Addictions

I came home yesterday after dark, after a day in the city, and one of the month-old puppies had climbed into a bucket of water and drowned.  His mother had pulled him out, it seemed, because I found him dead next to the bucket, but she was too late. I tried to revive his limp, chill body, but I was too late as well. My sleep was haunted by guilt, sorrow, and inchoate terrors. 

The mom dog slept by her baby all night, chasing her other pups away.  I wonder if she too, amid the misery of loss, also feels the mystery of it - death - that sense of passings and transformation that tinges the horror and pain with a kind of wonder. As if another kind of time operates there at the edge, but one is helpless to grasp its significance. Perhaps she knows its significance better than I do.  All night she slept by her baby where I had placed him in the grass, periodically licking his face and body.  In the morning I dug a very small hole and buried the puppy on the hillside where his grandfather and great grandparents also lie.   

Losing the puppy is just this week’s knife edge of sorrow, unexpected in its particulars but familiar in its raw exposure.  I live and work on a cattle ranch, which means that I make a direct living on the life and death of animals. There are the joyful, anxious months of calving, where the pastures are dotted with fresh and shiny babies, and there are the years of overseeing their growth to maturity, and then the day when they are shipped off to be slaughtered, where I send them to their death.  I don’t like the death part, no, I don’t like to think about it, but there is a very big part of me that needs it, like an addictive drug or an obsessive cause.  I need death to be there lurking in my life, or I would have to find something else to substitute for it, like alcoholism or jihad.  

This could just be a defect of my personality, as I’ve always had an above-average fixation with altered states of consciousness, intensities, extremes, and other sorts of follies and ridiculousness. I do a decent impression of solid citizen these days, when necessary, but I’m always a bit ragged around the edges on closer inspection.  I live too far out there to not be marked by a certain awkwardness.  Out there - out here - is where I can feel the systole and diastole of death and life rolling through me without impediment.  It is my secret drug, my secret well of renewal.  An open secret, secret only because I can’t explain it at all well or pass it on, as one is supposed to do with human culture.   

So, this is just another story of addiction, which is to say a story of quiet rebellion against the social order, or capitalism, or repressive standards of behavior, or civilization itself.  I don’t know anymore - perhaps it is the kind of rebellion that just makes order stronger, and I’m OK with that.  Social cohesion is something to be treasured; that is one of the lessons that we must very reluctantly learn from the Arab Spring and its aftermath: that even a repressive order might be preferable to the free-for-all of destruction and murder that can take its place.  

But I think my addiction has deeper roots and is the most conservative kind of rebellion possible.  I want what we always had until not too long ago: that atavistic world, so unjust by liberal humanist standards, but absolutely just along longer ecological timelines.   I want my life entwined with the lives and plants and animals because their lives are a truth deeper founded than the tangles of philosophy.  

Those are luxuries I have claimed for myself, the luxuries of sharp-edged experience and open spaces; they are unpopular, nearly free for the taking, however strenuous that taking might be. Digging the hole into which to put the puppy I weep inside for all of us, that we might die, that we have to die, that we must go on, and that it is so hard to hang on to what is essential.