Sunday Week 5 Year A
1942: A poem from the doomed uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. Starving Jews fighting back against their Christian oppressors. The refrain: “the meat defiant, the meat insurgent, the meat fighting! The meat in full cry…” The meat defiant and unwilling to be consumed.
1999: An essay at the back of this morning’s New York Times magazine. Suzanne Winckler writes about killing chickens. Every few years she joins a friend of hers and helps him slaughter the chickens he has raised. She says it’s the price she pays for being an omnivore. The price: there’s the shock she felt when she cradled her first chicken in her arms and felt something with the heft and pliability of a newborn baby; there’s the surprise at the wild struggle the bird makes to live even after its head is off and blood is misting everywhere; there’s the repetitive, messy exhaustion of a day’s hard work and the meal that follows—vegetables only.
What it does for her, she meditates, is remove the anonymity. Between the meat and her mouth is an immediacy that the rest of the time is masked by Styrofoam and plastic wrap and legions of nameless meat-processors.
But more than that it has taught her the ancient need to ritualise the grisly experience of killing, to regularise it with routine. The savage life may have its thrill but on the appointed mornings the butchers are slow to get going: there are knives and cleavers to sharpen, water to boil, tables and chairs and buckets and aprons to gather, an order of assembly to establish. These are her words:
It’s like putting on an invisible veil of resolve to do penance for a misdeed. I am too far gone to in my rational Western head to appropriate the ritual of cultures for whom the bloody business of hunting was a matter of survival. But butchering chickens has permitted me to stand in the black night just outside the edge of their campfire, and from that prospect I have inherited the most important lesson of all in the task of killing meat: I have learned to say thank you and I’m sorry.
Add comment February 7th, 1999