 Yule Heibel put me on to the work of J.M. Coetzee, and specifically his new book Elizabeth Costello.
The book is about a writer in her later years taking up the lecture
circuit, and espousing an unpopular animal rights viewpoint. It's a
slim volume, one that the critics have not been kind to, consisting of
eight 'lessons', the longest two of which are transcripts of the title
character's lectures on our ghastly relationship with other animals. My
reaction while reading it was similar to my reaction to Daniel Quinn's Ishmael:
I was intellectually engaged but felt a bit manipulated by the fraud of
hiding a political/philosophical treatise inside a 'novel'. But when I
read the following passage I broke into a cold sweat. Nothing I have
ever read has so perfectly captured the essence of how I have come to feel, more and
more, as I enter the latter years of my own life: a terrible sense of
dread, helplessness, outrage, despair, realization that despite all
appearances and cultural propaganda everything in our world is not all right, in fact everything is horribly wrong, ugly, and totally out of control:
Seven o'clock, the sun just rising, and John [Elizabeth Costello's son] and his mother are on the way to the airport.
'I'm sorry about my wife', he says. 'She has been under a lot of
strain. I don't think she is in a position to sympathize. Perhaps one
could say the same for me. It's been such a short visit, and I haven't
had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about this animal business.'
She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. 'A better explanation',
she says, is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I
think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken
into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.'
'I don't follow. What is it you can't say?'
'It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly
easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is
it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime
of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet
every day I see the evidence. The very people I suspect produce the
evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses
that they have bought for money. It's as if I were to visit friends,and
to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and
they were to say "Yes it's nice isn't it? Human skin it's made of, we
find that's best, the skins of young virgins." And then I go to the
bathroom and the soap wrapper says "100% human stearate". Am I
dreaming, I say to myself. What kind of house is this? Yet I'm not
dreaming. I look into your eyes, into your wife's, into the children's,
and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you
are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else
comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?'
She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her?
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At the end of the book, Elizabeth Costello grapples with one of the questions the Internet doesn't answer:
what motivates human cruelty, and whether the writer who writes about
cruelty is providing an important lesson in human nature, or instead is
in some way complicit in the cruelty and the desensitization of
humanity to it, by giving it publicity, new life. This is an issue that
is addressed as well in Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words. We
have a legacy of incredible cruelty, violence, terror. Is there a point
in rubbing our faces in it, in forcing people to face up to the horror
of concentration camps, slaughterhouses, chemical weaponry, mental
illness, sexual assault and torture, bullying, spousal and child abuse,
animal testing laboratories, political interrogations, what happens
behind prison walls, the agony of those in continuous pain not allowed
to die and without access to relief, the children whose entire lives
are consumed in deprivation and brutality, the suffering of crack
babies?
Our world, past and present and probably future, is full of these
horrors, this massive tide of suffering and blood. When we show
pictures of malnourished children, when we give them money and food to
prolong their lives until the next famine or crippling disease, when I
force you to look at the picture at the top of this post and tell you
that all of these horrors happen millions of times every day, in every
neighbourhood on Earth, is that a wake-up call, probably repulsive and
probably ineffective but an important service nevertheless, or is it an
obscenity, something no one wants or needs to see or hear or learn
about? Does it serve a purpose to surface, from beneath the thin
veneer of civilization and calm, the oceans of blood and the endless
crescendo of pain, misery and suffering that our sad, pathetic culture
is built on?
Why can't we come to terms with it? How can we come to terms with it? How can we let it go on? And if we can't stop it, and can't bear to face it, then what?
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
