Milosz and the Animals

In the 1982 collection of essays translated by Richard Lourie and published as "Visions From San Francisco Bay" Czeslaw Milosz asserts his own variant of Catholic anthropocentrism.  It is not always so clear that scientism is his target: so often with Milosz it appears to be natural science that is loathesome.

One particularly troubling moment arrives in his reflections on the natural sciences, reflections in which he glides from animals to the observed behaviors of mutilated insects.

Writing in the language of a nation whose cavalry last rode into machine gun fire, obedient horses terrified by mortar shells, high-explosive ogives, whizzing and whining shrapnel, yet he fails to speak of animal suffering in a voice that I hear.

The Vatican has sought to bring some corrective to its words and statements promulgated over the years - a Vatican which was said to have opposed the creation of a humane animal mission within its walls (or was it within Rome itself?)  What, after all, are our responsibilities in the soulless behemoth, the cowering dogs, the devious cats and rats, the fickle hawks and foolish pigeons?  Where are their catacombs?

Years after his death, readers of Milosz may have leafed through a nature magazine as a series of photographs, no doubt faked, showed wolves hamstring and then harass a moose until, days later, it falls exhausted, enduring crows until blinded and then the arrival of the bears.  Lions and hyenas follow the same course.  The fate of the solitary wilderness moose must not be construed as either evil or even cruel.  And we would protect the last pristine forests of eastern Poland from shorter railways, shorter highways, shorter pipelines, shorter power lines - before we do some wrong.  No forest which has known such trespass has ever remained on its own course, to its own end.

Elias Canetti was also less than direct, but often more suggestive than Milosz of how our relationship to the animal world is evolving.  Jeshua rides into the city on the back of a donkey.  Another makes his escape while clinging to a goat.  Canetti leaves us no doubt about the donkeys in the city of Marrakesh.  And not to forget that the north African cites were so often cities of slaves and their traders and owners.

When to stop beating a horse?

Saudi morality police are said to have barred girls from exiting a burning building because of their uncovered heads.

Yes, the fate of a Sappho in any great city of Islam should concern us more than a comic-faced camel on market day.

Milosz never seemed to grasp that urwelt, mitwelt and eigenwelt would not be the cleft ontological regions of the categorized world knowledge for which he was as nostalgic as he was for an inspired deontic order like any poet untrue to his first marriage vows.

A journalist's notebook suggests that it is the rural world of  Orthodox Serbia wherein the lost world of Milosz's Lithuania can be sensed in fable and superstition - the world of a lost Lithuania and others, their people uncounted or never returned from forced exile.  Villages renamed.  Manor houses plowed under.  But here the rural life continues as it might have in a Lithuania unconverted - or Orthodox.

But which folk parables teach that the man cruel to an old horse will lose his fortune, cruel to an old rooster, will lose his wife?  A carp is fattening in a tub.  Geese are fed as we would rather not imagine.

In not so rural America, poultry parts bound for Russia begin their journey by "locking" the flightless wings behind the back of the fowl - which go silent, subdued, and are easily flipped, carried and slipped into their crates for their journey to evisceration - handled and mishandled by the poorest of the poor, night laborers traipsing back and forth from 18-wheeler into the "barn" until the feathers begin to settle and it is time for a wash, perhaps a toothbrush, and breakfast.  If your great-grandmother showed your grandmother how to lock those wings, she doubtless also showed her how to hold the hatchet, or to choke up on the haft of an ax.

Those were not chickens.  Call them "fryers". The eggs have been candled from broiler breeding hens and sit warm in the incubator racks and shelves. The stacked boxes from the hatchery arrive in a few days and a new cycle of life begins.

This is no plea for free-range poultry or vegan diet.  The extremes are always easier to advocate.

Entering the Weisman Art Musuem at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on the south shore of the Mississippi - a distinctive Frank Gehry (Ephraim Owen Goldberg) building - a great wall painting cannot be avoided if you turn left - a wall of galvanized layer cages - layers, trapped in pairs, in a simple binary pecking order, for their eggs, their days shortened and cycling with clever clocks, timers.  Not the simple egg timer of a pleasant breakfast.  It is not my favorite work in the collection.


In these essays Milosz is telling us of how and where he finds himself, a Polish speaking poet on the western coast of California and anyone who has deep feeling for this regretted poet will have wanted to read these pages.