The history of the modern bovine

Standing there before the two of them, I feel a tingling awareness of my body; sumptuous, tight, expansive in its classical perfection. Mine is a body so conspicuously exquisite that those who look upon it feel almost guilty, as though they are participating in a vast squandering of resources.

I have never been so utterly complete, so able to occupy my physical self, my heartbeat,¹ my metabolism. Here is a new pleasure, heady and private: the expansion and contraction of my lungs, the coolness of the air slipping into and out of my throat, and the knowledge of the subtle, sensual rhythm that this causes in the image of my magnificent frame.

I hold still, waiting.

"I can't do this," says Patricia.

"Baby," says Mark cloyingly.

The mysticism and incipience of the moment is gone. Mark puts a hand on Patricia's and says something in a low, gentle voice, to which she responds, sounding upset, perceptibly beginning to lapse back into her typical self-righteous. They are both tired and hungry² and tense.

It is clear that my presence makes Patricia uncomfortable. She wants to speak to Mark as though I am not here, but she is aware of the hypocrisy in that, so she half-glances in my direction as she talks, nonetheless referring to me as "him."³

Mark points out that Patricia has agreed to this. We've met several times, I've spoken to her at great length. But although the force and tact of my rhetoric is unrivaled, I'm not surprised that something like this should happen. It has happened before, or I wouldn't be here at all.

It's best to let them speak alone. I have always found it undignified to back up, but tonight is a night for pragmatism. Awkwardly, I shuffle away to an appropriate distance. Mark casts me an apologetic look, which embarrasses and annoys me. I don't like Mark. Patricia believes that being married to him protects her from being "lumped in" with other reactionaries.

I enter a semi-meditative state, ruminating. Naturally I'm upset about this whole situation, but I of all people should know that this does not always go as one imagined when one was young.

Of course in my case it could have. I could, had I chose, be addressing a banquet of the world's greatest minds: scientists, artists, presidents, economics, philosophers, and of course chefs. All of the very best chefs. Not just Laverne or Strauss or Zhou, but all of them and more. We would talk late into the night, planning every detail to perfection. I was offered the chance. No expense would have been spared.

Instead, I chose Patricia. In her youth she was a respected member of the "intellectual" caste within the so-called "animal-rights movement." She remains a highly visible symbol of veganism, despite having given up formal adherence to that ideology. I suspect this was her motivation as well as mine. She is up for tenure in the Stanford economics department, and a decisive act of reformation on her part would make the appointment less awkward for the university. My own decision incited a degree of controversy, but I remain convinced it was the right one.

I did not expect it to be easy. For now there is nothing I can do. She has read enough of the essential literature,⁵ attended lectures by myself and others, and held with me enough private discussion to understand more than most meat-eaters, at least intellectually. The problem is now one of reconciling her emotions to discovered truth. It is not easy—but, as my former mentor, the great rhetorician Bessie Murray-Grey XIVCCCLXIX, observed, after reaching this phrase there is but one likely outcome.

I stand at a distance, ruminating and considering the works of Yukio Mishima, which of course I have read in the original Japanese. A misguided but beautiful soul is apparent in them. I admire Mishima for aspiring to make something beautiful out of the ugliness of human death.

In contrast to many academics of my standing, I have always found human culture interesting in its own right. I dare say that were it not for my continued support in both academic circles and the popular press, the study of human literature may have died out entirely. This is not to boast—I merely took advantage of a perception that exists, whether justified or not, that my judgments are not to be written off lightly, however unfashionable they may be. Rather, I hope to illustrate that the ignorance exists on both sides, whatever we tell ourselves.

My attention is drawn sharply back to the table as Patricia yells "Because it's wrong, Mark. I'm sorry, it's just wrong. It's wrong and it's sick." Patricia turns to look at me. "How can you do this?" she yells again, pulling her hands out of from Mark's.

Mark says something I can't hear, causing Patricia to look over the edge of the table to see the red wine she has just spilled on my beige carpet.

"What's it matter?" she yells again. "He's going to need it after you eat him, is he?"

Mark shows me his apology face, then says something that gets Patricia to stop yelling. She picks up the glass and, without attempting to make eye contact, says tersely to me, "I'm sorry."

I swallow my cud and continue to wait.

It is impossible to understand Patricia and people like her out of the context of the history of the modern bovine. And it is one of history's great ironies that without these people, there would no modern bovine.⁶ I will relate this history here in brief.

It began after the creation of genetically modified insentient organisms capable of producing a substance phenomenologically identical to beef, with far greater efficiency than traditional husbandry. Naturally this "meat" was widely and rightly shunned, but its existence rendered the killing animals for food, already considered by many to be a practice of little normative value, into a symbol of unsustainable bourgeois excess.

The solution was enlightened. Over a great many generations a new life-form was guided into existence. It was, by a very wide margin, the most rapid evolution ever to have taken place. The remarkable bovine that was the result of this process possessed astounding capacity for reason and abstract thought, as well as the faculty of speech. They quickly developed an advanced culture that recognized⁷ the concept of a bovine's ultimate role as food for human beings.

This was, of course, the first time humanity had been confronted with an equally intelligent species, and reactions were varied. Many felt threatened, and there was justified concern that the the original goal of the project had been lost. Indeed, for a time there existed in human culture such discomfort with the idea of another species that equaled humans, but was fundamentally different from them, that tremendous effort was made to "humanize" us. The very concept of the butchery and the consumption of beef was questioned; entire generations died of old age.

But our intelligence served us well, as it had been intended to. We developed the education system that remains in place to this day,⁸ emphasizing rhetoric, philosophy, and the culinary arts, and were therefore able to employ the twin inducements of just argument and delectable cuisine.

It was, perhaps predictably, more the latter than the former that reestablished our right to be eaten. And while relations have been mostly harmonious, there remains a failure in humanity to properly understand being eaten as a right. This is inconsequential for most, but it lies at the root of veganism.

My early conversations with Patricia betray the extent of the ignorance necessary to maintain this ideology. She spoke at length about my "right to live," tried to convince me that I didn't "have to" be eaten, that there was "a better way." She indicated that I had been "brainwashed" into my "beliefs."

The number of times I was obliged to employ quotation marks just now is telling. As I have attempted to explain on many occasions, the disconnect between human and bovine culture is a structural one: that is, people like Patricia struggle to engage bovinism using human categories.⁹ Some have even gone as far as to suggest that our "cultural addiction" to perfecting our bodies for human consumption stems from a sort of perverse religiosity.¹⁰

It is difficult to convince a person that concepts such as servitude and equality, so-called "animal rights," religion, masochism, etc., are inapposite here—but I believe I have done so with Patricia. Besides the personal satisfaction of it, I strongly believe the symbolism of her enjoying a fillet de moi will be of great value. Perhaps that is naive.

Regardless, my efforts are about to bear fruit. Mark beckons to me, and I approach the table. How long have I been waiting?

Patricia has been crying, but she is smiling now as she tells me she is ready. Mark is grinning in his self-satisfied way. He seems external to the scene—at this moment I even feel somewhat warmly toward him.

The sense I have of my body is returning. I feel purposeful and benevolent.

"Hungry?" I ask Patricia.

"Very much." She is looking up into my eyes.

"Which part of my body would you like?" My voice is soft and deep, paternal and reassuring, but Patricia hesitates. "Shall I choose for you?" She nods.

I direct her to place her hand on my side, near my spine, toward the bottom of my sirloin. Once again my breath takes on an aspect that fills my entire being; the pressure of her hand seems to anchor me to the world. I have never felt a physical sensation with such clarity.

"Here," is all I say. She nods.

Mark, with trite solemnity, informs me that he will have the same. We settle on appetizers. I have already selected the wine based on my recent diet. ¹¹

"Thank you," says Patricia, looking up at me again. Looking down at her, I am overcome by feelings of tenderness and generosity.

"Thank you too," I reply. "The chef will be bring me out shortly." With that, I leave.

My slaughter room has been prepared for me. My chef, flayer, and butcher are waiting to attend on me. We make brief small talk, and I give some last-minute instructions, then I step into a wide gold-plated trough, and let my eyes ease shut for the last time.

The ceremonial restraint harness descends from the ceiling with the hiss of a hydraulic motor, and my flayer and butcher see it down over my body. Though I have gone through the motions of this exercise innumerable times, the weight of the harness feels fresh, and at the same time familiar, as though it were a part of me that had been missing.

Even in the midst of my elation, it is not difficult to imagine Patricia picturing this. She has seen this room and its instruments; she has met these men. "Executioners," she called them at the time. This feeling, in some sense, may remain—or not. A powerful moment came when my flayer related to her a story told be a previous client. The client had explained to the flayer how surprised he had been as a youngster in school to learn that humans do not want to be eaten, and how he had only accepted the fact when his teacher had asked, "Who would eat them?" To refer to the bovine consumption-instinct as "a desire" is not dissimilar to saying that a human "desires" not to drink a bottle of cyanide.

Nonetheless, I cannot escape the feeling that somewhere in Patricia's mind I am a poor soul about to meet his brutal end, shaking and wretched—if not visibly, then somewhere in his own mind. In other words, that her understanding is a facade, behind which she still believes that everything I've described to her is its own facade, and that if all these elaborate constructions were torn down, we would be left in a barren landscape, the two of us alone facing death.

Padded ring clamps shut tightly around my ankles, and, with the sound of more shifting hydraulic pressure, the butcher lowers the platinum-coated ceremonial non-penetrating captive bolt pistol¹² and fits it against my forehead.

The cool of the metal is soothing almost beyond imagination. There is a sense of unfolding, of the components of my body and the world being rearranged into their proper places.

The butcher throws a switch, and the bolt begins to retract. For some reason I open my eyes. Standing in the doorway, unseen by anyone else, is Patricia. She appears horrified. I smile at her. There is a click as the bolt snaps into its cocked position. There is no change in Patricia's face. My butcher is pressing down with both hands on the heavy trigger. I can feel my own heartbeat against the straps of the harness.

Suddenly Patricia seems to comprehend the sound she has just heard. I hear her begin to yell.

Wait.

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¹I must admit that, in way I know to be deeply inappropriate, it reminds me of the last sentence of Hemingway's masterpiece For Whom the Bell Tolls, when Robert Jordan feels "his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."
²I am afraid I cannot resist the rather sophomoric observation that there is a very obvious solution to this.
³Patricia has made it clear that she believes she respects me. Contrary to what might have been expected, I have been surprised to discover the fervency of this supposed respect. It is, in its own misguided way, touching. If tonight we fail again to move forward, I shall write a monograph about it.
⁵A category in which, I am pleased to say, some have found fit to include my own work, notably Cook, Diner, and Dined: A Thesis on the Tripartite Preparation of Prime Rib, and, among the more populist-minded, Being and Consumption.
⁶ The current unpopularity of this notion is based on a contemporary revision unworthy of further discussion.
⁷Human chroniclers have often erroneously employed the phrase based on.
⁸The subject of bovine institutional development is a controversial one, and one in regard to which I am afraid my opinion differs from the orthodoxy, which would have it that our cultural institutions sprang into being with little intervention from the human world. In point of fact, many of these institutions, inconveniently but undeniably, have roots in human-enacted "programs" of those early days. C.f. my essay "Humanization Programs and the Early Development of Education: A Defense."
⁹I, for one, have always believed that we can ill afford the cavalierness with which we treat this sort of culturally imperialism.
¹⁰One shockingly offensive but briefly popular diatribe, Cult of the Steak, went so far as to characterize butchery as "a ritual sacrifice" that we believe necessary to enter an "afterlife." What our culture has so far failed to understand is that humans need it explained that this is bunkum—that the very categories of "life" and "after life" are peculiar to humanity. For example, over the years I have maintained frequent correspondence with a certain well-known human writer and thinker (whose name, for obvious reasons, I will not include here). Once, I happened to request his thoughts on how human civilization functions under its unique conception of death, which at that time I felt I was just coming to understand. He replied that when he read those lines, he was utterly dismayed. My correspondent is regarded as one of the great minds in operation today, and yet it had never occurred to him that the human fear of and obsession with death was not universal! This ignorance may be inexcusable, but accepting it as a given one wonders not at the persistence of the vegan ideology, but rather at why it is not even more widespread. (In regard to my question, I confess to admiring for the myriad ways in which people cope with their idea of death. A study in the role of death in human literature would be an immense but rewarding endeavor, and one that might find fruitful beginning with the authors I mentioned earlier.)
¹¹Once again, I must object to the fad of adjusting one's diet to suit a particular wine, dessert, etc.—but perhaps now is not the time for this discussion. I have said my piece elsewhere.
¹²This was a gift from one of the associations of bovine academics that I have chaired over the years. Its history is notable, but too lengthy to go into here. As an academic, I have not made a habit of vast worldly accumulation; however, this non-penetrating captive bolt pistol is one of a handful of possessions that gives me great pleasure.

first draft

It is probably artificial and stupid to talk about the “greatest moment” of one’s life—in fact, to talk about the greatest anything is ridiculous,¹ when it comes down to it. But there was one moment in my life during which I thought, This is the greatest moment of my life, although not in those words or any words, being too overwhelmed with the perfection of my experience to think in any particular words whatsoever, especially since the perfection (I use the word loosely) of that exact moment was due at least partially to my having just prior been told to “shut up.”

I was on a bench in Toledo at the top of a very tall and steep bank, so that before me was a winding river with the ruined turrets of some ancient fortress acting as a resting place for birds too last to fly across in one go; and green and gold fields on the far side, with more castles and towers in the distance; and old men in overcoats and carrying Walkmans and smoking on their way home from work in front of me. I was expounding (blathering eruditely) on some topic or other (something about Alzheimer’s research, I think), and my companion (who I was probably in love with), who had been leaning her head back on the bench so that she faced straight up, interrupted me suddenly, saying, “Chris, shut up and look at the sky.”

Of course when a girl (who is four years older than you, and you are only twenty) you are probably in love with gives you a command like this (which essentially amounts to carpe diem, doesn’t it?) you obey her; and I obeyed her, and leaned back my head as she had leaned back her head and looked up at that unremarkable gray sky until my neck hurt and the sky became remarkable; the fissures in its clouds were deep, as deep as the secret gorges that the Greeks would climb down to visit Hell; the clouds were the same clouds that I had looked down on as a child from a high mountain in some national part somewhere and thought, If I just drop down onto them I’ll sink deep and forever into their softness²; and I felt I was about to fall up into them and through their crevices to whatever was above (which, of course, would not be the temperaturelessness of space, which provides nothing and by doing so causes you first to explode, then to suffocate and probably, eventually, to cook in the energy of your own biothermal reactions); and when you are about to travel to the next life without the unpleasantness of dying, you really do feel liberated from a few things, and you can truly relax as you have never relaxed before, forgetting everything about this world—the pain in your neck (until it becomes too bad), the bench, your flight home, the old men walking past, how the sun will set soon, the girl sitting next to you (not completely, of course—not her; is she thinking about you?).
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¹ For reasons not just ideological, but pragmatic, astrological, chronological, philosophical—reasons that are embedded deeply in the core of the existence, etc.
² And they were the same clouds, really; for what is sameness when our bodies can replace (eventually) every molecule and yet we are the same person as much as a person can ever be said to be the same person that he ever was. And for all I know those particular clouds were in fact the exact same collection of molecules, each made of the exact same collection of atoms, etc.; that is, as much as we can ever speak of “particular clouds,” in that there is really only one cloud in the world, and it has existed for all of our time and will continue to exist as long as there is a single water molecule that has the kinetic energy to break off of the scrummy mass of its identicals and hurls itself through nothingness until it collides with some bit of air and is sent crashing meteorically back to bestow its piss-and-vinegar spirit onto some other lucky bastard. And that is the tragedy of clouds, which look so discreet and simple from far far away, but that, like many things (all things, really, although admittedly more dramatically than, say, a person), up close turn out to have neither borders not substance. Which is basically why it was good that I chose not to throw my young self off that cliff.

second draft