Week 7: Taking big bites

I had the privilege of being visited by my friends Logan and Allysia last week.  They are also vegan, and Allysia keeps a blog of her adventures at http://blog.happy-vegan.com.  We had a couple of conversations about veganism, which prompted me to consider some of the positions that I hold with regards to the vegan diet and why I choose to eat that way.

My personal stance is straightforward.  I eat a vegan diet because I disagree with the practices of the industry that provides meat and dairy products.  I am not willing to lend financial support to animal abuse and excessive pollution.  Outside of this, my views tend to diverge from those of many other vegans that I have met.  I do not have a fundamental disagreement with eating meat in and of itself.  My argument is with abuse and overconsumption.

If you eat average grocery store or fast food meat, you are in a small way complicit in the wholesale abuse of animals and the massive pollution that accompanies raising and slaughtering them.  These practices continue because most people who consume mean never have to see what goes on behind those walls.  But what if you had to participate in every step of the process?  It’s a powerful thing, the ability to take a life for food.  It seems to me that an education should include a demonstration on how to prepare an animal for consumption.  We can’t all be hunters and butchers, but I think that if we all had to participate in the process along the way, we might all treat the animals that we use for food with a bit more respect.

I do not believe that hunting, fishing, trapping and preparing your own meat for your own consumption constitutes abuse or immoral behaviour.  Predation is a natural relationship between stronger and weaker organisms.  It becomes problematic when we abuse the advantage and turn it into things like industrial-scale farms and slaughterhouses.  An animal will inevitably die in the wild.  A well placed bullet from a hunter is probably a better way to go than being devoured by wolves or starving in the winter.  But hunting in our society has evolved into a leisure activity rather than a necessity because of animal husbandry.  When hunters couldn’t keep up with the demand, we turned to farmers to pick up the slack and somewhere along the line, we defenestrated the code of respect for the animals that feed us.

One of the traits that we’ve evolved that’s unique among all animals is a conscience.  Some sense of ethics, morals, right and wrong.  Is it ever right to kill an animal?  Veganism is more or less a first-world privilege.  We’re all participants in a unique phase in history.  Most of us live in cities where we have the resources and the wherewithal to be properly nourished for our whole lives without touching animal protein.  Does the viability of a vegan diet in most modern cities mean that it is no longer moral to take the life of an animal?

I’m still troubled by this question, but my answer is no.  I feel that it is still justifiable to use animals as a food resource.  I also feel that the solution to the industrial farm and slaughterhouse is to have a relationship with our food that extends beyond picking a a cut from a grocery store shelf or a menu.  Respect for animals that give us food ought to be a necessary precursor to their consumption, in my view.

We are animals, just like the other animals on earth, and our unique evolution has given us the ability to prey on animals and to digest their flesh to the benefit of our bodies.  There are a number of evolutionary indicators that suggest acclimation to an omnivorous diet - the shape of our teeth, for instance, or the necessary bacteria and enzymes in our digestive system that allows us to process meat.  Flesh carries the full complement of amino acids and is a complete protein.  It seems that humans are well equipped, from a biological standpoint, to use meat as a valid food source.

Again, the problem comes with abuse of the privilege.  We’re far beyond letting a few people spoil it for everybody.  Overconsumption is the norm rather than the exception.  It carries a whole host of problems, both ethical and health related.  A standard portion, containing more than enough protein to feed a healthy adult, is about the size of a computer mouse.  One of those each day, or even every few days, is plenty for anybody who eats a balanced diet.  

The point of this entry isn’t for me to lecture anybody, or to come down on people who choose to eat meat.  I’m well aware of the fact that we’ve moved far beyond the point where it’s reasonable to expect a complete reversal in the way our society eats.  Most of us have been raised from birth to expect a portion of animal protein as part of at least one meal, and sometimes each meal of every day.  The ease of acquiring that type of diet makes it difficult to ask people to change their eating habits.  My upbringing was no different.  I just decided that I didn’t want to do it anymore until I could provide it with my own hands.

I would catch a fish.  I would shoot a deer.  I would raise a coop of chickens and eat their eggs.  My argument is with the industry, not the activity.  For the time being, I don’t have the knowledge or the resources to hunt, fish or raise animals, so until then, I choose not to participate in the industry because I disagree with its methods of raising animal protein.  It’s not wrong to take the life of a creature when you do so with respect for the animal, the environment that you take it from and the nourishment that it gives to you in exchange for your efforts in hunting, catching or trapping it.




Word count: 1,012

Week 6: Twigs of life, dragons of death

There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast.  Escaping from the beast he gets into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him.  And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes s twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it.  
His hands are growing weaker and he feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him above or below, but still he clings on.  Then he sees that two mice, a black one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging and gnaw at it.  And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon's jaws.  The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue and licks them.  
So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment.  I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I hung.  I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet.  I only saw the unescapable dragon and the mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them.  And this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all.
- Leo Tolstoy’s “Confessions”

I read this passage in the syllabus of a fascinating course at the U of A.  It was the setup for a semester of profound, challenging and interesting discussions.  The companion material to this passage consisted of texts about people who’ve tried to, in a sense, cheat death.  We discussed the biblical story of Abraham, for example, and his willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, in exchange for a covenant with God.  It was agreed that because of his obedience, God would “make of [him] a great nation” (Genesis 12:2) despite his advanced age.  Abraham would thereby gain long or perhaps eternal life in that his progeny would endure as a nation for a great long time and remember him as their forefather.

It was during this course that I learned a favourite new word: aporia.  From the dictionary:
1. Rhetoric . the expression of a simulated or real doubt, as about where to begin or what to do or say.
2.  Logic, Philosophy . a difficulty encountered in establishing the theoretical truth of a proposition, created by the presence of evidence both for and against it.

What a fantastic way to encapsulate the crux of such a confusing and difficult argument in a single word.  Tolstoy argues that the honey can never taste sweet in the face of the dragon and the mice, but do I believe him?  There seems to be plenty of arguments to the contrary by characters like Socrates, which leaves me in an aporetic state.

Abraham feared the end of his family line; he was an old man with no offspring.  Tolstoy feared death because he worried that he, as a person, and all of his works would some day be forgotten.  Socrates took an entirely different view.  He had no fear of death.  Plato’s Apologia tells the story of the trial and execution of Socrates, who had been accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens by planting the seeds of doubt in their minds.

Socrates is sentenced to death by his accusers.  He responds to their verdict by saying that “those of us who think death is an evil must be mistaken” (Apologia 40c).  He says that death is either a dreamless sleep, a state of nothingness where the dead have no consciousness and therefore no worries, or it is, as the oracles and priests have told him, a “change of habitation from here to some other place” (40e) where the possibility exists to meet with the great men of history.  Socrates says that he is “willing to die many times over, if these things are true; for [he] personally should find the life there wonderful.” (41a)

If one is apt to take a more cheery view of life, Socrates’ fearlessness and wisdom is certainly the more useful and enlightening idea of death.  He tastes the sweetness of the honey, even in the face of the most certain death.  I have always loved reading the Socratic dialogues for their questioning and careful logic.  This particular argument, though, leaves me again with more questions.

I suppose that one half of Socrates’ conclusion is correct.  If consciousness is seated in the physical brain, and the brain dies, so too does its content.  Therefore, if that which makes us a person in the “spiritual” sense is contained within our own physiology and brain chemistry, once the neurotransmitters stop firing, there will be no more consciousness.   

His second option, however, causes an aporia in my mind.  Socates supposes that if we are not eternally unconscious after death we will find ourselves transported to a new place place where we will meet people who have also died.  I see a false dichotomy.  If the second option involves consciousness or some preservation of the self after death, why would we take it as gospel that the automatic destination for our “spiritual selves” would be a realm that is populated by other spirits or souls of departed people?

Nobody who claims to know what will happen after death is telling the truth.  Death is a veil that we cannot see through in life.  It is an event horizon, to borrow a term from physics.  Life is the event, and the horizon is death, and nothing external to that horizon can have a measurable effect on the event inside of the horizon insofar as we are capable of observing it.

I am not saying that nothing exists outside of the event horizon of life.  Nor am I suggesting that there is no way to break or thin the veil.  What I am saying is that there is no measurable effect from one side of the event horizon to the other.  I mean that we cannot qualify or quantify any interaction between living and dead people, unless you believe in kooky things like psychic mediums.  I do not.  

We travel through this life, and we will all pass the event horizon and be dead some day.  When that moment occurs, we will either lose our consciousness and be nothing, or we will not lose our consciousness and we will be something, but how that consciousness will persist is anybody’s guess, yours as good as mine.  There are plenty of conjectures as to the nature of that persistence, and I hold them all in fairly equal regard; interesting to speculate on, but ultimately of little value on this side of the event horizon.

I consider myself a pragmatist, and I am certain that my views on life and death will change as I walk through life.  At the moment, and in summary, my take is this:  I like the idea of the possibility of life after the physical death of my body - I think that would be a popular opinion in most circles.  Where I differ from, say, a religious take on that notion is that I don’t count on the possibility of an afterlife any more than I count on the possibility of no afterlife.  I believe that regardless of the outcome beyond the event horizon of death, I can have life here on earth by keeping a memory of me alive in the minds of the people who knew me.  There is no great secret to eternal life or reincarnation or resurrection, no special ritual or prayer.  The way to life after death is to live in the minds of those who knew you by giving enough love back to the world to be worth remembering.


Word count:  1,077.

Week 5: Pins and needles

When I was about thirteen years old, I developed an interest in body modification.  It started innocently enough.  I used the internet to find pictures of stretched earlobes and tribal armband tattoos and imagined what they might look like on my body.  Four years later, I wrote a paper for my grade 12 philosophy class entitled “The Philosophy of Extreme Body Modification,” which included discussion on everything from ritualistic body suspension to large gauge genital piercing.  The penultimate moment in my journey of discovery was when I found BMEzine.com, which is the best and most comprehensive archive of body modification information in the world.

As a young teenager, I was encouraged to participate in church-sanctioned activities that in no way supported my budding interest in the fascinating subculture of body art.  Tattoos and piercings were explicitly prohibited.  This edict extended into my own home where my parents were less than thrilled with my new fascination.

I’ve heard a lot of casual remarks about the internet and smart phones making us anti-social techno-junkies.  A recent conversation I had centred on whether or not technology is divisive and isolating.  I feel that the internet is by far the most useful technology that has ever been invented, and that it’s bringing people closer together, not only in online communities but in the real world as well.  

I posit that the vantage point of a person outside a window, peering in at someone glued to a computer, is the wrong angle.  It’s important to look through the eyes of the person seeing the screen.  In my early teens, I spent probably hundreds of hours scanning the written and pictorial archives of BMEzine.com and participating in the forums and chat rooms .  These are hours that I “could have spent outside, being around real people,” as the tired argument goes.  The tricky thing is that the “real people” who I had access to, given my age and limited ability to travel independently, were not the sort who shared my passion for body art.  In fact, they actively discouraged the practice.  Thus, my involvement with a new set of people who were only accessible to me in the virtual realm.

The question of perception and reality - is the world we create in our mind more or less “real” than the shared “reality” of people who we see and smell and touch? - is way outside the scope of a 1,000 word blog entry.  Let’s just agree to accept the validity of independent realities for the duration of this essay, then go back to our business like good citizens.  Right, then.  By using the internet I made a new reality with people who thought that body art was a beautiful thing to be studied, admired, and questioned.  Many of them were like me.  They had no access to people who shared their passions and secrets in their immediate social sphere.  So they, like me, made a new sphere.

It’s worth addressing the concern that this technology allows dangerous and ignorant people to populate similar spheres where their anti-social and violent ideas can go uncontested.  I believe that online social networking is a sub-category of free speech and expression.  We have to accept that the preponderance of good people will, for the most part, crowd out the assholes.  There will always be a few that make it through; the anonymity afforded by the internet makes a lot of people sound tougher than they are.  To me, this is no different than a real life social networking situation.  Go to any nightclub in any city.  The vast majority of people there go with good intentions, but sometimes there’s one dude who gets a knife through security.  We accept the risk because it’s assumed to be small and accompanied by the promise that for every sociopath, there are thousands of wholly decent human beings.  Most of the time, if we conduct ourselves civilly, we won’t be forced to confront the psychos against our will.  It’s very, very easy to close a browser window.

The internet allowed me to build a passionate new interest in a safe and supportive environment.  It also remade my reality outside of the virtual sphere.  I wanted to make friends with similar interests.  Now I knew they existed.  I had in some small part entered into their discourse and I was privy to the lexicon that would identify me as a member - or at least a tourist - in that group.  I started to drop in at tattoo and piercing shops to chat with the artists, and I found most to be inviting and friendly.  I destroyed the last remaining shards of prejudice that had been planted in my mind about these people by well-meaning but uninformed authorities.

There are perhaps millions of people who, for whatever reason, were never part of a physical community.  They logged on.  They gained the ability to find others like them and to form supportive groups and to be included.  Online social networks have allowed people to disclose information in open forums that would not have reached the public otherwise.  These groups also provide opportunities to teach people how to seek out good sources and refine and build their ideas.  

Online information is an infinite swamp of knowledge.  With a quick point and click, you can find out anything about anything.  Social networking connects individuals with others who can teach them to navigate in the murky waters.  Individuals who were ostracized can feel included.  The positive shift in perspective from beaten-down outsider to accepted member most certainly has rewarding real-world consequences, regardless of whether the new membership is with a “real” or online community.

It’s been a dozen years since I first clicked on a BMEzine link, and in that time, I’ve had six body piercings done, acquired five tattoos, and had eleven overwhelmingly positive experiences.  The thought of “regretting it later” has never crossed my mind.  Thanks to online body art communities, I can see the beautiful and groundbreaking work of people like Jim Ward and Fakir Musafar, now 70 and 80 years old, respectively, and realize that it’s not about how it looks when you’re old and wrinkled.  It’s about the experience of receiving the pain of the art and transforming it into something beautiful in ways that are more than just aesthetic.

Word count: 1,059

Week 4: The gig

It’s not even November yet, and there’s snow on the ground.  It’s freezing, and the stairs are slippery.  When you hit it big, there will be roadies.  For now, grab a piece of gear and load up, it’s soundcheck in 15 minutes.  You curse your choice of instrument and grunt as you heave your heavy hardware onto the stage.  You wonder if the sound guy will be sober when you take the stage.  You wonder if the cold will keep people inside.  How many tickets pre-sold?  Doors are in an hour and you hope that when they close, you’ll walk out with enough to pay for gas back to your jam space.

Cables twist like black vines weaving through a chrome jungle of cymbal stands.  You roll your eyes as the sound guy asks you to put some dampening on your snare.  You need more bass in your monitor, and you’re probably going to hit that microphone every time you go for a crash cymbal.  You hear feedback from something, and there’s a painful few seconds while mute buttons and volume knobs are attacked.  You strike up a few bars of a song that won’t be on the set list tonight, and everybody sounds good.  You step off stage, wondering what it’s actually sounding like in the front of house.  You wait.

You receive a handful of drink tickets.  You sigh and pocket them, thinking how you’re likely to find them in a dresser drawer some time the following week.  Alcohol makes you tired and less capable of driving gear back to your jam space to unload at 2 AM.  One beer and you’re done for the night.  You wish that the the value of those drinks came as cash instead.  You nurse the bottle, sipping slowly.

You see people walking in, ordering drinks, chatting.  The energy in the room begins to build.  You tune your body to the vibrations of the voices and the PA speakers.  Thousands of watts wait in anticipation for you to count them in.  The mood in the room is good, and you notice the anticipation building all around.

A quick glance at the other band members, and you all nod and step backstage to tune, stretch, and get in the groove.  You make some last minute changes to the set-list and argue about song order.  This one is high-tempo; you suggest a slower number to follow for dynamics and recovery.  The others nod.

The promoter pops his head in the door.  “Five minutes?”  No problem.  You begin to feel the adrenaline pumping, and the excitement, and you breathe deeply and pace your heart, and you down the last of that one beer you’ll drink, and you order a whole pitcher of water with a straw.

Your heart beats faster now, and you vault up onto the stage.  You hear the music fade and see the house lights dim, and you never get tired of that moment when the room gets quiet as people settle in and wait.  You smile at your band mates as you take your seat in the back.  The old adage about the drummer having the best seat in the house comes to mind.  “Yeah, nothing better than a dead-straight view of your guitarist’s ass,” you muse to yourself as you pick up your sticks and wait for amps to switch on and guitars to be shouldered.  You take a quick sip of water.

There’s still not enough bass in the monitor.  You point and wave and gesture, hoping that the message gets across the room to the mixer and the knob-twiddler standing behind it.  You close your eyes and release the tension in your body, and you abandon yourself and give your whole being to music.  And you give a quick glance, making eye contact with everybody.  And you get a nod, and you take a deep breath.  

Ready?  Click, click, click, click, and the beat drops.  You count it in faster than you would in practice.  Muscles and joints snap like cobra strikes, wild but precise, and you’re conducting an electric ensemble with your whole body as the baton.

The lights are tiny rainbow suns.  The mood is as hot as the temperature onstage and you feel the thrill of making music.  You’re locked in tight, and you smile with each crash and accent and well-timed ending.  The dancing, spinning, stomping feet on the floor are all in time to the beat, and you play to the girl in the flowing white dress and the boy with the newsboy cap and the man sitting near the back with a beer in his hand and a thick moustache on his lip.  Everything is elevated.

You hit the big crescendo, and you stand and toss your sticks to the crowd and wave as the applause and cheering die down.  You jump off of the sage, riding the high, and you exchange a few sweaty hugs and high fives, and you accept a beer that you won’t drink and a joint that you won’t smoke, and you thank everybody, and your band mates all smile and you feel a little closer to everything.  You hear the swell of the background music as it resumes, and the fun is over.

If it was a regular job, you would be earning less than minimum wage, and you do it anyways because you love the stage and you’re a bit masochistic.  You accept the small envelope of cash graciously and step outside.  The shock of cold stabs your lungs and burns your ears, and you breathe deeply and rub your eyes and step back inside to pack away your equipment.  You curse your choice of instrument again as you trip over stands and shake off the cables that grab your feet, and you curse under your breath as you bang your fingers on the door trying to push it open with a full armload of gear.  You slam the car door and sigh and make the long drive back to the jam spot, then back home to a darkened house, and you smile because she left the porch light on and a note that says “I Love You” on the table.  And you can’t sleep, but it was worth it.

Word count: 1,045.