34.

Some way downhill is a giant chicken shed. Our neighbour, a farmer, had it installed last year. He’s invited us to come & see it & I was hoping it might happen somewhere in these pages but it hasn’t worked out yet & now I’m not sure it shall. It’s free range so I don’t have to imagine a total chicken concentration camp but I presume it still seems like living inside a giant death machine. It remains a meat factory. Apparently when the power went out in the storms they lost 4,000 chickens because the ventilation stopped working, which suggests it’s rather badly designed. Our neighbour seems at once to be somewhat proud of it & a little resentful at having been manipulated into building it, it seems whoever pays his bills has him by the balls.

Up on the hill just past the local village is a death camp for cows. It is one of the ugliest installations around & it has quite some competition. The government pour money into it & dead cows come out & go into everybody’s mouths. It isn’t just meat being eaten: they are the poor of the animal world, the slaves. When they built the thing they cut down a bunch of trees & there it sits, lord of denuded fields. It’s horrible.

You don’t even realise you’re connected to it. It’s like a little cog spinning in a distant field. Oh look, you say when you’re having a walk one day, a tiny windmill. But it’s not a very windy day & still the thing goes on turning. It has been placed there deliberately to contravene a kind of natural law. Such laws cannot really be broken but going against them appears to some to be to their benefit. The presence of this little spinning wheel makes you part of a machine. The moment they placed it there they changed what you were without your realising. You think it doesn’t really matter because there are so many things in front your face that matter that much more, but the thing is none of these things matter a jot if they’re part of a machine. You might not see it but it is demeaning you. It is sucking the life out of everything you love.

Here, all you need is to put one of these down. A hand plucks a flower & places your feet upon the ground. Or was it the feet upon your ground? The ground is the place of your feet at any rate, your feet are not replacements for the ground. Nothing to stand on but understanding. A pebble balanced on the lip of the ripple it caused. The body of God is antigravity. What is this what is this what is this floating in? The reality is the truth must be imagined. The meaning of life is that which renders all our attempts to give it meaning absurd.