I Am a Strange Loop

Nonetheless, grocery stores had an annoying way of bringing the issue up very vividly. There were big display cases with all sorts of slimy-looking blobs of various strange colors, labeled “liver”, “tripe”, “heart”, and “kidney”, and sometimes even “tongue” and “brain”. Not only did these sound like animal parts, they looked like them as well. Fortunately, what was called “ground beef ” didn’t look terribly much like an animal part, and I say “fortunately” because it tasted so good. Wouldn’t want to be talked out of that! Bacon tasted great too, and strips of the stuff were so thin and, once cooked, so crunchy, that they hardly conjured up thoughts of an animal at all. How fortunate!

It was the unloading docks at the rear of grocery stores that made the mystery come back with a vengeance. Sometimes a big truck would pull up and when its rear doors swung open, I would see huge hunks of flesh and bones dangling lifelessly on scary-looking metal hooks. I would watch with morbid curiosity as these carcasses were carried into the back of the store and attached to hooks that slid along overhead rails, so that they could be moved around easily. All this made the preadolescent me very uneasy, and as I gazed at a carcass, I could not help musing, “Who was that animal?” I wasn’t wondering about its name, because I knew that farm animals didn’t have names; I was grasping at something more philosophical — how it had felt to be that animal as opposed to some other one. What was the unique inner light that had suddenly gone off when this animal had been slaughtered?

When I went to Europe as a teenager, the issue was raised more starkly. There, lifeless animal bodies (usually skinned, headless and tailless, but sometimes not) were on display in front of all customers. My most vivid recollection is of one grocery store that, around the Christmas season, featured the severed head of a pig on a table in the middle of an aisle. If you chanced to approach it from the rear, you would see a flat cross-section showing all the inner structures of that pig’s neck, exactly as if it had been guillotined. There were all the dense communication lines that had once connected all the far-flung parts of this individual’s body to the central “headquarters” in its head. Seen from the other side, this pig had what looked like a smile frozen on its face, and that gave me the creeps.

Once again, I couldn’t help wondering, “Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there? Who had looked out through those eyes, heard through those ears? Who had this hunk of flesh really been? Was it a male or a female?” No answers came, of course, and no other customers seemed to pay any attention to this display. It seemed to me that nobody else was facing the intense questions of life, death, and “porcinal identity” that this silent, still head provoked so powerfully and agitatedly inside mine.

I sometimes asked myself the analogous question if I squished an ant or clothes moth or mosquito — but not so often. My instincts told me that there was less meaning to the question “Who is ‘in there’?” in such cases. Nonetheless, the sight of a partly squished insect writhing around on the floor would always give rise to some soul-searching.

And indeed, the reason I have raised all these grim images is not in order to crusade for a cause to which probably most of my readers have already given considerable thought; it is, rather, to raise the burning issue of what a “soul” is, and who or what possesses one. It is an issue that concerns everyone throughout their life — implicitly at the very least, and for many people quite explicitly — and it is the core issue of this book.

Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men

I alluded earlier to my deep love for the music of Chopin. In my teens and twenties, I played a lot of Chopin on the piano, often out of the bright yellow editions published by G. Schirmer in New York City. Each of those volumes opened with an essay penned in the early 1900’s by the American critic James Huneker. Today, many people would find Huneker’s prose overblown, but I did not; its unrestrained emotionality resonated with my perception of Chopin’s music, and I still love his style of writing and his rich metaphors. In his preface to the volume of Chopin’s études, Huneker asserts of the eleventh étude in Opus 25, in A minor (a titanic outburst often called the “Winter Wind”, though that was certainly neither Chopin’s title nor his image for it), the following striking thought: “Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should not attempt it.”