The Blood of Angels Read online

  Fervent vegetarians see brutality in everyone who eats meat, but they’re completely blind to their own tunnel vision and their lack of respect and humility about life and other people. As you can see in this blogger’s writings the ‘Animal Question’ becomes an obsession equivalent to their own feelings of lack of love, and everything is subsumed into something having to do with ‘the struggle’. ‘Respect for animals’ is more important than any other issue or viewpoint because it’s all about justice and love and truth and everything else is evil and false … Experienced this way it is impossible for them to see their own ideology and activity as limited or fallible or to see the imperialism in it, an attempt to alter society according to their own desires (= a vegetarian society). To the fervent vegetarian the animal issue is ultimately more important than respecting or listening to other people (anyone who thinks differently). Let’s change the world but refuse to look at ourselves and instead paint a narcissistic image of our superiority to people who eat meat. Let’s worry about our values and rights as reflected in animals before we’ve learned to know and respect ourselves or people. Respecting other life forms has to come from people respecting themselves (and radicals recognizing their own shortcomings and obliviousness!!). People come before animals. Anyone who harps on about animal issues without understanding his own humanity and putting it first is pitifully lost.

  SHOW ALL 10 COMMENTS

  DAY FIFTEEN

  When I get home I take my pinhole camera to the basement. I bring along a bucket of warm water. I mix the developer, vinegar water and stop bath. In the red glow of the darkroom light I open the box, take out the photographic paper and dip it in the developer.

  I wait. I rinse the paper in the basin very gently. Soon I start to make out darker spots here and there and some details of the negative begin magically to appear on the paper. I can see white tree limbs against a dark sky. I realize immediately that the photograph is a success. I transfer the paper to the vinegar solution then the stop bath. I wait half a minute and the paper negative is in my hand, glossy and damp as a newborn.

  I take the photograph into the cottage. I use clothes-pegs to hang it from the clothes-line in the bathroom. The plastic-coated paper dries fairly quickly, and I help it along by fanning it with a piece of cardboard. Soon the surface of the paper no longer feels sticky.

  I’m a very inexperienced photographer, especially when it comes to black-and-white pictures. Aside from the negative image of the tree limbs I can’t really make anything out except for some darker and lighter splotches, mere visual clutter.

  I put the picture through the computer scanner and save it to hard disc. I open the negative file. I sign into the Port of Departure customer service page where I know I can find simple photo-editing software. I search for a bit, find the command to ‘change negative to positive’ and click.

  The picture changes in the blink of an eye, and I recognize the view immediately. My eyes turn wet. There it is. The Other Side, in all its virgin magnificence, on the screen, large and sharp. There’s just a little softness in the grass and bushes – the wind had time to move them a little during the exposure.

  At the edge of the woods there’s a vague shape formed of shadows and light that seems new, stands out from the landscape. I know that it’s a natural human tendency to form meaning and create patterns from clouds and boards and branches, but, still, it makes me curious.

  I click the enlarge button and zoom in.

  A slightly grainy shape made up of black, white and grey, standing in front of the spruce trees. Eero.

  *

  I climb calmly down the ladder out of the junk room into the Other Side.

  The evening will soon fall around me. There’s still some light, but I can already smell the dew.

  The birds are singing a late-summer song, no longer serenading or wooing. The sound from among the leaves is just a twittering, preparing for the coming autumn. Maybe the birds don’t migrate very far any more. Maybe on the Other Side the world is gentler and milder for them. Maybe if I were a bird-watcher I would be hearing and seeing amazing things, strange calls, making incredible, exotic discoveries.

  I don’t go as far as the lane of date palms.

  I don’t need to.

  I walk maybe a couple of hundred metres.

  I stop in the middle of the meadow, let the setting sun warm my eyes from behind the broken edge of the forest, let the dew from the bent grass seep through the legs of my jeans to my legs.

  ‘I came to tell you I’m here. I’m here, too.’

  My voice is forceful, without hesitation.

  Is that a rustling in the woods?

  I turn. This is enough.

  I go back. I can just barely make out the splotch hovering in the air, the suspended doorway, the portal between worlds, the ladder leaning against nothing. It will be dark soon.

  Everyone else thinks that Eero has gone away for good today …

  To a happier land.

  From time into eternity.

  I’ve basically forbidden the use of such words at Port of Departure, but right now they feel right, good, even profound.

  *

  He’s following me. I know he is.

  He’s there behind me somewhere, where the lower branches of the spruce trees intertwine to form a tattered wall. If I turned my head, he would flash into view, the blue of his jeans, a glimpse of his red plaid shirt. I can almost hear his wary movements under the light rustle of my own footsteps. I’m certain he’s taking steps exactly timed to mine, walking in my footprints with the same determination and carefulness he had as a child, walking in his father’s footsteps through deep snowdrifts. His legs, like mine, are brushing the virgin dew from the gleaming silver grasses.

  I can feel his gaze on the back of my neck, tingling like a sweet poison, but I know somehow that I shouldn’t look back. If I look back before he’s ready something might go wrong. I have to accustom him to my presence, tame him gradually, like any creature in an unfamiliar environment. He has to trust me, to feel safe following me.

  Some day he’ll come as far as the ladder. Maybe further.

  The last languid bees are flying around the colourful willowherb blossoms, soon to return to their nests heavy with pollen and nectar.

  And soon I’ll return to my own world, my steps heavy with dew and reluctance.

  I want to stay. I want to turn around. I can’t.

  But he’s coming, he’s following me, stopping when I stop, moving warily forward like a clever animal every time I make a move – I sense it more than hear it.

  A blinding white anguish tears at the innermost part of me, and when it strikes I have to bend down for a second, inhale the cool air into my lungs.

  I stand up again, panting. I won’t turn around, I won’t turn around. Just a few metres to the ladder leaning against nothing, the opening at the top of the ladder, the darkness of the junk room hovering there, a dark tear in the chromatic brilliance of this place, like a worn spot on a painting where the colour has been eaten away.

  ‘Eero.’ I can’t help but say it.

  I hear him nodding, my senses reaching out through the air to feel the hint of movement. Like the way a seal can sense the direction of a fish’s movement in the vibrations of the water long after the fish has passed. I sense him like a hammerhead shark senses a manta ray hiding in the sandy seabed. He’s right behind me, almost close enough to touch. My every limb is twitching to turn around.

  ‘Eero. Is everything all right?’

  I sense it again, a noiseless nod behind me. Two nods, like Morse Code in the air currents. Yes, Dad.

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  The air sighs another nod. I take the last steps. I lift my foot to the ladder, every lift of my foot a sob in my lungs. My head is as high as the opening. I look into the darkness of the loft.

  I can see the last red rays of the sunset bathing my boots in light and then I’m in the dust of the loft, and it still amazes me that the
re is no slant of light from the Other Side forming a bronze puddle on the floor, just the untouched dark of the room as if the opening didn’t exist in this world.

  Now I turn and look.

  Somewhere far off, in the darkness of the woods, a flash of something – blue? red?

  I only went halfway across the meadow, but there’s a wake in the wet grass that leads all the way to the edge of the forest.

  PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES

  A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES

  RECOGNIZING OUR OWN HUMANITY

  In my previous post I opened up a little about my own family relationships. I let myself be provoked into it because so many commenters have in the past, and especially lately, tried to find some kind of simple pop-psychology explanation for the movement for animal rights.

  A favourite theory seems to be that there’s some connection between motherlessness and belonging to a ‘fringe organization’. Many commenters think that it’s obvious that a person who doesn’t want to inflict suffering on animals and fights for that idea is somehow not quite right in the head – no ‘normal’ person would make a cause out of such a thing!

  According to these interpretations I have a need to find my lost mother in the gentle eyes of a cow, a burning desire to ‘look for approval’ among radical activists, I’m trying to use my self-pity and sob stories to collect cheap sympathy for my cause. Many commenters have even gone so far as to suggest that I have some erotic passion towards animals of other species (although I don’t quite understand what that last assumption has to do with early loss of a mother).

  First off, I’d like to remind you that not everything you find on the internet is true. My ‘story’ could be deliberate misinformation and provocation.

  Secondly, and seriously, is it true that my concern for animals has become ‘an obsession equivalent to their own feelings of lack of love, everything subsumed into something having to do with “the struggle”’, as commenter Keijo Ernest so aptly put it?

  ‘Anyone who harps on animal issues without understanding his own humanity and putting it first is pitifully lost,’ he says.

  *

  My father doesn’t read this blog because he doesn’t know anything about it or about my ARA activism, which makes it not quite so horribly embarrassing to say things like this on these semi-public pages.

  I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced lovelessness. My father, who has himself experienced being motherless as well as half fatherless, hasn’t shifted the trauma of rejection on to me – if he has any such feelings of trauma. My father did a wonderful job raising me, always ready to talk, to share ideas and points of view. His presence in my life has been simple and uncomplicated, an appropriate mixture of protection and freedom. He has transferred his values to me almost intact: a respect for the complexity of life, a person’s responsibility to animals and nature, an interest in ecology. Through him I’ve also learned not to mystify death, the limit that both humans and animals must all face. If you’re looking for a reason I am the way I am, look at my father – he’s the one who made me who I am.

  LEAVE A COMMENT

  DAY SIXTEEN

  I wake up to someone pounding on the door and then opening it with a key.

  I sit up on the side of my bed, run my hands through my hair, my eyes not wanting to open, my heart going a million beats a minute like anyone’s would who had awoken to someone invading their home, and I hear steps, then two voices, a man and a woman.

  I recognize them both.

  I forgot to turn my phone on.

  I had other things to think about.

  I pull on my long johns. I don’t need any other clothes – these are people I know. I come out into the front room, and there they stand, Ari and Marja-Terttu. Marja-Terttu sets an object on the table.

  The urn.

  She has changed out of her mourning clothes and is now dressed in a white denim skirt and grass-green sweater. The girlish colours are too much for her weather-beaten Australian skin. I notice for the first time that Eero has some of her looks, the slope of his eyes and eyebrows, the tilt of his chin.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Ari let us in with his key. We thought we ought to come and check on you, since you didn’t answer our calls. And there was this … this …’ she gestures towards the container, her voice trailing off.

  ‘Get out,’ I snarl, and they both startle, almost jump. ‘Not you, Marja-Terttu,’ I add.

  Ari takes a step towards me. ‘Now, let’s talk about this like …’

  ‘Get out.’

  My voice is so full of the authority of fury that he just waves his hand wearily and doesn’t speak, backs out of the house. Marja-Terttu looks at me like she’s never seen me before. Where is the pussyfooting Orvo, the man she left behind, the doormat she walked on, the wet mitten? Who is this red-blooded bear of a man?

  The house goes quiet.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I forgot to turn my phone on.’

  ‘Yeah. I brought this … because I didn’t know what to do with it … I mean, because it belongs to you, you told the crematorium that the ashes were going to be placed on private property, that you have a landowner’s permit, I mean you are the owner of this land …’

  I look at the urn and nod. I’d completely forgotten about it. There’s nothing in it that connects me to Eero, although I picked it out myself from my own unerringly tasteful and stylishly ecological urn selection. It’s grey ceramic, manufactured in a special process so that it will decompose within fifteen years. Eero isn’t in it. Eero’s somewhere completely different.

  Marja-Terttu gestures towards the door, indignant.

  ‘Your own father! Can’t you even let him …’

  I don’t say anything.

  ‘It was an accident! A horrible, horrifying thing, but an accident! And it’s not as if Eero was completely innocent of …’

  ‘I’d like to get dressed.’

  I turn and go back into the bedroom. I’m picking my jeans up from the back of the chair when I notice that I’ve been followed. Marja-Terttu is standing behind me, her ample bosom heaving, one hand bent against her chest as if out of modesty.

  ‘Orvo.’

  I look at her and it’s all quite tiresomely obvious. But so what. I toss the jeans back on the chair with a smile, and with one tug Marja-Terttu’s sweater is off, she unhooks her bra, I push her on to the bed and hitch up her skirt in a bunch around her waist and pull off her underwear. The act is quick and rough and careless, not particularly warm, but she sighs and moans more than she ever did when we were married. I don’t know if she comes, but I don’t really care that much, I’m outside and above it all, it’s all just supposed to happen somehow, male and female, the queen and the drone, one more penetration of the soil that Eero came from, one more experience for her of how to become that soil, that’s all.

  This is her last goodbye.

  *

  We quickly wash up – after I make too much of a fuss searching for clean towels – and quietly get dressed, then Marja-Terttu gets to the point again.

  ‘Is there something I don’t know about? For heaven’s sake, tell me.’

  *

  I tell her.

  Ari learned a lot in America. He knew all about medications, maximizing slaughter weight, quality-to-feed price ratios, minimization of production costs through use of grated flooring and nose restraints. He didn’t use any dirty tricks to manipulate the slaughter weight of his bull calves because he slaughtered them himself, and nobody was paying the difference, but if he’d sold them by weight you can bet he would have fed them lead shot or whatever worked.

  He hated the EU because they poked their noses into his business with their norms and prohibitions and directives. Before the EU came all you needed to get quality certification was a good relationship with a local vet.

  And Hopevale Meats had never been one of those nests of horrors that you read about in the papers sometimes – creatures half dr
owned in their own manure, diseased and covered in sores, gnawing hungrily at their cages. Hopevale was a clean, efficient abattoir.

  Ari had the same relationship with his animals that a farmer has with his potatoes. Produce as much as possible for the lowest possible cost. There was no room in it for sentimentality. No farmer stares into the eyes of his potatoes and thinks of their souls or wonders whether a sandier soil would be more comfortable for the little fellows than a clay soil. The only thing about the quality of the soil that matters to a farmer is whether it helps or hinders his harvest. Nutrients come from a sack.

  In the same way it was blessedly immaterial to Ari whether his calves were standing on grates or sawdust. If a grate system was easier and cheaper, he used it. When grates were banned and sawdust became the standard, he used it up to the very last week, day, minute allowed, put off replacing it so long as he possibly could, cut every possible corner short of endangering his business. He did it in every aspect of production connected to the welfare of the animals – the lowest possible cost, the highest possible output, the words ‘adequate’ and ‘when necessary’ interpreted in his own peculiar, flexible way, neglect that was carefully planned and only corrected if he was cited for it, making weaselly, clever use of phrases in the regulations such as ‘provided it does not cause unnecessary inconvenience to the producer’.

  And since Hopevale was never legally guilty of any mistreatment of animals he never worried about such organizations as the Animalists or Rights for Animals. When the fur trade was finally stamped out in Finland after years of squabbling, the tree huggers took on chicken and pig farmers. It was much rarer for them to interfere in beef or dairy production.

  But then that direct-action group showed up, the Animalist Revolutionary Army. It promoted itself as Amnesty International for animals, and its members called themselves Singers.

  I tell Marja-Terttu that I knew quite a lot about the Animalist Revolutionary Army and its ideology and activities because Eero was an active member. And that I’ve learned a lot more from his blogs.