Eating Beings

Beautiful and Terrible.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts

-Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II Scene VII

Despite all the whimsical talk of talking trees and water goddesses, I am not at all trying to tell you that the world is all fluffy stuffed animals and happiness. No. The world is trying to EAT you, and one day it will.

In case no one ever told you the facts of life: Momma Earth is gonna eat your ass one day. She's gonna scarf you down like a juicy Whataburger and maybe smack her lips. Would you like any dead fried potatoes with that, ma'am?

How do we make sense of a world where your being is only sustained by eating beings, and all those other beings are all doing the same? Even plants, even when they aren't actually eating living things (venus flytrap anyone?) certainly benefit from the deaths of beings. Moreover, I do not have the false comfort that many vegetarians have in believing that they are eating insensate beings. Plants are a whole other kingdom of existence from us and very very different, but they are not insensate. Some of my favorite beings are plants.

Obviously, space here in this world is at a premium. The rent is high, and those who can't make the rent are devoured by those still paying it. And sooner or later, for every being on the planet, the landlady comes knocking. Even the landlady's landlord comes knocking in a few billion years when the Sun goes red giant and gobbles up the Earth. That is assuming that the Sun's lease doesn't come up first.

This being the case, one might say, why be kind? Why worry about animal cruelty or using more of the planet's resources than we need or what in fact happens to all those other beings? Or even, why should we care what happens to our grandchildren's children once we are gone? It's a mercenary world. 

Or you may wonder: I do want to be considerate to all these other beings, to the extent that I can, but why do I want to? Is it not after all kind of counter-evolutionary in a way, to restrain your own predation? And how should we face death when our turn comes and it can't be avoided? Cry bitter tears when the rent comes due?

There may be more than one reason why I would wish to respect life in a predatory world. The very fact that we know that all these other beings are in the same situation as we and that we all strive hard to stay alive a bit longer in the world, leads me to believe that we are not all that different. If I do value my own life enough to kill another life to preserve it, I have to understand that they value theirs just as much. And perhaps, in a hard world, an act of mercy is the closest thing to the experience of eternal life that we can have while living. We are lifted out of ourselves into the world, and know that all these striving beings are also in a sense our own selves too. Our brothers and sisters.

When our turn comes, we need not lament it too much. We have eaten, now we are eaten. We were given life, loaned form and substance from the bodies of other beings, and now we give it back. We should reverence every life that we take, every forkful of food, every breath of air, every drink of water. Doing so, we cannot wish to take life in vain.

Perhaps a strange thing to comment on, but I was out walking on one of my ill-advised midday walks in the summer heat of Texas, and came upon a stream of ants going to and from a dead cicada. To me it was like a visual concretion of becoming: here this form of the cicada is going away, there those forms of ants are sustained and new ants are being birthed in the ant colony. This is what life is, a continual change of form, a continual becoming and fading away. Life is not made of discrete instants, it is like looking at a river through a spyglass. Here a drop of water enters the scene, there it exits stage left and something new takes its place. The motion never ceases at all, there is no point at which you can say definitively past, present and future, starting and stopping. This leads me to believe that the motion extends beyond the circle of our limited spyglass vision, and that it is moving somewhat like a circle itself. The World, which we can see, and the Dreaming, which we can't. And yet together they are one world, and not separate. The Dreaming feeds the World, and the World feeds the Dreaming.

You can use a stage play as a metaphor. The stage is of course where everyone wants to be, everyone wants the limelight. It's where the action happens. However a much larger space, backstage, is behind the stage, and from here the props and actors appear on the stage and to here the props and actors go when their time comes. This motion can be thought of as a river of sorts, or a circle. Backstage, the Dreaming, gets the props lined up for the stage, the World. They make their motions through the world, and then they go backstage again, back to the Dreaming. And yet the stage and the backstage are all parts of the same thing. The World and the Dreaming aren't different worlds, they are sides of the same world.

What happens when you enter the Dreaming, I do not know definitively. Maybe some jaded stagehand eats his lunch on your painted scenery. ;) Maybe the plasterboard backdrop of Venice gets repainted into the plasterboard backdrop of Los Angeles. I'm pretty sure nothing gets wasted though, and maybe if you are lucky your Dream is interesting enough to keep around somewhere, waiting for another go at the stage, or some other stage somewhere. ;)