Ananke

IT HAD BEEN A BAD summer that year. Nine months already without any rain to speak of and now the lakeshore stood naked and primordial as some postdiluvian plain, an uncertain wasteland revealed in the receding Deluge. The leaves dead on the branches like a premature autumn. There were buzzards them by the score in those bent and sunblasted limbs, more circling in the skies on spread black wings, fluttering funeral cloaks chased by their broad shadows on the earth below: an audience of them. But we live our lives before an audience unseen of some kind or another, often without ever acknowledging their presence and certainly not letting their attentive eyes influence our decisions in any way. The audience of the carrion birds is always there, truly, whether we see them or not.

I was amazed at how silent it was. No wind off the lake surface, no cars passing by. Which was fine: the way it should be. There is a secret whispered in intimacy, something implied but never named: it is the pale and distinct face of betrayal. Betrayal is the flip side to the coin of the intimate. In the clearing there was only two of us, the animal and I, and the instrument of betrayal— the maul— in my hand unnamed and unnoticed, dangling against my side.

We all wear masks from time to time— the Greeks were right, as always, there— because of our need to order ourselves out of the speeding chaos of life, a way to frame an incident into something measurable and nameable. The mask defines. By defining the role of he who wears that mask, it condones the actions the wearer commits. How could it be any other way? A man defined by a certain nature cannot be expected to do otherwise.

I had my mask to wear there in that dry and bitter field. I wish I could say the same for the calf that lay before me. That it was a sacrifice, that it was prey. No. The calf was simply lame in a drought when there was no feed to be wasted and no water to be spared. And now it had lifted its trembling head up as I arrived, me in my mask, and I wondered if, seeing that I had not come to bring the calf its bottle, if it recognized the mask, if it was old enough to name the grim and tight expression on my face. I doubt it. I know people nearly a century old who do not know that mask when they see it, but I know it because I have worn the mask before, never comfortable with it in any way but resigned to it nonetheless. It is Necessity. Ananke. And no man wears it willingly no more than any man bears it willingly when he sees it come for him.

____

I WONDER WHAT RAPTURE early men must have felt seeing horses wild on the floodplains, running like cascading waves against the forest edge as the trees ticked by. Like fire down the wind. Perhaps one of them had become so enamored of that kinetic grace that he had taken to chasing them down the tall grasses, exploding through briars and blooms both to catch one, maybe become one of them simply by joining the fleeing herd. How, eyes whited and teeth bared, all mane and tail, they had run into the forest. Perhaps one of their number had fallen on a treacherous treeroot and this was how the man found it: leg broken, wasted, no wild spirit at all. Maybe he just stood there in the silence of the forest, impressed by the intimacy of this moment, between this beast and himself, before he drew his spear and slew the animal where it lay.

Early man’s first use for horses was eating, not transportation. Sometimes they would run them into an autumn forest and set it afire.

Intimacy and betrayal.

Apparently one day that intimacy was broached again, but this time the man left the weapon behind him, unmentioned among them. Then there was something new that had never trodden the earth before: the rider and the steed. But the weapon was there all the time, the other side of that coin was there all the time. They simply agreed to overlook it until the day came when a certain mask would be taken down again. Men perhaps did not even need a name for that mask then; they knew what it was all along. It was poets who needed to name it. Name it perhaps so that they might distance themselves from it. If such a thing is possible.

____

MY GRANDFATHER HAD a few cattle that he kept, one of which he was willing to let us have butchered on one condition: that I maul it myself. I was thirteen and a city boy and what I knew about slaughtering animals could have filled the inside of a matchbook if you wrote in fairly large print. I was not much on the idea and my mother was dead set against it, but my father— well, my father understood one thing and that was that my grandfather was a pointless man to argue with. My grandfather and my father and I all went into town with this heifer in the trailer rattling behind us. My first and probably best memory of the slaughterhouse was the thick and waxy smell in the air, something I attributed to the butcher paper, but that wasn’t it by a long shot.

They put the animal in a narrow cage with its head hanging out. Overhead there was a heavy steel beam with chains strung on it, some that had hooks bolted into the links and these dangled to the floor behind the cage. I had seen that before, though I couldn’t remember where. A man came and he locked these large metal hooks around the cow’s hind legs and then he spat into the metal grating on the floor and nodded his head. No one had spoken the entire time on the killing floor. No jokes. Nothing. My grandfather handed me the maul and the weight of it nearly pulled me over. “Do it once and do it right,” is what he told me. And they stepped back out of the way.

It makes a rather undramatic sound, mauling something to death. Maybe that’s the worst of it, how unspectacular it all is. But it’s a sound you will remember all your life. There was perhaps a second between the moment I heard that sound and the animal quit convulsing of utter silence and then with quick efficiency, the floor manager released the gate to the cage and hoisted the animal up into the air with the most ungodly racket as the chains passed through the pulley. He slit its throat and bled it into the floor.

Frisson is the word. Looking at that animal dangling in the air, limp now but still warm, its blood raining down into the grating below: I was struck with a sudden and electric frisson. I knew now what that waxy smell was. It was the smell of the dead. And I knew where I had seen that hoist before: it was in the back room of the funeral home my father had worked at. And I knew something else as well and it was this: the killing had all been too simple, too quick and easy for me to assume that I was anything but mortal myself. Mortality, for me, had been defined in that moment, and not as a word or a concept but as something undeniable and paperthin that at any instant could find itself cut short by Necessity.

My grandfather put his hand on my shoulder and nodded to me. Intimacy. Betrayal. My grandfather had betrayed me to something capricious and impossible to argue against. Ananke. Out of necessity he had betrayed me to it.

____

GETTING HER HOSE OFF had been an adventure, but with that finished there had only been the two of us there naked in the pale winter light, on that bed with its jumbled sheets and weak springs. Just the two of us there. Her disheveled hair half in her face. Her magnificent eyes on me, but there was nothing clever in them now, only apprehension, and somewhere in the back of her mind she must have told herself over and over again that she could trust me. Yes. She could trust me.

God, how nervous she was and so helpless to her fear and to that ravenous need in her that she had fought in all our tight, rash encounters before, but this time there was not going to be any staving it off with her fingers in some dark room later, no. This time was for real.

“What if my father finds out?” is what she asked me. I almost laughed.

One would have thought the two of us of conflicting interest, her father and I, but we were the same man, the same hand. The same mask upon our faces. Iphigenia with her pale breast borne naked to the knife when Agamemnon her father had called for a sacrifice. Before, her father had been her consort and her initiator, father with his pale mask of Necessity, but this time he would not hold the blade himself. She would have look elsewhere. To another man. Another conspirator. In the end the same man with the same aims. What if my father finds out? He already knows.

She told me she loved me. And I told her I loved her, and that I wouldn’t hurt her.

Which I did anyway.

Intimacy. Betrayal.

Like that proud horse broken, the wild spirit I had seen in her was gone. Like that animal in the cage, she was helpless and submissive to her own desire. I held her hand when I broke her. Kissed her as I entered her. Betrayed her even as I took pleasure in the warmth of her. Rider and ridden: something that had never trodden the earth before. She bled onto the bedclothes and she cried into my neck. Cried even when she came. She wrapped herself around me and kissed me and told me she loved me while I could feel the warm drops of her blood on my thigh, on my own member as if I were anointed in it. Which I was.

____

THE FOREST SUCCUMBS to fire. The flames are drawn as if by the inward breath of some great titan back through the black and standing cruciforms of the burning trees and the watchers step lightly through the cooling cinders into a landscape ash-hot and unreal. They group in a loose circle around the Horse Grove where the still smoldering ruins of some score of horses lie black in the quivering heat of the earth. There is then only silence. Even the songbirds have fled to the river.

How many of these childlike men drop their burning brands to the ground as if ashamed of them. A caprice, and surely it had never occurred to them that the fires they had set to herald the wild run of the horses would come to this. They look from one to the other to affix the blame somewhere, but there is not a one of them that does not reek of that killing smoke.

There is one among them who steps forward and his jaw is so tightly set, his eyes lost of any levity. He draws out his primitive knife and kneels beside the closest of the charcoal animals and cuts into its flesh. He begins to eat. To devour the animals as if to relieve the trace of this act from the earth as surely as the fire erased the grove itself. The others they balk for a moment but in the end they all join this solemn banquet though none of them will speak of it. Not for long years to come, and then only by allusion, any word but the truth.

In the evening the first man to eat sits before the anticlined wall of the tribal cavern and he grinds down charcoal from the forest fire and ochre as well and these he places into his mouth and grinds them even more, mixing them with his saliva. He leans his mouth close to cavern surface, the nameless rock, and begins to blow out colors dark upon that wall. After a few hours the horses begin to appear again, run wild upon the stone.

Silence, the mother of Art. The silence of the initiated.

____

MY UNCLE HAD TOLD me I could take his .22 rifle out to put down the calf, but I had done that before and it was more unpredictable than anything else. Even a month old calf has a thick skull. I took down a sledge and walked through the brittle haymow to the little place we had fenced off to feed the animal out. It might have worked out, bottlefeeding it until it was strong enough to get up on its own, but the calf had fallen out into the full summer sunlight and hadn’t been able to get up. The afternoon sun had all but killed it and now there was nothing left for it but Necessity, nothing left but the maul.

Poets gave Necessity a name to distance themselves from it, but they gave it another name, under certain circumstances, and this word is mercy. Mercy does not imply a distance but an excuse. Mercy is what you call Necessity when it is not you personally that has to pull the plug, or swing the hammer.

All about the trees were fringed with buzzards. Some had even landed on the grass to stand witness like dark mourners, but carrion birds do not mourn any more than they pray. Still, there was the silence, and the calm clear lake past the reeds before me. It looked like a sheet of glass. It looked like the world had stopped entirely.

The calf struggled its head up and looked at me. And I told it not to worry. I told it that I wouldn’t hurt it.

It hardly made a sound when the maul struck, but the buzzards exploded into the air and the noise of them taking flight was huge, overpowering. Their shadows were everywhere.

I do not speak of what I did to anyone.

The initiated aren’t just those who know how to shake off guilt but those who more than others have reason to be guilty. The complicity between initiates has to do with a shared knowledge, but likewise with a crime. However much we try, we can never quite sever the bond that links the initiated with the gang of criminals.

—The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso