19.

The first time I remember ever being truly repulsed by meat was the moment I found a hare’s leg in the grass, some year’s back, a month or so after having released Little Odin, the first hare we cared for & raised after he was wounded by a lawnmower.

I can think of many reasons why I loved that animal so, enough of them embarrassing, but whatever really bound us went beyond reason, & so it is. When I see a hare, I see family, I see a deep & strange part of me, I see too much.

It was a back leg, mostly still covered in fur but with some flesh & bone near the top at the joint. I was dismayed & disgusted, disappointed in myself. I felt someone foxy was sending me a message, saying I raised him too human, made him too slow & soft. I understood nature as callous, as having no place for a word like friend, at least whoever’s friend mattering less than the fire in the belly of the beast. All of a sudden I condoned civilization, I agreed that we should build a wall around ourselves & manage things according to our principles, the pinnacle of which seems always to be love. But if it was love it wouldn’t be up there, the pinnacle of a pyramid of principles with a wall around it, a holy city of gentle freegans with a meat factory of war-struck migrants clamouring to get in.

But then boundaries is where love happens. Walls of love & grief, portals of trauma. I should remind myself it is not really the world I am trying to make sense of I’m just exploring some thread of myself, wandering the corridors of maybe some kind of message looking through the windows of wow. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Not in a bad way more like a flower. A flower has no skin. My limbs are petals, the beat of my heart the drawn out memory of an insect’s wings, nectar my blood, my brain a cloud of pollen, nowhere is not colour —

It wouldn’t make any sense if I was trying to convince anyone of anything or make some social commentary or fabricate some recommendation. As the ramblings of a hard working mad person it makes all kinds of sense. In the heart of certain secrets it rings as true as what cannot be shared.

I have even wondered if I have killed simply by eating meat. Perhaps I failed Little Cloud, our zen bunny, or I would have if pure joy could ever fail anyone. He died last April. I have promised to write these tales properly some other time, as you know such words as these are threads of a broader tapestry, maybe even the living carpet of some boundless room where the bookshelves are trees still & the words run with sweet sun water like veins in leaves.

I cooked a joint — probably pig — that I bought because it was going off. I put the oven dish outside for the rats to lick & that night heard fox for the first time in many years. They reminded me of a story, something between the hares & the bunnies, & I set out trying to write it — maybe that was Lent last year? — I couldn’t write it. I started but I couldn’t keep it up. I conjured foxy but then I never put them back away & if there was a story there it wasn’t long before they finished it. Left me a little bit — the back legs again — to put in the ground & remember.

If there really is a tree in Eden whose fruit gives the knowledge of Good & Evil I think that fruit must be flesh. Perhaps it is a tree the body of God is buried under. Their bones becomes the wood & their nuts become the nuts & that’s why I’m nuts. Why we are insane, I mean. Such trips are so hard to handle the knowledge leads to ignorance, which is always somehow wilful even as it’s a given. Imagine if every blink you had to peel your eyeballs like grapes & drop them into your own insatiably self-satisfied yawn. You would cry such sweet nectar the angels would become insects just to sop you up.