glass abattoirs
on not looking
1.
In a recent story, J.M. Coetzee has his recurring character Elizabeth Costello call her son in the middle of the night. She is calling to ask how much it would cost to build an abattoir.
It occurred to me, she says, that people tolerate the slaughter of animals only because they get to see none of it. Get to see, get to hear, get to smell. It occurred to me that if there were an abattoir operating in the middle of the city, where everyone could see and smell and hear what goes on inside it, people might change their ways. A glass abattoir. An abattoir with glass walls. What do you think?
*
A girl comes to the hub and asks for vegan food. You point her apologetically towards the browning fruit, the crates of leeks.
Anything fresh?
Only what’s out.
The girl has blue hair and a bag covered in badges. She is younger than you, although not as young as you were when you had blue hair and a bag covered in badges. She nods at the fridge behind you.
There isn’t anything in there, is there?
Your gaze slides over to the fridge. You are not supposed to open it until the others have been emptied.
I’ll check, you say. As you are rifling through squashed supermarket sandwiches you say: I used to be vegan.
You don’t know why you tell her. Just making conversation? The girl knows your game. She squints at you.
Why did you stop?
Your moral currency has been declined.
Oh, well, you begin feebly. I was always pretty bad at it. You find a green salad, a pot of guacamole, a packet of tofu. Some things I managed to cut out, but other things were harder.
The girl takes your offerings, thanks you.
You should try again, she says. After a while it becomes easy. And if it gets hard, you can always watch videos. Of the cows and stuff. They’re on YouTube.
The girl packs up her bags. You make conversation. When she leaves she looks at you and says: You should live your moral beliefs.
You should live your moral beliefs. The phrase is heavy, too heavy. It hangs weirdly against the potatoes, the waxwork bananas.
*
Once upon a time there was a young prince who could speak to birds. When he took up the throne he decreed that things would be different. The people, he said, must know the suffering their hunger causes. Every day until solstice, he said, we will take one beast from outside the city walls and slaughter it in the square. We will let its blood drip into the paving stones, down into the gutters, and we will behold its whimpers as it dies.
On the first day, the people gathered eagerly to watch the grisly orchestra of this strange new king. There were gasps as the beast’s throat was slit, grimaces as its knees buckled. The beast wailed; children keened; the air was thick with red noise. On the second day, the beast died slowly, birthing its own stomach. Men trudged home with sullen shoulders, dismayed by the thought of dinner.
But by the fifth day, their appetites had returned. The atmosphere was businesslike; flinches were disguised as coughs. At the end of the month, even the children could look without wincing. By the time spring had settled, people had begun to avoid the square; they gathered elsewhere, in taverns and junkyards. But it was not because of the butchery, they said; it was only because of the smell.
The king, watching from his palace, asked the birds for advice. But they would no longer speak to him; or perhaps they never had.
*
The women gleam out over plates of beef, egg, yogurt. Today we’re making this complete nutrition bowl. This is my favourite post-workout fuel. Lean protein, low calorie. This will keep you full for hours. Embarrassing, given all you know, to have been corned by the gleaming women. But they only exist for fifteen seconds: spawn and die, like fruit flies. You gobble them, little toad that you are.
You read an essay by a man who says that when he was addicted to porn he would often find the faces of anonymous women, their limbs and moans, floating into his psyche in idle moments: phantoms blocked on the path to forgetting. The gleaming women are similarly sticky. You find their voices in your head in the supermarket, on the bus, while chopping onions.
Man's great affliction, wrote Simone, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat. All the anorexics on Instagram are Catholics now. Peaches and steak. Anchoress girl summer. It makes you feel old. Shuffled pack; same old game. Tilt the mirrors, thumb the screen: look, look, look. It doesn’t matter what you look at, what you don’t, as long as you are not eating.
*
The abattoir is everywhere. You can enter it at any time. But the blood it contains is so unreal, separated from you by so much glass.
*
I know, you wanted to say. I’m just not sure exactly how to.
2.
The animal is a moral problem. The animal, in fact, is the moral problem. All moral questions are questions about what it is to be human, and all questions about what it is to be human are questions about what humans do to animals. This does not mean that the horrors humans inflict upon one another can be weighed against those we inflict on animals, but it does mean that the two horrors are inextricable.
The world is split into two kinds of people: those who know this fact, and feel it very deeply, and people who do not know it, and feel it only in their sleep. It is possible to pass from one side to the other, but not easy.
It is impossible to live in the world without violating animal lives. It is impossible not just in the world we live in now – although its barbarisms in this regard are particularly acute – but any world we have ever lived in. We were scavengers before we were hunters. With the hunt came the tool, techne, language, culture, law. It is probable that our capacity to conceptualise the horrors we inflict on animals as horrors – unnatural acts, freely chosen – is dependent on our having committed them. This killing was ours before we could question it. Now we can question it, it is no longer truly ours.
The nonrelation between humans and nature was once what constituted the domain of the sacred. We cannot know if the slaughter of animals is permitted; thus, we ritualise it. The sacrifice, the hunt, the feast. Here we are, gathered as brothers. Here we are together, looking into the glass abattoir. Making something sacred is a way of looking at it, of looking at our own ambivalence in relation to it. The slaughtering practices of our current world system are barbaric not only because of their scale and brutality, but because they are built to desacralize. All automation is a means of looking away.
3.
This is the story of M and the politician, or: why Elizabeth Costello was wrong about glass.
M was a handyman who had worked fitfully all his life and was now fitfully retired. At some point he had wound up in France, for reasons he couldn’t or didn’t quite want to remember, and now he lived in a small town in Aquitaine, with French enough to drink with. One day M was sitting in the square, sounding off. He was sounding off, as usual, about foreigners and terrorists and what the world was coming to. M's friends nodded and sighed. They swigged their beers and licked their lips. They did not point out that M, too, was a foreigner. But one of the friends was a stranger. The stranger said that he had been to the camps on the border with a company of aid workers. The stranger said that the people there had not come to take or displace, but only because they were desperate.
M said, ok, but they can’t all come here.
The stranger said, where else should they go?
M said, it’s not my problem.
The stranger said, go out there and see what you think.
M said, maybe I will.
The stranger said, go on then. Make yourself useful.
So that week M took his camper and went to the border to stay for the night and make himself useful. He saw the tents slashed and frozen, the mud white with Dover clay. He saw the fires made of gorse and plastic. He saw the people, and he saw that most of them were boys, children. He saw how many of them there were, which was not all that many, and how cold they were, which was unthinkably. He fixed their bikes and they pestered him for cigarettes. He talked to them and they made him laugh. At the end of the weekend, M did not go back to his town. He stayed at the border for six months. Then he went back to his town to go to the dentist. And then he returned to the border. I think he is still there.
Some time later a politician came to the border, to see exactly what it was that he had made his career promising to eradicate. He was allowed to come to the border, like anyone else with his passport, although he was not allowed to bring photographers. The politician saw the mud, and the fires, and the wind. He saw the people, and he saw how many of them were boys. He talked to the boys. They boys did not know he was a politician. Which team do you support? they asked him, in English. Are you married? they asked him. The boys told him about what they would do when they got to England, or maybe they didn’t. They did not speak about where they had come from, or maybe they did. Maybe the politician pulled his hat down over his ears and blew on his hands. Maybe he drank weak tea from a plastic cup and stared out over the haze, to the horizon, where England was or wasn’t. Maybe someone asked him for a cigarette.
The politician left the camps. The politician went home, to his wife and his football team. The politician thought about the boys. And then he wrote a newspaper column about how leftist radicals on the border were teaching English to foreign criminals.
*
I know the fantasy: you take them all along on a big class trip to the cinema, all the butcherers and slaughters and war criminals and drone bombers and pundits and grifters and staffers, and when the curtains unfurl and the screen slides out the film that plays is it, the glass abattoir. It’s the thing, mediated into reality, the undeniable suffering thing, pressed free of all ambivalence, of all evaluation, of all appetite, of all history: the bodies dragged in from outside the city walls. And you get up and you point and you scream and you scream: See? Do you see now?
But what do they do, Elizabeth, your waiting audience? They applaud. They think it’s hilarious.
*
You are distributing crates of children’s clothing at the site in Dunkirk. The wind is everywhere, in the trees, in the fires, in your mouth. The mud is white. Nothing grows in it. There are no children around. Better to keep them inside, or at least surround them with bodies.
A man comes up to you. He is not wearing shoes.
Please, he says, gesturing.
I’m sorry, you reply. It’s only for children, today. You hold up a shoe, miniaturized. I’m sorry. You see?
The man shakes his head.
In Dunkirk, he says, it is like this. He raises his hand to the sky. First children, he says.
He lowers his hand. Then women.
He points to the floor. Then dogs.
He looks at you. Then men.
He laughs into the wind, and disappears.