Existential Vegetarian

You can argue all you like about eating or not eating meat.  I have never seen either  side  win such arguments. As a 'vegetarian' up-taker I do not argue nor judge at the individual level.  I have simply made an existential choice.  The choice is how I want to live.  The choice is to give up food provided by the capture, husbanding  and killing of animals.  At first this was not easy, now it is no problem. To the majority food animals are utilitarian and expedient beings. Their use and disposal is behind some temple veil. They are not creatures with a will-to-live, capable of their own fulfilment, possessed of their own lives.  Krishnamurti said he did not eat meat because he did not want to take the shine from their eyes. It was eloquent and sufficient.

Contrary to lazy monotheistic thinking animals are not put on earth by the deity to harvest their flesh so the great human project can flourish. They are rather a result, like us humans, of time and evolution. Generally the difference between us and them is that we have won the evolution lottery. Our brains, knowledge and technology have made us masters of the world, lords of all creation. The status of the 'domesticated' animal means little to us. That it is the strong and mighty, the civilised,  killing the weak barely registers as unjust. If we could see in one vision the vast apparatus of man's scheme, the enclosures, the feed lots, the slaughterhouses and distribution links it would astonish us. As we are a little squeamish and ashamed (our better part) our provisioners hide it from us. It is ironic that having elevated ourselves to the status of 'human', a meaning of which is being substantively different to other creatures, we should in our treatment of  them be so heartlessly exploitative. No doubt, man will continue with his dismal project (unless climate change forces a shift.) Most of it is done in good conscience. It is the way we are conditioned in childhood,  the banal cultivation of unfeeling and unthinking.  But the existential choice is always there, simple, clean and liberating.

Hammarskjold and the True Meaning of Humility

If you were alive in the 1950s a household name was Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Hammarskjold was a man who combined a life of high public office with a life of the spirit.  He died in an air crash while on duty as Secretary-General travelling to a trouble spot in the Congo. Undoubtedly this death has added to his posthumous fame, although I doubt few born after 1980 would know of him.  He discharged his executive life with great inner grace.  I imagine only a few friends would have seen his inner conflicts, the clash between contemplation and action, the private and public. His encounter with the great traditions were his fuel and and his notes were made into Markings (Vagmarken, 1963).  I acquired a translation  of this work early in my life (Faber &Faber, 1963). Markings is a compilation of  part musings, quotations, prose and verse. It is an impression of a life of the mind.  I gave the slight paperback the special treatment of  rebinding in boards.  One wishes that all men of action, the bit-wigs chasing this and that, the hollow men, would  read Markings.  Maybe they would take away a vision of the Life of Action, the life in the world suffused with higher things.  

Here the Secretary-General gives us a lesson on humility -- and doesn't it all start with humility?

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud, a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable. 

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons.  Secure in its reality, the self is neither better or worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is --- is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement. 

To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your bearings, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise or blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance. 

Towards this, so help me God --- 

Markings

That Which Comes From Heaven

It is only that which comes from heaven that can have a real impress upon the Earth.  

Simone Weil 

Heaven is a part of my inscape. Not the heaven of religion as I have no formal religion. Heaven is not a place in my schema, it is a mythic counter point to the world. In heaven all worldly things are resolved and  all opposites co-joined. This is not true in any literal sense but through and in the neediness of sentient nature.  It resonates with Chinese thought. I think of heaven as a better metaphor than a deity for the yearning of the human spirit.  One does not have to confront a super-ordained ego-person. Heaven does not love and is not bossy. Heaven is the mother of harmony.  Heaven cannot be possessed and does not possess.  It suggests and does not command. Tao starts from heaven but ends up on Earth as a blessing. Looking around I see a lot of  fracture and discord.  There is no bedding down, nor comfort, which comes from the Latin fortis for strength.  We lost sight of the celestial begetting place from which we spring. We move quickly, in flight, and stuff ourselves with sensation for fear of the heaven-forsaken abyss around us. Please don't take this too seriously.

Ted Hughes in Passing

At the Lifeline Bookfair these days I am something of a window shopper as I am in the book disposal time of life.   I dribble more books in 'donations' than I take out. Yet it is still fun to enter the vast barn like room and immerse oneself into the sea of books. It is a little like the old cartoons with Scrooge McDuck plunging into his vat of coins. And there is also a sense of community, the bibliophile set, even though you might not talk with anyone. Another benediction is the feeling of escaping from 'the world' outside with all its vulgarity, twardriness and insincerity. On my last visit I had a little encounter with a young woman. I overhead her asking the volunteer if he had seen any books of Silvia Plath's poetry. He could not help but a few moments later I found The Colossus and brought it to her grateful attention.  I revealed that I had just finished reading  Jonathan Bate's biography of Ted Hughes, 'her husband' as I put it. She explained that she was just getting interested in Plath.  She did not have much of an opinion about Plath or Hughes.  In reply to a prompting  she said she was not a feminist. Well,  I could have dallied and got into a discussion about this unhappy pair but I thought it was not an appropriate setting. One must keep moving; I drifted off to another table thinking about Hughes.

Before reading Bate's book I knew little about him apart from his being the husband to the tragic genius Plath, that he was excoriated by feminists and he tended to write animal themed poems.  My luscious read of Bate shows he was a mighty poet, truly talented, deserving of fame. But this did not take me too much into his work.  I did not really take to him as a person. He is a bit of the 'huntin, fishin, shootin' type of man. I am not. And I found his lifelong philandering repugnant. And if I were to sit in judgement about his treatment of Plath I would reckon it pretty shabby - and unbecoming of a true poet. Leaving the fair with my token catch of books  I gave a little wave to my friend but she did not see me.