It seems that consciousness

in us is

linked

to sexual desire

and to hunger; but it could

just as well

not be linked

to them. —Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done With the Judgement of God”

***

I once threatened to run away from home. The memory survives only in fragments, perhaps sutured together from two or three separate incidents. First came my parents’ laughter, feeding into and off of my ridiculous anger. Minutes or hours later, I recall looking out a frost-encrusted window, occluded in part by our Christmas tree. It was frigid out, and the roads were strewn with salt. A block away, our suburban street was swallowed by the northern extremity of a highway.

I had never tasted such despair. In the huge cold world (to say nothing of the universe) my parents’ house was exceptional. The escape I imagined was death by exposure. I could escape home as easily as I could escape the nerves that made my skin cold or my stomach hungry. There was only surrender without conditions—groveling and humiliation before my masters. I resolved to never forget the injury.

***

Not long ago I went to a garden in Tokyo, where I spent some time watching koi fish. A common motif in East Asian art, koi are a well-bred variety of normal carp. If released into the wild, their descendants are naturally selected back to a prosaic brown within a few generations and become indistinguishable from pests.

Some koi swam around, some rested on the bottom of the pond. I followed a particular one and soon found myself projecting a skeletal personality onto its movements in relation to the others. It was medium-sized with orange and white patches, like a housecat.

Yes, the more I looked, the more I felt it wasn’t so fish-like at all. The very word “fish” seemed a cheap disguise for something stranger. I noted in turn its bulbous, grub-like body, its stubby forelimbs, its porcine head, its creepy pale flesh. A chimera, every facet of its shape wind-tunnel optimized by eons of selective pressure—it would be naive to expect aesthetic coherence.

I kept watching, no longer noticing any one fish in particular. The stew of movement took on a darker aspect as a banal observation occurred to me: fish exist in an economy of calories. I had watched them eating and resting for what felt like a long time, fifteen minutes or so. They would alternate between these activities for as long as they lived, punctuated only by the occasional burst of terror or release of gametes. They would persist after I left the garden to take the train home to my tiny room, as I prepared three slices of avocado toast for dinner, as I typed out notes for this essay, and so on, still clinging to their cold, bloated selves like shipwrecked sailors to driftwood.

***

I would like to claim to the word “vegan,” though I allow exceptions some may consider hypocritical. Immobile bivalves lose the signaling mechanisms associated with pain after their larval stage. Minor as it may seem, the point is worth defending—oysters and mussels are rich in zinc and B12, which classical vegan diets are deficient in. The gray tumors that repulsed me as a child now weigh on my tastebuds as light as the ocean breeze.

My “veganism” was always above all a matter of affect. I still remember eating pepperoni pizza in a Whole Foods, an hour after two acid tabs—the feeling of a pepperoni slice against my tongue, rough and unctuous. A little attention, a look through the hair-thin crack in my familiarity, then all at once the extreme, unsubtle animal smell, the leathery mouthfeel, the voluptuary savor. Then an image, in equivalence: fat, greasy lecher in a fetish suit, incontinent expression on its face.

I finished my sordid treat. There was no question of suppressing my disgust—after what I had felt, still wanting it. My conscience festered for months, until it became intolerable.

***

I’ve never had any illusions about the “impact” of my diet. To walk among humans is to paddle around a cauldron of gravy; there is no purity to be achieved. Suppose a zealous vegan were to purge his world of all primary, secondary, and even symbolically “carnist” products—even imitation fur or leather, entertainment featuring meat, vegan food from non-vegan restaurants, media platforms that advertise animal products, and so on. Even then, he would remain complicit in the works of his species if he could remain civil in the presence of meat, if he could, say, refrain from terrorist violence against food workers.

Those too sentimental for violence might at least deliver an ultimatum to friends and family: “It’s the meat or me.” The scorched-earth strategy is as obvious as it is unheard of. We have all kissed the Great Butcher’s iron ring.

***

There are almost no restaurants I can eat at in Tokyo, I have no friends here, my Japanese is terrible. I lay in bed until 3 PM, try and fail to finish Antony and Cleopatra on my shitty laptop, waste hours refreshing Twitter until I grow disgusted with myself. All I look forward to is long walks at night, no plan or destination. How many of Tokyo’s 160,000 restaurants I’ve seen, their signs and menus battling for attention like flowers in a jungle: halved eggs, oozing their luscious orange gel; sculpted, sea-moist fish slices draped over celestial white rice; or conversely, whole fish, banded with crispy grill marks. But no image is so common as raw bovine flesh, sliced thin, marbled with white fat. I walk by an izakaya on a steep and narrow street. People inside are drinking and laughing as clouds of smoke rise from the grill to pour out a vent, pervading the street.

***

There exists a genre of videos documenting the most unsavory aspects of animal agriculture—tail-biting pigs in their claustrophobic cages, chickens being tossed around, untreated wounds and the like. With few exceptions, people who are willing to watch such things in the first place are vegetarians, or at least prospective vegetarians looking for a final push. “Omnis” are neither aware nor unaware of the videos; they know just enough to avoid them (I speak from experience).

Most viscerally intolerable is the unanesthetized castration of piglets. It’s like seeing for the first time—in body alone. The castrator first slices an incision on the animal’s scrotum with a knife or box cutter. He pops out a testicle and either slices through the spermatic cords or rips out the entire structure. The second follows in the same manner. He applies some kind of disinfectant. This last about two minutes.

The pigs themselves, I can only insult their wordless articulacy with description. Even thirdhand, such intensity demonstrates the poverty of metaphor; only the crucifixion, maybe.

But watch long enough, and it becomes familiar: the sickly lights, the cages, the contours of the sow’s body. I almost convince myself I remember being there, as if watching videos of myself as a baby.

***

The crater of my wisdom tooth, stitched closed, has become infected. My mom and I return to the oral surgeon. He ferries me to his chair, opens my mouth to do some exploratory digging, and rips out the stitches with a metal tool.

Too nauseous even to whimper, I fold into a chair in the waiting room. Never had pain so overawed me—my will exhausted, healthy aversion bleeding into terror. All at once my life stretches ahead of me like a long vulnerability, my body a continent of nerve endings. I imagine an interval of time, perhaps no longer than a few minutes, that not even decades of pleasure could redeem. Would chance ever assign me pain like that?

In terms of physical suffering, I’ve been about as lucky as any human ever to walk the earth. What of those born outside the spatial and temporal boundaries of modern medicine, those who’ve had teeth removed without any more anesthetic than a stinging swig of alcohol. Civil War soldiers had entire limbs sawed off. It is not satisfying to savor my luck at having been born in such an advanced age, in such an advanced place.

***

As a boy, I liked nothing better than nature television. Besides the drama of survival, it appealed to my budding self-image; through the animals, I could commune with life’s strength and cunning, hidden even in my own immature body, while at the same time learning what it meant to be human—detachment.

I remember a series about poisonous snakes. The episodes combined nature footage with dramatic reenactments and interviews with snakebite survivors. The bite itself was always underwhelming. But then, with something like reverence, the victims would describe the slow or sudden onset of weakness, then the nausea and convulsions. Loved ones evoked unconscious bodies and fading heartbeats. But then, at last, elation: the medevac would arrive just in the nick of time, the car would screech to a halt in front of a non-Western hospital, the scarce antivenom would emerge from a bare cabinet.

About a year ago I revisited Planet Earth. More than any other nature series, Planet Earth induced simple awe, with its camera pans from the edge of outer space, the dying falls of its orchestral soundtrack, and the sheer scale of its title.

As for my more recent viewing, I’m sure I would have enjoyed the “Shallow Seas” episode were I not on psychedelics at the time.

The episode opens with an orchestral swell. Humpback whales swim like warty battleships, save their large expressive eyes. A mother heaves her calf to the surface to breathe. Attenborough’s blustering solliloquies lord over the landscape, even as their semantic content is lost on me. Minutes pass. Now fish and sea snakes hunting together in a single tribe, then frenzied around some unseen carcass.

Now a nexus of fleshy legs slinks across the urchin barrens, grasping out its feeler-covered extremities (“It uses them to taste,” Attenborough explains) in pursuit of a twitching carpet of spindly five-legged detrivores, which writhe as if channeling electricity. “The predator extrudes its stomach and wraps it around its victims, liquifying their soft parts,” continues Attenborough, as the abomination shivers and quakes above a bed of sand dollars. “Nothing is left of them, except their white skeletons.” Now the camera cuts to an aerial shot.

As my muscles unclench, a monstrous thought: “That could have been me.”

***

I recall nothing else except the episode’s conclusion. Backed by strings, voice heavy with sadness, Attenborough says: “Fish and krill stock are declining so rapidly that spectacles like these may soon be part of history.”

I actually laugh (“Spectacles”!!). After this epic buffet of violence, what else so predictably non-sequitur as conservationism? Could Attenborough, in the darkest, most skeptical corners of his mind, really affirm this? Surely this cancer on being couldn’t be tolerated forever—could it?

Nature’s violence affected Attenborough, to be sure, but only as an image of violence, the way one looks at Picasso’s Guernica or a Francis Bacon painting and feels they “understand” something—as if this vast tangle of tortured nerves, every square millimeter like a raw clitoris, were some design meant to illuminate the Human Condition by analogy.

I call this “pornography.”

***

“We take the viewers on an emotional journey. These days a series like Planet Earth II, we are trying to compete with things like Game of Thrones and trying to give the viewer a very emotional journey.” —Producer Chadden Hunter, re: controversy surrounding the show’s “cruelty”

***

If you scan the most popular posts on Reddit’s vegan forum, you will find several reposts of the same infographicinfographic, which illustrates the gap between the natural lifespan of livestock animals and the age at which they are slaughtered. For example, turkeys live five months of a 15-year lifespan, and male “egg chicks” live less than a day. The “lived” fractions of the possible lifespans are highlighted in green, while the rest of the bar representing the animal’s “natural” lifespan is red.

Of course, “natural” is not a term we should take for granted. Livestock animals are bred according to human designs. Their “natural lifespans” would more accurately be called “hypothetical lifespans,” since they cannot, are not meant to, and will never exist outside of the circumstances that ensure their early deaths. I except the sentimental spectacle of “rescued” farm animals (also popular on Reddit).

Cows, chickens, and the like are not desirable pets. If the whole world went vegan, these species would approach extinction—though perhaps some number would survive in zoos and laboratories. There are likely few vegans who would call themselves “pro-extinction,” yet to the extent that veganism succeeds as a cultural boycott of meat, it will trend towards exterminism; the less demand there is for meat, milk and eggs, the fewer animals will be born to fill this demand.

Is it worse that livestock animals are killed, or that they’re born? Reddit appears ambivalent. I’ve made up my mind.

Wild fish occupy the opposite position vis. a vis. consumption as livestock: higher demand for wild fish results in the birth of fewer rather than more animals. If vegans are against needless suffering, why shouldn’t fish then be overfished to extinction? Let us be done with sentimentality, varnish of cruelty. Life in the ocean, with the constant threat of starvation and predation, is in no meaningful sense “better” than life in a stockyard. All talk of nature’s “beauty” is an apology for torture. The human mind can better reckon the impossible distances of interstellar space than it can the volume of violated flesh that fills the oceans. Why shouldn’t vegans put an end of this watery abyss of ingrown teeth, cheering fishermen as avatars of mercy? Why, in fact, should we not cheer ocean acidification and coral bleaching as accessories to this godlike act of compassion?

***

Have we already fallen down a slippery slope to nihilism? The same principle applied to humans:

Never mind: the great event may not exist, so there is no need to speak further of it. Kill ! Kill ! the English, the Irish, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the rest: friends or enemies, it makes no difference, kill them all. The bridge is to be blown up with all Russia upon it. And why? Because we love them — all. That’s the secret : a new sort of murder. We make lebetrwurst of them. Bratwurst. But why, when we are ourselves doomed to suffer the same annihilation?” —William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

Williams knows this will not do; natural selection is too costly to have been “for nothing.” Ascending the throne of self-replicating madness:

You tell me I am wrong. Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong? I am not wrong. —D.H. Lawrence, “Pomegranates”

***

Natural selection is a black box: eons of suffering in, grains of complexity out. Its worth is concentrated in its highest creation, which increasingly obsolesces it. The human brain is a critical mass of organization. Relative to natural selection, human intelligence produces complex systems more quickly, and at a much lower (but still astronomical) cost of suffering.

These human-made complex systems, “technology” and “civilization,” contribute to the generation of even more complexity in turn. Tool use, agriculture, global trade, industrialization, digitalization—every step increases the base rate of complexification, so every step comes faster than the last. Barring some cataclysm or fundamental limit, our systems will in time become vastly more complex than we are. Only this can vindicate our cruel inefficiency in retrospect—our obsolescence.

(“Man is sick because he is badly constructed.”)

***

What can meat give us beyond mere carnal pleasure, pedophilia of diet?

Our brains may need meat for optimal function, as suggested by empirical, anthropological, and developmental research. None of this is conclusive; but one with complex designs in mind may want to play it safe.

Meat is important for building muscle. Plant-derived proteins are of much lower quality than those found in meat. All else being equal, vegetarians and vegans gain muscle less quickly. Male upper body musculature is attractive. A man with larger muscles can better compete in the seduction-reproduction game. This advantage, worthless in itself, is as valuable as the genome it assists. Intelligence is largely genetic. Human intelligence remains the main driver of complex system formation.

Sentimentality, varnish of cruelty…

***