5.

What is necessary for me is not necessarily necessary for you, but I think it is necessary that it is in some sense chosen, committed to. I believe the truly necessary entails a kind of vow. Perhaps the vow of vows. Not to eat Lamb’s Head Soup is not the vow I have taken. I cannot tell you the vow I have taken — it is in many ways still hidden from me — but I can tell you that not to eat Lamb’s Head Soup feels to me like a consequence of it, something that has become necessary in light of it, in light of that which remains somehow dark to me.

How can I have vowed, or have chosen something, truly, & yet not know what that something is? Well, for one thing: I do know, that’s what this is, it’s just that knowing is a feeling for me: this may not be a vow that you take with words. For another thing: it means, or seems to mean, different things depending on the situation. I didn’t really even realise I was writing about it until today. One last thing: though any true vow must be taken freely, the freedom that underwrites this vow feels somewhat otherworldly. I believe it may only be found at the nexus of certain forces, a location from which worldly perspectives may appear highly constrained.

I won’t eat Lamb’s Head Soup because the creatures are my kin. Moral relativism is not the end of morality it is the matrix of it. All this is built on kinship relations. Such relativity is a face of the Absolute. Perhaps the vow is given & taken as an Absolute Relation.

I won’t eat Lamb’s Head Soup because of what it is, which is also what it symbolises. I need to stay as far away as possible from the Meat Factory while I hold myself against it.

I won’t eat Lamb’s Head Soup because of the whole bloody mess. They sound like they’re saying Yaay, to me, when they bleat. Those cute little sounds drift across the fields & make me smile. I talked to my wife about it, she said that when she used to be a vet she learnt we didn’t eat them yet: we waited until they were teens (so slightly less cute) & killed them then. I’m not sure peace can come to a world that eats meat, I told her.

I’m not sure peace can come to a world that eats meat, I said to myself. Of course it can, you idiot, I said, Peace comes to whoever goes to it. It comes to who it comes to, always Absolute & never total. But I know what I mean, I know how I feel, I know what my lord is saying to me, I know what my Peace is, what this Peace means.

I couldn’t even imagine it. Well, I could, it just seemed even less real than the angels & demons, fairies & aliens, I might sometimes imagine I imagine. Lamb’s Head Soup: I don’t believe you. Cute wrinkly pink head boiling away. You don’t feel right.

So I had to wonder about that, if it wasn’t a sign I was making some progress: I knew Lamb’s Head Soup existed, that it was something the world did: it was out there, somewhere in that consensus reality I don’t recall myself ever having agreed to: Lamb’s Head Soup, I could find it, see it smell it touch it taste it, hear one of the main ingredients calling just now across the fields, inexplicably: Yaaayyy.

It just doesn’t make sense to me, emotionally, & this means that it lacks reality, at least for me, it lacks reality. Maybe that’s why I went crazy, before? I think now: I just didn’t believe in people, in their world, not nearly so much as I believed in myself & the voices in my head & the pictures in my dreams & the feelings in my soul & those other strange people who have apparently given time to or followed their own.

So I’m making progress, because now without going crazy Reality is reorganising itself along another axis or according to a different dimension, like depth but not really: feeling. I’m not sure feeling really does space & time like most conceive dimension. If you had a flow of feeling in a certain way then wound another around it you would & you wouldn’t get a whole new feeling between & beyond them. At any rate you could never package them up & then replicate them & put one pack there & the other over there & say time is somehow in the gap or passage between them. I just mean that to feeling dimension means something more like meaning & so if there’s a point it’s basically You, which I am too, & so if there’s a line it can’t be the one between us & them, & so on.

So Lamb’s Head Soup, which is part of the world & exists in consensus reality, is less real to me than certain feelings that said reality may label subjective, & thus the world may categorise as fictions what to me are more facts than fact. But to grasp the import of this you have to see the entire Meat Factory & all its products — one of which or some of whom you & I might be — as actively becoming illusory. Concretely: what many people take to be the Real World seems more like an illusion to me than ever. & The earth herself erupts in an almost apocalyptic-feeling imaginality, a realer-than-realness. Existence becomes wondrous — it is no longer your everyday, run-of-the-mill stuff — & yet there is nowhere it isn’t.

Apart from where it’s not.