The Chaos of Organs: Emily Carr on Meat
But what I really wanted to talk about was the sexual politics of meat. Carol J. Adams, are you listening? What I really wanted was for you (all of you) to think, together with me, about the sexual politics of meat. I want you together, thinking. Which is not the same as in agreement. Which is the hope of simultaneity the Internet makes possible. I have been thinking about the sexual politics of meat alone for a long time ago, talking to my poems. Sometimes there is so much meat in my poems, I have to revise it out. I have to purposefully consider how much meat you can handle. Carefully, cleverly, I have to coax you into treating everything & everyone as, simply, meat.
Besides my poems, for a long time now my husband has been the only one listening. Last night I told him I believed that, in theory, if you are going to eat an animal you should be willing to eat all the edible parts of it. I meant this quite literally. & I argued that there is, essentially, no difference between cow heart & hamburger. For my birthday, I had been re-reading one of my favorite naturalists, Archie Carr (no relation, though we do share a love of Florida—in the original sense). In his book Ulendo: Travels of a Naturalist in and out of Africa, he argued that:
for the sake of the planners of the future who make the big step & give up cows & cornfields to farm the seas [for algae], let me say never, never permit people to see what it is they are being fed…
… [I] say it will be the magnified looks of it [algae] that will scare off clientele—its unsettling miscellany, its untrustworthy subdivisible size. Prettily packaged, in cakes or oozes, it may find a limited vogue; but some idle person is sure to tease apart a bit of the stuff under a lens one day & see the chaos of organs & shells & little feet—and then there will be hell to pay.
Dr. Archie Carr
Carr included in the list of taboo creatures: backboneless land animals, footless animals, & animals with too many feet. As a pioneer in the scientific study of sea turtles, frogs, & several species of fish, Carr was an avid hunter of all varieties of strange meat & only relinquished his penchant for such delicacies as tapir, barbequed turtle soup, and tepescuinte late in life.
So Carr did not speak as, as some might argue, a “fascistically utopian” vegetarian. Nor could he be called a naïve animal rights activist. He was, for a great deal of his life, in an altogether unresolved conflict between the instincts of a naturalist & the urge to shoot things. His admiration of nature was complex, & at times contradictory. He believed the growing population of humans is at the heart of the decomposition of our natural landscapes & the Age of Reason is the root of the end of the Age of Mammals.
He believed that if you think along with the rest of the reasoning mammals, “sure enough, there is smooth concrete out to the edge of the sky and every single man has an antiseptic Cadillac, knows all the pharmacology of happiness… And we shall head out into the rest of our time, masters of creation at last, and alone forever.”
Alone forever, we have forgotten, finally, to arrange for our own disappearance.
Carr himself, however, was unflinchingly practical. Tourism, he argued, is at the heart of the salvation of nature, & we cannot ignore it. We will only save what we value & we only value what we see. If, in other words, we are going to preserve paradise, we must accept the safari lodges & gas pumps & scenic trails mixed tactfully in with the trees & beasts & vegetables.
& what, you want to know, about sex? There’s lots of meat here but where’s the sex in the sexual politics?
The sex is, I think, the most human part of the equation. The sex is where we get all pathologically mixed up. I’m thinking sex generically here & am ignoring recent theories about the differences between sex & gender. I’m not convinced we will ever, finally, get to the bottom of the tangled roots of those troublesome words. I don’t know that I’m convinced one is biological & the other is not, one natural & the other man-made. I’m not sure, yet, if I believe the distinction is useful. I’m not sure we’ve thought carefully enough through the implications of evolution.
What I do know is that Archie Carr was obsessed with sex. I know that our “scientific” knowledge of the animal kingdom is largely based on sex: what kind of sexes & how many, the mechanics of sex & how often it occurs, which sex cares for the young & whether they are born as eggs or fully fledged & when they mature & how. & which sex initiates sex & whether it is anatomically difficult & if it happens in pairs or trios or flocks.
We “know” a species when we know how it mates.
July 30th, 2009 saat: 4:06 pm
Alright, I’m in, and I’m going to resist over thinking this too much. (& over thinking, I think, is part of the problem of meat, of the “failing” or perceived flailing of poetry, and by extension, of those who read poetry in the many senses of that verb read…)
Here is what I’ve been mulling around lately: might the reluctance to be what we are-meat, essentially- or better, to take responsibility for being meat, and therefore take responsibility for eating meat have a close connection to failure in the most visceral sense? Perhaps some context:
I too believe that poetry does something. It must. I reject the notion that poetry and art must fly in the face of its audience (though I respect a few who argue for this I would counter: what audience?). Further I resoundingly reject the notion that poetry (which I am using as a portmanteau word for art/text) risks fascism if it works in the name of something positive.
So, what if failing to accept responsibility-as readers, as animals-for the other (animal/reader/writer/idea) is in fact the crucible for new knowledge?
August 6th, 2009 saat: 2:51 pm
i don’t know if what i am about to write is fair for the blog but i thought of this piece (at least indirectly) when i read what i am about to quote. this is from a book called ‘runes of the north’ by sigurd olson. sigurd olson is a naturalist; this is from a reflection he had upon encountering a frog that had somehow gotten into a well olson had dug in the north woods: “Rana (the frog) was of an ancient race, one of the amphibia, predating man by untold millions of years. . .We studied each other an I wondered what primal reactions were running through its amphibious nerve centers as it lay there watching. The same life flowed in Rana as in me. We were brothers under the skin. It knew nothing whatever of such things as the atomic arms race, or missiles, nationalism, or self-determination, but it did know something about the feel of water and mist and the sound of waves and of rain, something about shadows and the threat of a long sharp bill of some heron wading the shallows, or the swift flash of a pike from the deeps.” I believe you are correct that we think we know an animal when we know how it mates; i also believe that we are wrong. this knowledge is an observation, a fact, even truth of a sort. but we really don’t know how to relate to animals anymore. thank you for this piece - it was very thought provoking.