Monday, June 9, 2014

Why am I a vegetarian?

Most times I don't like the question because it is a throw away for the person asking. For example, when standing in a cafeteria line and a friend says something like "Oh yeah, you are vegetarian right? Why is that?" and by the way, you have 30 seconds to answer before we get to the cashier and I will have something else to talk about.

When I first started teaching at my current job, I taught Environmental Science for several years. During the development of this course I was reminded of the environmental impact of meat production and the environmental impact of malnourishment. Sometime in there, I decided that I would eat less as a means to decrease my personal ecological footprint. Forego that hamburger and you save more water than you could possible save with a week of shorter showers. So initially I have vegetarianism in the same category as upgrading to compact fluorescent bulbs. During that time, I took a trip to Guatemala to do a bit of an eco-tourist thing and to visit a few anabaptist churches out in the campo. Again, I was reminded of the difference between wealth and poverty, between choosing to be vegetarian and eating vegetarian because meat is expensive or not even available. This trip pushed me from just an "ecological footprint" action to a solidarity action. For a long time, every time I had to choose to eat vegetarian, I was reminded of the global poor, who do not have that choice. My choice became a mantra, a ritual that daily reminded me of my professed value system and worldview. So for awhile, my 30-second answer to the question was "I choose to be vegetarian so that I can be in solidarity with the global poor who do not have a choice". As you can guess, that is not a good response to a throw-away question. It begs for discussion. What do you mean? Why is this solidarity important? What belief system makes this make sense? Instead, I usually got a quick "Oh!" and a turn to the cashier. I still don't have a good 30-second response.

What I do find interesting about the ritual aspects of my vegetarian choices is how ritual evolves. I have questions about ritual in general (see this previous introduction), but I have found more recently that my food choices are so embedded into my being that I often forget the original intent. I can go days not eating meat, and not think once about the global poor or my value system. It never goes much beyond a few days since I eat out enough to always be making choices on menus, but it does make me wonder about other rituals. What rituals do I participate in that have been so imbedded that I don't even recognized them for what they are? And does the simple act of reflection on the history/origin of a ritual bring it back to life or allow the recapture of meaning, or is something else required? Do these sorts of "dead rituals" need to be blown up and replaced for the original meaning to be reintegrated into life? And is it just a bit ironic that the main way I am reminded about my concern for the global poor is by eating out at restaurants and reading menus? Just a bit pathetic...

So there you have it in a few more than 30 seconds...


Friday, June 6, 2014

Literary Residue

How does one recover a lost literary history? Annika and I were recently talking about books that we read as kids. I don't remember. And if one does not have a "family home" where one's parents have maintained a bookshelf full of books that you read as a kid, how does one recover that bibliography. I am sure that my reading formed me, or at least had an impact on me. But in what ways? Is that avenue of reflection lost to me? All that is left is the residue of my memory, so let me at least meander through what is left. My family moved from a central California farm to Oregon just as I was turning 8. This change in scenery was dramatic enough that most of my memories are vaguely categorized as Oregon and before-Oregon. And my literary memory is all Oregon. My first memory of books I read on my own was a series of Pink Panther books. These were approximately 6 inch, square format, paperback books of a couple hundred pages, but each page had a comic on the left and text on the right. I read these at a rate of about 1-a-day for awhile, so there must have a been a bunch in the series. I remember specifically that I got permission from my teacher to count these as "books" for the reading contest.

Otherwise, I believe my first book-book was Pilgrims Progress. My dad and I started reading this together out loud, and by half way through, I couldn't wait, so just finished it. Maybe this is was what led me to CS Lewis Narnia series and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. For some reason, I read LoTR and the Silmarillion and couldn't get enough of this world, but did not read The Hobbit (which is still missing from my bibliography).

I vaguely recall some Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys and some Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). I specifically recall The Hounds of the Baskervilles. Somewhere in there was a brief name-your-own-adventure book, where you got to choose the path of the plot. I say brief because I was not interested enough in the necessarily simple story-lines to go back and re-read with a "different" choice. Elias Chacour's Blood Brothers and Chaim Potok's The Chosen and The Promise definitely pushed my perspective outside of central Oregon. At some point my mom and I got plugged in to Alexander Solzhenitsyn (she with Cancer Ward, me with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).

In High School, the only thing (and I have thought about this repeatedly over time) that I remember reading for school is the play Death of a Salesman. No Shakespeare, no American or English classic lit, no "summer reading" for history, nothing. You could name any book in the high school canon, and if I have read it, I have done so after my 30th birthday. In that time frame, but outside of school, I only remember reading Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut) and The Empire Strikes Back.

And that is it. This is not a brief overview of the types of books I read. This is a comprehensive listing of the books I remember reading. The volume of reading I remember doing (staying up late most nights with a book) is not consistent with the number of pages I have listed here. So something (many things) are missing. When I browse lists of books like "1980s Science Fiction" or "1980s Fantasy" or "1980s ..." I don't recognize anything. So I find it strange that my identity as a reader is based on a memory that remembers the process of reading, but not the content. And the one nearly sure thing about memory is that it is not going to get any better with time. Those clearly formative years reading at least kept me interested in reading, and formed me into a reader. How the content of my reading formed my thoughts and ideas and persona seems to be lost...