59 Ignominy

Further west I could observe on my ten-mile drive the blackbirds and the crows. At the edge of the road they looked like they were squatting. They did not even fly away when I came zooming towards them, out of my path they hardly hopped, just strolled to the side a step or two to let me pass, then returned to their breakfast of drying wet flesh and innards.

Road kill.

Driving my father to Emerson one afternoon I saw a tiny ground squirrel frozen—who knows why—in my lane on Highway 34 and it all transpired too quick and too late for me to do anything but wince and wish yet I hedged and blinked and ducked and dreaded and tried in a split second to figure it all out.

For—

For what—

No.

It and I both anticipated—

Wrong.

Under both wheels on the left side.

Crunch— 

It sounded like a bundle of tiny twigs.

Crushed.

Horrible.

I must have hit it full flush, my two tires completely covering it up.

Its whole body smashed flat.

Its sound pinched my heart.

Oh—

Heart heard.

Yes—

Hard heart—

I felt it, and I heard it, and I winced, in my lips and teeth.

Under my breath a clenched—

"God damn it!"

My father heard me.

He asked.

"What's the matter?"

"That squirrel."

"You couldn't help it," he said.

I conceded.

"No."

"So?" he asked.

I thought.

"Everything can't all be all right when that happens," I said.

This puzzled him.

It was in my mind for hours and still there off and on for three days.

Why—

Dead animals.

Carnage.

Car.

On another afternoon I was with a friend when we saw a squirrel chasing its tail, once more right in the middle of my lane of the highway. It looked agonized, crazy, as if it might have been earlier hit just a glancing blow by a passing motorist and now was chasing its pain, crying if it had been able, and I had time so I braked and swerved to try to avoid it, not much, we were speeding down the highway after all, just a tap on the brake pedal and a short quick twist of my wrist.

Whap!

"Got him!" my friend exclaimed.

Uff da—

He'd misunderstood.

Everything.

Everything.

I picked it up in my rearview mirror, spinning crazily faster in the same tight circle, in the same place, as if I had given its death merry-go-round a hard slap as I had hurried by.

Horrible and grotesque my good intention.

Whap!

"Got him!"

I was reminded of rabbits in Kosinski and Castaneda.

All this driving it couldn't be right.

No.

Down at the south campus near the stockyards the stench was unbelievable, the smell of death, fear, the slaughter, the blood, piss, shit, the hogs and the cattle you heard shrieking. 

"We think those animals are different from us," I told students.

The noise of panic.

"We should listen."

The noise of agony and hell—

Animal terror.

Prey.

"We kid ourselves."

Cow.

The ruminant intended to graze over hundreds of acres of thick grass, indifferent to the storms and seasons from year to year, almost a part of the climate itself, its own elaborate, exquisite inner pink fruit torn open only by big cats and wolves. I imagined the grass, green, high, laden with seed, heavy as oats, the cattle like buffalo, slow and lazy and harmless, accepting, content, hardly moving, loitering idly, lowing at the dying light come evening, simple as milk, the clouds, shadows, dark waves and tides of sky, coasting over a cool evening green.

Eden.

This was all sentiment and nostalgia.

A lie.

Penned, imprisoned, and bred.

Castrated, bled.

Trapped in their own shit, blood, pus, and piss.

Sores.

Sick, diseased—

Mad cow.

Mad cow.

I got caught behind a huge cattle truck from California one afternoon on the highway, the truck so brown with filth it looked like it had moled its way through a dung pile, and it was blowing back right into my face what at first I thought must have been a chemical so putrid and rank I was almost overcome by the stench of it. I couldn't understand how the trapped animals could even remain alive in that mobile sewer—and unconsciously I began gritting my teeth till I realized I was doing it so hard that for an instant I feared I might break a tooth.

Food chain.

Near the end of West Maple Road where I turned left to work there was the same sickening stench, a huge feedlot, barren, always black with shit, piss, blood, in summer, fall, winter, spring, an ugly, eternally brown and black reeking cesspool of churned mud and excrement.

Animal.

I.

Haunted mornings in the winter.

Sleepless nights.

In late summer insects splattering against my windshield.

Dead animals in the road.

Blood.

Brown stain the color of rust.

Death.

All of this—

All of this passed through my mind.

Thought.

"The kids won't eat our vegetarian meals," Ruth said.

I nodded.

'They eat hamburgers and hot dogs with their friends."

It was true.

"If they're going to eat meat I'd rather I prepared it."

"Yes."

We'd been vegetarian for five years.

Maybe eight.

In the winter my boots got cold and my feet got wet.

I missed leather.

One weekend we visited my brother and his family.

"Come in!"

They had just refurnished their living room in leather.

"Have a seat!"

Skin—

There was skin everywhere I looked.

Skin—

I surrendered.

Enough.

Thanks to my experience of whatever it was my faith in the dharma was adamant, my diamond beyond any doubt, but I was high no more. Married a second time and in 1984 struggling with seven-year-old twins and practicing the dharma as best I could on my own, so far as I knew I had neither freed nor saved even one sentient being nor in spite of my having incorporated the principles of personal honesty and nonviolence into my classroom teaching had I any effect on the killing and war and threats of war still featured daily in the morning newspaper and on the evening newscast on TV. But though I was discouraged I wasn't depressed, I had the summer off to write, and once I turned the handle and opened the faucet out it poured, the unpublished novel of my experience, my "enlightenment," indifferent to embarrassment, to absurdity, to scorn, to ridicule, to humiliation, to contempt, to mockery, to taboo, and to shame, even in fact defiant. Like Ginsberg, I wanted to howl. But by then my enlightenment, whatever it had been, was long since over and my novel was less an account of my year in heaven than a description of my present life in hell.

I called it The Archeobiopsy de Marnk Twang.

Nobody cared.