The Tale of an Indian Runner
This is the anecdote I wanted to tell you:
Five goat kids were born to us this spring, of which four were male. Not all of Thorne’s triplets were favoured with milk – Opal I needed to hand-rear – but Octavian and Olly, as well as Kama’s son Olaf, came in July to the point of needing to be weaned. Too large now for the “Baby Darling House” at night, (my goats know themselves only as ‘Darlings’ and refuse to respond to any other moniker), there was no other way for me to gain the milk than with separate pens.
While this year’s introduction of electric fencing has forestalled my own need for a padded cell, any alpha goat will brave pain if the alternative gives off a whiff of divestment. The boys’ pen was green enough, but it was really only two wafts of white string away from the voluptuous bosoms they were used to.
I made a plan. I brought the mothers out to their new pen on the first morning with a bucket already filled for the boys. The first gate closed, I began the program. Sprinting up to their enclosure, pouring the Yummy One into their own trough, the arrival of their mothers’ voices – no shrinking violets, my Darlings – still meant that it was time for breakfast, but as the days went by, instead of turning to Kama and Thorne, the strapping kids began to look my way.
Such provision, of course, is expensive. And it begets more appetite. Yet no goat boy, no matter how alpha, questions why it is that I run this goat charity.
Anyone who can harness the urges of others and sate them with simulacra not only holds the reigns but is invested in doing so.
Our fifth(ish) episode of Walking With Goats may see us led along precarious pathways. Trustingly, we can place each foot beyond the last. Let us not look down.
Having come to claim the dubious honour of embalming the future in its plotline, the Matrix - that beloved and fluorescently hubristic 90s phenomenon – seemed by this year like it couldn't possibly cough up another maxim. So I was surprised – 6th form dropout that I am – to stumble over one of its quotes in a page of Baudrillard that read, in all other respects, like a mouthful of my daughter's hair.
Welcome, Morpheus tells Neo, to the desert of the real.
Neo keeps his quaint collection of hacker minidiscs and nostalgic bundle of cash capsuled in a copy of Simulacra and Simulation. It’s several hundred pages long in the movie, because the minidiscs are pretty sizeable, so they’ve had to print the pages between its gothic leather bound covers in a really big font.
Simulacra isn’t a word you’ll hear much if you stop to chat with farming neighbours, unless you live in an Alan Garner novel – which thankfully I don’t – but as a phenomenon now gaining more cultural power than any other, it’s something we’d do well to ask more farmers about.
The Borges fable that inspired Baudrillard and thus the Wachowski brothers – but unfortunately not the architects of our new world – is so beautiful and so brief that not to include it here would be a crime.
A story with a happy ending, I’d say.
Baudrillard though, clearly wasn’t the sort of guy that you’d invite round to help the dinner party conversation float. For him, the map was fashioned from forever plastics and the desert under it – our real land, its real grains – alongside all vestiges of real forest, mountain and stream, had long since rotted away.
This was his desert of the real.
Today, interestingly, Bill Gates invites me to gaze seaward from the shore of a palm bedecked cove.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with a lone duckling this week. Here he is:
I sure hope he lives.
Brilliantly named as ever by my daughter, he was once one of a band of four: the Pooper Troopers. But now he’s not.
As I’ve attempted this week, poorly and in haste, to acquire the skills of a duck mother – selecting tiny leaves at random in the hope that they will be to the final Pooper Trooper’s taste, mimicking the sharp calls of the muscovy mothers as they beat their paths for the young born to duck culture – I’m forced to ruminate on the hatcheries Huxley foresaw. Yesterday the final Pooper Trooper attempted to eat gravel, sand and the flecks of masonry Dulux scattered by my remedial work on the carrot bed. Now he cleans himself in the shadow of my desk, while Charles Dickens stalks beyond the gated entrance, her shits too large to welcome anymore.
Decoupled from a parent, the Pooper Trooper latches onto any leader; at this age capable only of belief in their benevolence.
Ducks write columns on transhumanism, technocracy and smallholding, the Pooper Trooper has no choice but to deduce.
Ducks carry buckets to large four-legged grazing animals.
Ducks water gardens.
Occasionally ducks stop for tea.
We’ve been here for a long time, us and the animals. There is a beautiful paper, Long Time - Long House, in which Kristin Armstrong Oma charts the two thousand five hundred year presence of the building that brought humans and animals into the same life-space.
She calls the way of life that it housed the agrarian commitment.
I am now familiar with what this means.
The work is wall to wall: 6.30 am until 10 at night. Animals in well-stocked panic rooms that protect them from predators, animals in need of water, animals that refuse to stay in fields and lead the rest of the flock into my garden, animals with no other thought than an obsessive preoccupation with the strategies necessary to get into the house.
There has been haymaking, with pitchforks and homemade cider. Now there is potato harvesting. Sacks and trays fill every surface indoors and out; drying, sorting, net-weaving the sacks for storing, out of reach – we hope – of the dreaded rats.
What success that species enjoys uninvited; the predator parasite.
The Pooper Trooper goes off like a siren every time I’m out of visual contact. He savours lemon balm harvested and floating in the dogs’ water bowl. Allowed to follow along as much as his worsening limp will allow (trodden on repeatedly for wanting to be where safety ought to lie), he runs behind me like a violent metronome.
He’s overwhelmingly excited by digging up potatoes – and he’s not the only one. We’re told that it’s time to end animal agriculture, but I challenge anyone to watch him de-slug the bed I’m unearthing our winter supplies in and declare that humans and animals don’t go hand in wing.
Lab grown meat, we are told, and insect protein are now the stuff of our life-space. The longhouse no longer the manifestation of our habitus, a clean world of automated provision will rise from the industrial ruins that fattened World Economic Forum ‘stakeholder’ coffers last century.
All the while, inexplicably, crisis after crisis bottlenecks our food supply. Forests are planted - like unknowing foot soldiers.
Do we believe our world, bought up by the largest monsters – the companies big enough to eat the small like carbon-negative plankton – will be cared for while we’re sated with abstractions? Do we lean back comfortably in the knowledge that it will be stewarded by them?
At two thirty am, I wake in the heat because my semiconscious roll-call of the welfare of lives ends with death. I’m unable to sleep longer because my responsibilities have not been met.
The Pooper Trooper sits in a box beside my bed, afraid of the noise of the water pump in case it turns out to herald the arrival of the monsters that took its three faithful siblings. It trills for me and quietens each time I speak the name it knows. In the duck house, the older brood – who would kill him too if I housed him with them – seem old enough to face rats down. Nonetheless at three in the morning I’m opening their door to check on them.
In the other, mobile cage – the “tractor”, which acts to prepare the ground for planting by fertilising and scratching while supposedly protecting the birds inside – Clara is guarding another brood of twelve: tiny, utterly vulnerable. Her third attempt this year. To give her the safety she desperately needs and deserves, this single duckling by my bed and his now-dead sisters were displaced. Clara would have killed them too.
It is absolutely silent, then a distant engine will make its way through the throat of the night. But for stretches, the absence of sound is complete. Under the moon, the hills around our house are redolent of a day that’s no longer reachable.
It is very lonely, to care for lives and to lose them. My daughter goes on trips with friends and family, but there’s no leaving the animals in heat like this. It’s lonely to be so far through this transition already – Jeremy Vine ushering in the prospect of a food crisis between the classic hits on other people’s radios – and to realise how many will swim and play and holiday till the crisis comes to shake their hand. Perhaps they cannot adjust because to do so – to eschew the life that we in the West have lived in recent times – is to countenance what should not be true.
The final Pooper Trooper takes part in my excitingly duck-like exercise regime of balances and leg stretches in the mornings. And I have never known anything more ridiculous than the sight of him standing sentinel, drenched in the shower next to me, momentarily sombred by the passion of his own involuntary pool frolicks.
Neither of these moments is a fantasy, and most especially not to him.
They had no mother but me, the Pooper Troopers. Bought when Clara’s second attempt at live young failed this year, to try to assuage her grief – which I can assure you is very real – she recognised and rejected their eggs as aliens. And I incubated them and gave them lives to be taken.
In the passivity of the summer night, I write beside him, whispering his name while my daughter sleeps next door.
It is a world of dubious safety and incomprehensible narrative.
I am also filled with solitude. Though I’m new to the profession, I’ve already come to know intimately that – now more than ever – all farmers are.
It is important to understand that what we cannot countenance can still be true.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will ride in on the coattails of enclosure and starvation, just as its predecessor did.
The screen, I remember reading, induces the same brain frequencies as an open hearth – the alpha brain state – in which the impressions of symbols, emotions and narratives are drawn with greater appetite into our souls. Netflix – always one remarkable step ahead – offers three different kinds of firewood in its crackling hearth-backdrop library.
Decoupling and the abstraction of urges, I say to the Pooper Trooper underneath my desk. But the Pooper Trooper just stares up at me.
What will be left when we lose contact with the truth of phrases such as 'under the wing, 'taking stock,' or indeed 'given enough rope to hang yourself’? In the multifaceted mirror of our language and culture, we will see reflected images without substance, pale of meaning.
What do we wish to conserve?
When I crouch down, the Pooper Trooper waddles to sit underneath me.
He cannot help it. Though the heavy booted feet of duck mothers – which differ so dramatically to the delicate webbed feet of duck babies – often inflict mobility threatening injury, their shadow is so appealing. Surely, they must offer harbour.
That I am his mother is only one leap of faith away for him. All he wants is to believe.
“Each grow box will be connected to a SELF Labs-powered trivia-based simulation game called Cultivate Coin, which allows users to choose a role, learn about farming and the growing process, learn how to operate a grow box business, earn rewards, and most of all take part in the growing process virtually.”
While we criticise and impoverish farming families who embody the knowledge of countless generations’ agrarian commitment, our land and its heritage is being sold out at rock bottom prices. The farmers – who were lied to and enslaved to debt by those same companies that now profess to have built better hands to feed us – are, across the world, protesting. They understand.
They will be invulnerable, these feeding hands. Row upon row of them.
But to sever ourselves from our life-support system has become nothing but a matter of nostalgia.
A loss barely felt, and satiated with mere imagery.
Images by Fran Sivers
Thanks so much for reading back John. That means the world to me. I find all the losses very hard to take. I really appreciate you caring enough to hear about them. I'll find time to watch the video - I promise!
I've gone back in your series to know "the pooper trooper".
Some years ago I used to watch the videos that Lammas put out, then they stopped coming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cakxPwL4uQ0 "Living In The Future"