me the separate spaces behind his pig pens that the animals used as toilets. Unlike many of our own species, they try to avoid shitting where they live.

Treated as mere things, and not as the living, sentient creatures they are, the animals we humans like to eat are generally transported to their doom under conditions of great cruelty:

“You’re going to lose hogs in a semitrailer no matter what,” one investigator was told by a worker. “When they come off the truck, they’re solid as a block of ice. . . . I went to pick up some hogs one day for chainsawing from a pile of about thirty frozen hogs, and I found two frozen but still alive . . . they raised their heads up like, ‘Help me.’ . . . I took my ax-chopper and chopped them to death.”

This is only one among the terrible stories of this kind that Melanie Joy tells. I won't lacerate your feelings with more of them.

I defy you to read these books and remain a steadfast carnivore—as Paul McCartney has observed, if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.

All this is really nothing new, of course. Upton Sinclair, in his famous bookThe Jungle, exposed the US meat-packing industry in 1906—almost a hundred and twenty years ago. But the reforms that followed were mainly (and very inadequately) to do with food safety. The issue of its intolerable cruelty remained unaddressed in a world ruled and run by merciless carnists whose consideration was only for monetary profit and their own greedy appetites.

Our world.

* I would become a vegetarian again in 1990.

† https://animalclock.org/#section-numbers.

December 12, 2024

The Getting of Wisdom

Homer boasts the bloody Deeds of Achilles

Thus much Excusing which Might Please;

Nought can Deform a Human Face

Like to His Armours brazen Brace.

—William Blake (attrib.)

Famed for my oxtail stews and bouillabaisse,

I plucked octopodes from their proper place,

Beneath the sea,

And now in the Court of Last Resort face

Life, ordained my penalty to be.

I never knew a hunt was judged a crime,

But was humbled, doing time

As lightly as one may upon our Earth

Indebting guilt to mortgage doubtful dearth.

My hope's one day to be paroled

—For what that's worth!—

Before I get too bloody, beastly old.

With gratitude to Henry Handel (Ethel Florence Lindesay) Richardson for the use of her title.

December 11, 2024