30 Objects in 30 Essays
From the objects that I have made, objects other people have made, objects that I live with, and what they have to say. The products of hands and brains. The obvious differences between things and words. The tangible and intangible rewards of effort. Use and beauty as the two primary qualities of objects, words, hands and brains. For through objects we make the stories of our lives: a life made, a life bought, a life well-used, a life beautiful and useful.
...
1: A Deer Skull
It's an essentially precious exercise to hold up a skull and contemplate eternity. Lend a hand and make yourself useful, Mr. Idle Princeling. Or at least get out of the way of us gravediggers. There are bodies here that need to be planted before they begin to stink and spread disease. That's useful work. And we can talk and have our wit while we work, rather while I work and you talk. In fact, when you're not around, I can work and create wit through my work. Wit just as valid as yours, better even, as it's grounded... What all your thinking and nothing-doing is going to get us in the end...
...More Death, as it turns out, in Hamlet. Premature death for a bunch of people, including good-guy Hamlet. Could have been avoided if he had just done something early in the play....
Who wins? Well, the gravedigger is the only character who can (and does) say a grave is his, and yet not lie in it. It's a minor victory for the working man, not to be run through by a sword to complete an orgy of plot twists and turns, the fate of his betters. Looking over the mess, he will make a big sigh and scratch his head, then go down to the scullery, fetch the maid and an extra mop, help clean up, lug the bodies to the graveyard, then spend his vacation time digging more holes for them. Not much of a win, really, except he gets more life than they do, and can perhaps appreciate it better.
Am I a frivolous prince? All talk and no action? Or am I a gravedigger? What work do I own, not just for myself? What have I created, that others may live and die? A life of questions is a life well-led.
I have several skulls, collected over the years. Several are from whitetail deer that I have shot. One is a raccoon skull I found in a field, and another is South Indian gaur I found in a river. I do not pick them up and sigh quietly to myself, intoning Alas poor deer... But I do think about them. I find them beautiful and expressive. How I got them, though, is what they mainly have to say.
There is little practical use in any of them. They hang on my walls and sit on shelves.
At a distance, a skull is a Halloween joke. Up close, it is a marvel of engineering, design, dreadful beauty and unanswered questions.
Raccoon teeth are strikingly large in proportion to the rest of the head. Alive, raccoons look like delicate creatures, washing their food in water, trash pandas up to some amusing mischief. Hidden under their bandit mask, under skin and fur, a certain edge of serious carnivorous business comes to the front. The raccoon becomes more complex. Big eyes to see prey. Big teeth to rend prey. A capacity to be a vicious little bastard. That bite would hurt.
Modern man did not design this object, could not have, and would not have: the smoking gun is the absence of a single straight line, the imperfect symmetry, the dents and shapes without design rationale. We humans love straight lines for reasons that still, after years of contemplating the matter, escape me. They're not really found in nature except for the horizon, perfectly still bodies of water, and in our imaginations as the shortest path between two points. In the last few thousand years, we have fetishized the straight line. It is pure, it is perfect, it is geometrically useful, etc. We use it everywhere and in everything (with notable exceptions). Still, our tools are mostly designed with straight lines to create straight lines, so they have become the easy standard. The curve, somehow, remains suspect, not perfect for not being straight, the dark partner of an ideal. Straight - Curved, Right - Left, (Dexter - Sinister), Good - Bad, Sky - Earth, Male - Female, Man-made - Natural, Perfect - Imperfect, etc. in which the first items of the pairs are somehow connected, and thus the seconds with all the seconds.
The bones around the brain are joined along the most intricate of wiggly and uneven lines. No person would or could ever join things like this. It's overly-complicated. Surely there is a simpler way to do it? Where is the clarity of intention? These unthinking bones joined together in a manner frankly alien to our sensibilities.
It amuses me to think of Mies van Der Rohe and other modern architects, and their unflinching dedication to the purity of straight lines-- all of them having these thoughts directly under the squiggly little skull-bone lines that hold their heads together.
The Meat says "I Am Not Meat!"
What part of my humanity do I resist in the name of some pure ideal? Truth? Justice? Honesty? Goodness? Or am I all wiggly, meandering, conjoined and blurred thought, just like my skull bones? Is this a fair or useful contrast?
Skulls are evening light. They illuminate the darkness inside and thereby the darkness to come.
They are made objects, but not by any hand or machine. Growth is perhaps the most noble kind of making. The common metaphor is that we're "made by the hand of God" (But I can't really see Him in his dusty workshop, fashioning us out of clay, adding sugar and spice...). What drives the stitching of those skull bones? What effort drives the DNA? You can push back to the first blob of algae, back to the ignition of our star, back, back, back and you just find another lovely question under the first, of what drives its precursor. It's tortoises all the way down, what holds up the universe.
Answers that aren't, are the best answers. Like parables, these answers distract only the dull, and inspire a hundred questions in the sharp.
The skull is what the meat has left behind. The skull tells us of the end of thought, of agency, and the arrival of our distant 'reward,' whatever that may be. They are the traditional memento mori. One day our skulls may sit on a desk. One day our dust will serve as bungs for barrels of beer. It is a humbling thought, a useful lens to reflect on our current pretensions, our pride, our system of values that too easily weighs our accomplishments and status heavily, and our quiet gestures of love and friendship lightly. Geological time erases these pretensions. A skull can be a lens to focus our lives, remember what time we have and ask what we do with it, towards that strange question of what can we take with us? and What can we leave behind that endures?
What do we build in our minds that lasts?
Nature does not know extinction, it only knows transformation. I think this extends to the information collected and processed by the mind. What does it turn into? Anything more than the specifics of our actions and efforts, and their results? What do we carry away, if the conscious sense of self is any part of what survives the transformation? The question is delightfully unanswerable without leaps of faith. It's a good question to have at hand in daily life.
That raccoon had a life. It was born. It grew up. It ate and drank, shat and slept. Maybe it had pups. It then died one day, in a field near my house. What was that raccoon's experience? What of it endures? Sure, I am a more complex animal than a raccoon, but the same questions apply. I know nothing of the raccoon's life, though the right nostril is slightly deformed, just like mine.
...
Another skull is from a South Indian gaur, a type of bison. I found it while on a school hike in the Palni hills. The gaur had died in a river, and the entire skeleton, undisturbed, rested on the bottom up against a rock. The 10 ft long and 6 ft. tall skeleton was undisturbed and visible through the clear water, as if the bison had laid down for a rest and turned to bones.
I waded in and pulled up the skull. The stink hit my nostrils instantly, like a spike to the brain. Bits of decayed flesh fell off it, much of the brain and nasal tissue remained within. Wearing only a bathing suit and a hat, a sense of vulnerability washed over me. What had I done? I had desecrated a grave. I will pay in disease and madness. But in a moment, I came back to my senses, and brought the prize back to the hiking group.
"Why did you take that, Mr. Purdy?" a student wrinkled her nose in horror at me.
"Isn't it amazing? It's beautiful!" I replied with glee, feeling doubtful, covered in slime and filth as I held it up.
Several students complained about the smell during the bus ride back to campus. I had stowed the skull below in the luggage compartment, so it was my smell they noted.
"One day, we will all smell like this," I reasoned with them, to no effect.
After much boiling and bleaching, the skull hangs on my wall. Huge. Impressive. Somewhat threatening. Beautiful to my eyes. It doesn't smell.
Very few people ask after it, perhaps worried there will be a long and intimidating or boring story. Perhaps disgusted by a dead animal on the wall. Perhaps they think I'm a trophy hunter, displaying my conquests? What each of takes away from any object-- its associations and meaning--is uniquely theirs, not mine. I get more questions about Princess Leia. I don't mind being misinterpreted. Much.
But the ultimate topic of this essay is this deer skull.
For me, this object comprises everything the others do, from intricate, graceful beauty to the questions of a life well-led, with an important complication: I shot this deer. She was the first I ever took in a hunt.
Some hunters hunt in uncomplicated ways for uncomplicated reasons. I am not that kind of hunter.
I started to hunt when I was in my 40's. It began as a question of principle. I eat meat. I like meat. Beef, lamb, chicken, fish. Some are mammals with limbic systems, with emotional lives perhaps as sophisticated as dogs, which I love, and would never consider killing or eating because they are "too close" to me.
I know that killing and eating an animal is, at some level, an awful business. But if I am going to eat and enjoy meat, I needed to know what it was to kill an animal, not let other people do it for me, to not cheat what it means to be an omnivorous human.
Secondarily, I finally had enough free time and extra money to be able to. I took a hunting class, took a test, and got my license. I bought a tree stand. I bought an orange vest and clothes detergent and soap that left no scent. I bought a rifle and ammunition. When all was said and done, I figured the venison I could get in a season would cost about $50 a pound.
The main expense, though, was time -- to hunt successfully, you need a lot of time. I never had that as a parent, a hockey dad, a husband, a self-employed woodworker. There is always something to do with the kids, fix around the house or do in the shop. A good friend had described the strain his hunting put on his marriage, as he was mostly away during hunting season. I didn't want that in my life. So I put it off until the kids were older and more independent, the shop a bit more under control, the day a bit more loose.
The first day in the field was one early December. I woke before dawn, got dressed, went out to the stand and climbed up in the dark. I waited. I got cold. My feet and ass hurt. My fingers got numb, The cold steel of the rifle burned a cold line across my lap. I waited. I watched and saw nothing. I got impatient. I wanted to check my phone constantly. I thought to go get a pillow to sit on, and another to rest my rifle on. I didn't move. I didn't speak. The light rose, then the dawn came, breaking through the leafless forest. It was utterly beautiful. Silent. Cars in the distance and planes overhead were a distant annoyance. I was alone. The forest was empty. The wait became rich beyond anticipation as scattered thought quieted into simple being.
Then crunch crunch crunch. I hear the impossibly loud sound of steps on leaves. I look, my heart beating a million miles an hour. It must be some giant deer, the crunching is so loud. It's a squirrel. Crunch crunch crunch echoes through the forest. Another squirrel joins and they chase each other. Crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch. It's an unbearably loud racket and I want to tell the squirrels to beat it, they're a distraction, frightening away deer and the quiet of the woods.
One races up a nearby tree, gets about eye level, and shakes his tail at me making a chirrup sound. I gather he doesn't approve of my presence. I talk back at him, and he takes offense and runs up and down the tree chirruping. I am an outsider and I have been outed.
Five hours later, I climb down and go home. My body is stiff. I have seen nothing but the glorious shift of light from night through predawn gloom to brilliant morning. And a few playful squirrels. I am hooked and cannot wait to get back in the stand. The meaning of the forest has begun to shift.
Each time in the stand, I see and hear nothing but the forest, the emerging light, squirrels, birds of every stripe, deer at great distances, running in groups, moving closer then away. One morning after two hours in the stand I suddenly feel a presence and look to my right. Fifteen feet away in the next tree is a barn owl staring at me. He has been motionless and staring at me for two hours. I stare back. He doesn't move for another hour except for the occasional blink. Then he flies away.
After five days in the stand, I am despairing to ever get a shot. I should move the stand, I should wash my scent off better. I should be quieter. I need glasses. I have to think like a deer. I have to think like a hunter. I am thinking too much. Then a little yellow bird alights on a branch nearby. It looks at me sideways, then chrips loudly. It chirps loudly again. I smile at it. It hops about and chirps repeatedly. Within about a minute, I am surrounded by fifty small yellow birds all chirping very loudly at me. The little fuckers. I'm not supposed to be there and you're the forest alarm bell, eh? Well fuck you for exposing me. I am an outsider and I have been outed again. I see no deer that day either.
With no chances for a shot, the hunt became a glorious exercise in meditation. I learned to be still, outside and in. I listened. I watched. The beauty of the forest, the beauty of the changing light, the incredible silences and the peculiar ways it would be interrupted. A few hours alone in the stand would transform me from my usual anxious wreck to solid on my feet for the rest of the day. Thoughts would spend their courses, come to conclusions, and leave me. I began not to care if I ever got a deer.
Perhaps my seventh time in the stand, in the predawn gloom I see the silhouette of a deer perhaps 100 yards away. My rifle has open sights, I need glasses but don't have them, everything is slightly blurry, and the distance is ridiculous. I level the rifle at the tiny profile, hearing a voice in my head say 'this is not a good shot', with rising frustration and anger in my throat that this is the only shot I have had so far. BANG I fire the gun. I get down off the stand and go look where I shot. There is nothing. I missed entirely. I tell myself I am a fool, not a worthy hunter. What if I had injured the animal? I will never take a shot that is not perfect, that is not sure to give the animal a very quick death. I hate myself and do not hunt for a week.
My tenth time in the stand, after a dawn of beautiful clear light, I hear crunch, crunch, crunch, again, for the millionth time, as there are squirrels everywhere in the woods. But this time it is slow. I look and see a large doe moving carefully across the woods, 50 yards away. My heart pounds. The shot is too far. It is no good. I master the reptile brain inside and quiet it, and I wait. Watch. Learn. I abandon desire and hope. The doe looks around, flicks her tail. Sniffs the ground. Roots for acorns. Looks up. Moves a few steps. Looks around. She moves left, then right, but in a pattern that brings her slowly closer. I watch her. I can nearly feel her thoughts, when she tenses, when she relaxes. Her tail is expressive, shaking off her fears after she listens. When her tail is still, she is tensed to detect a threat.
She moves closer. 30 yards. 25 yards. 20 yards. Then 25 yards, 30 yards. Then 15 yards, 40 ft, 35 ft. She is walking directly towards me. My heart pounds harder with each step closer. I can hear it in my ears and wonder if she can't hear it too. I quietly raise my rifle and take the safety off, the click impossibly loud, but she doesn't move. If I am going to be a hunter, this is the time, it is now. 25 ft. nearly under the stand. My breath is slow without having to consciously slow it. My hands are not shaking at all. I am holding the heavy rifle with a deer plainly in the sights, with no other awareness whatsoever, and I am waiting, waiting for the perfect shot. She has to turn to show her side so I can send the bullet through both of her lungs at once. She turns to face me and stops. She sniffs the air. Does she smell me? Will she bolt? I don't move. She puts her nose back down and roots again. She moves to her left offering a perfect side view, but then steps in front of a tree. I wait. She takes another step away from the tree. She is 20 ft. away and I can hear her breath in the forest silence. Can she hear mine? She pauses. I stop thinking about the distance, the angle, all the technical aspects and I simply feel that the moment is right, as if time stutters and a gap opens. My finger moves against the trigger almost beyond conscious will, in a gray area of half-thought. The moment feels right BANG.
The painful sound is irrelevant. I watch the doe leap up and try to run as if in slow motion. My heart stutters. I see her stumble after the second step and fall. She gets up, then falls over again. My heart beats again.
I climb down the stand and run over to her. She hadn't moved more than 10 feet from where I shot her. I see the hole in her chest and I hear her trying to breath, gasping through her mouth, bubbles of air in bright red blood oozing from the hole in her chest. She is lying on her side. I put down my gun and kneel next to her. She doesn't move and I put my hand gently on her side, her killer to calm her. She takes a few more breaths, then stops. I watch her eyes go from quick to glassy. For a moment, I am not sure if she is dead or not. But then it becomes obvious. Of course she is dead. I keep my hand on her, feeling the warmth of her body, her recent life. A strange sense of awe at what I have just done, the animal's grace in death, the strange irony of trying to comfort her, all washes through my head. Then comes jubilation. I have just shot my first deer! Not bungled! A clean kill! Then comes gratitude and promises. I find myself thanking the deer, thanking her for letting me have her life, for the many meals I and my family will enjoy from her. I promise her I will not waste anything.
The next job is the Stupid State Paperwork. I must fill out forms in the field immediately, or risk a lifetime imprisonment and social shame for causing a bureaucrat's files to go wobbly.
Once done, the horror comes.
I have to gut her in the field to get the body temperature down to save the meat from spoiling. I have never seen this work done in person, only watched a video and read about it. I make uncertain, tentative cuts through the skin. I make a long incision and start pulling out organs. A large stomach, coils of intestines, what could be a liver or a pancreas I don't know, a heart, all steaming in the winter cold. There is blood everywhere. It is up my sleeves and on my pants, soaking into cloth and drying sticky. The fur clings to the blood. Bits of fat and skin attach to the fur. My face is cold but my hands are warm in the doe's wet interior. Trying and mistaking, I cut parts that I shouldn't and end covered in half-digested acorn mash and deer shit. I cut more parts that I shouldn't and parts come one bit by bit, whereas in the videos, it all comes out together. My hands slide in blood, I suppress disgust.
I have to reach up from inside her chest cavity to pull her esophagus down to cut it out. My arm is inside a dead animal up to my shoulder and I can barely grasp the knife inside. It is a practical problem of competence, the only thought is that I wish I knew what I was doing. All emotions have fled.
Finally, I must cut the anus away from the carcass without cutting into the scent glands. I don't know what they look like, or more appropriately what they feel like, as everything is inside the pelvis where I can't see. I jab, I cut, I pull, I tug, I cut some more and finally cut away the large intestine and the anus. They lie in a steaming awful heap next to the bloody carcass. I exhale and almost see myself from a distance -- a baseline human experience tens of thousands of years old: killing another animal to eat. It's a strange feeling of kinship with my full humanity.
Eating is, at heart, a desperately disgusting proposition. Killing. Cutting. Chewing. Digesting. Shitting. The Anorexic has simply thought it all through, and taken it too close to heart, felt and thought it through fully. To survive, we have to be deaf and dumb to some parts of existence.
I drag the body from the forest back to my truck. I drive it home. I hang it upside down in my garage and spend the next four hours taking the hide off, cutting the head off, cutting the limbs off, then dressing the meat on a table into specific cuts, wrapping them in paper, labeling them, and putting them in the freezer. I cut up the skeleton for dog treats. I hose out my truck. I hose out the garage. I hose off the driveway. I peel my bloody, fat and hair encrusted clothes off and put them in a bag. Then I shower, the dried blood and fur slowly coming off, the tallow fat taking a lot of soap, scrubbing and hot water to come off, the scent lingering nevertheless.The horror is apparent everywhere if I want to think about it.
The curious reminder, the true, humbling memento mori, comes when dressing a deer carcass: how similar hers is to mine: meat, bones, and guts. This is where PETA perhaps chimes in to say, Yes, and as nobody should hunt and eat humans, so we should not hunt and eat animals-- we are the same. I come to a different conclusion, that we are all part of a single cycle of life and death. My role is simply as apex predator, as hers was of prey. One day, I too will die, perhaps young, perhaps old. Once buried, my body will be devoured by the proverbial worms. The deer and I have different fates, but the same ultimate destination. I hope to be as gracious about my fate, as the first doe I shot was. I hope to accept whatever chance, opportunity, and my skills give me for my life, from beginning, through all of it, to the end.
The venison tenderloin with Bernaise sauce I made that night was one of the best meals of my life, certainly the most meaningful as it was accompanied by a broad range of emotions and thoughts.
Hunting and dressing a deer is a lot of work.
That doe fed me and my family. Her body kept us alive.
The simple adrenaline excitement of the first hunt took a long time to wear off. When it did, I was left with an appreciation of the hunt that I could never have imagined. It is beautiful. It is thrilling. It is horrifying. It is useful. It is deeply disturbing. It is deeply satisfying. From animal to dinner plate, it is not a straight and simple line of thought and deed, but one fraught with a hundred thrills, a hundred horrors.
By my tenth kill, the awe was no longer a thunder strike, but an abiding sense of gratitude, connection and respect that overlays the enjoyment of achieving something both difficult, satisfying, and delicious. Supermarket meat remains offensive to me, for I know how those animals live and die in comparison to the wild does and bucks I have taken. The act of handing $5 to a teenage checkout for a pile of hamburger under plastic is a modern travesty.
I preserved her skull. Her skull is now mine. I own it in a number of ways. It is not so much a trophy, or a memento mori, but a reminder of a responsibility. It is an ideal, the straight, perfect line that I impose on my hunting: not to waste, to be grateful, to be responsible to the role of being human, to appreciate the beauty and usefulness of the animal, to find humility in our similarities as living, breathing, thinking animals.
This is certainly too much thought in a deed, the learner's process towards comprehension. Over time it is all now no big deal. The skull reminds me of when it wasn't, when the Facts of Life were a revelation, and how insulated I lived by simply buying meat.
Maybe I should bequeath my skull to a troupe of Shakespearean actors to use as a most-believable Yorick prop. Actors using an actual skull? One that used to be covered in meat? Maybe help them put meat on the bones of their words. That would be useful.
Recent Comments