Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

I also knew that he poached by every possible means. He treated the forest like his own personal farm—everything there belonged to him. He was the pillaging type.

It is in the feet that all knowledge of Mankind lies hidden; the body sends them a weighty sense of who we really are and how we relate to the earth. It’s in the touch of the earth, at its point of contact with the body that the whole mystery is located—the fact that we’re built of elements of matter, while also being alien to it, separated from it.

I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.

The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don’t know how to live without it.

It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk.

I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.

“You’ve no right to shoot at living Creatures!” I shouted at the top of my voice.

“Would you please give me something to anesthetize me?” I said. “There must be some sort of drugs. I’d like that. To stop me from feeling anything, or worrying, to let me sleep. Is that possible?”

I could feel my head burning with sudden, anxious thoughts, I could almost see them steaming in the rain, changing into a white cloud and joining the black ones.

Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.

It occurred to me that like everyone else, he took me for a madwoman, and it hurt my feelings.

Sorrow, I felt great sorrow, an endless sense of mourning for every dead Animal. One period of grief is followed by another, so I am in constant mourning. This is my natural state.

it’s the killer who was rabid,” I cried, because I know that argument well; the Slaughter of Animals is often justified by the fact that they may have been rabid. “It had been shot through the lungs, it must have died in agonies; they shot it, and they thought it had run away alive. Besides, the vet is one of them, he hunts too.”

they won’t take pity on your poor souls, for they say you haven’t got souls. They don’t see their brethren in you, they won’t give you their blessing. The nastiest criminal has a soul, but not you, beautiful Deer, nor you, Boar, nor you, wild Goose, nor you, Pig, nor you, Dog.’

“In fact Man has a great responsibility toward wild Animals—to help them to live their lives, and it’s his duty toward domesticated Animals to return their love and affection, for they give us far more than they receive from us. And they need to be able to live their lives with dignity,

“What sort of a world is this? Someone’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth . . . Shoes, sofas, a shoulder bag made of someone’s belly, keeping warm with someone else’s fur, eating someone’s body, cutting it into bits and frying it in oil . . . Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening? This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience, without the slightest pause for thought, though plenty of thought is applied to ingenious philosophies and theologies. What sort of a world is this, where killing and pain are the norm? What on earth is wrong with us?”

and suddenly it occurred to me what a blessing it is to be ignorant.

Other people’s life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate in the same coin.

The truth is I had a lot in common with them—I too saw the world in other spheres, upside down. I too preferred the Dusk. I wasn’t suited to living in the Sunlight.

I don’t like those high, powerful cars, made with war in mind, rather than walks in the lap of nature. Their large wheels churn up the ruts in the dirt roads and damage the footpaths. Their mighty engines make a lot of noise and produce exhaust fumes. I am convinced that their owners have small dicks and compensate for this deficiency by having large cars.

No, no, people in our country don’t have the ability to club together to form a community, not even under the banner of the penny bun. This is a land of neurotic egotists, each of whom, as soon as he finds himself among others, starts to instruct, criticize, offend, and show off his undoubted superiority.

Poland

human cruelty know no bounds.

I petition for the Deer and other eventual Animal Culprits to go unpunished, because their alleged deed was a reaction to the soulless and cruel conduct of the victims, who were, as I have thoroughly investigated, active hunters.

“I can’t stop thinking about it. Dead bodies. You know what, whenever he comes home from hunting he tosses a quarter of a deer on the kitchen table. They usually divide it into four parts. Dark blood spills across the tabletop. Then he cuts it into pieces and puts it in the freezer. Whenever I walk past the fridge I think about the fact that there’s a butchered body in there.” She took another deep drag on her cigarette. “Or he hangs dead hares on the balcony in winter to season, and they dangle there with their eyes open and caked blood on their noses. I know, I know I’m neurotic and oversensitive, and I should go and get treatment.” She glanced at me with sudden hope, as if expecting me to contradict her, but meanwhile I was noting mentally that there are still normal people in this world.

“I used to have two Dogs. They kept close watch to make sure everything was divided fairly—food, petting, privileges. Animals have a very strong sense of justice. I remember the look in their eyes whenever I did something wrong, whenever I scolded them unfairly or failed to keep my word. They’d gaze at me with such awful grief, as if they simply couldn’t understand how I could have broken the sacred law. They taught me quite basic, plain and simple justice.”

“We have a view of the world, but Animals have a sense of the world, do you see?”

“That’s nonsense,” she said. “I’ll never believe he shot a dog.” “Is there really such a big difference between a Hare, a Dog and a Pig?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

“Is it true that you behaved aggressively during the hunting here, in the locality?” “I would say that I behaved angrily, not aggressively. There’s a difference. I expressed my Anger because they were killing Animals.”

“I have been practicing Astrology for many years, and I have extensive experience. Everything is connected with everything else, and we are all caught in a net of correspondences of every kind. They should teach you that at police training college. It’s a solid, old tradition. From Swedenborg.”

I admired him for the fact that—so he said—he only ever owned as many things as he could pack into two cases at the drop of a hat, in less than an hour.

This drifter physician reminded me that we should never make ourselves too comfortable in any particular place,

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves . . . And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”

The psyche is our defense system—it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.

“Drive your plow over the bones of the dead,” I said to myself in the words of Blake; is that how it went?

“It’s wrong to treat animals as if they were people. It’s a sin—this sort of graveyard is the result of human pride. God gave animals a lower rank, in the service of man.” “Please tell me what I should do. Perhaps you know, Father?” “You must pray,” he replied. “For them?” “For yourself. Animals don’t have souls, they’re not immortal. They shall not know salvation. Please pray for yourself.”

Rustle was now coming along the railing, accompanied by an altar boy, feeding them their next bit of meat, this time in symbolic form, but nevertheless meat, the body of a living Being. It occurred to me that if there really was a Good God, he should appear now in his true shape, as a Sheep, Cow or Stag, and thunder in a mighty tone, he should roar, and if he could not appear in person, he should send his vicars, his fiery archangels, to put an end to this terrible hypocrisy for once and for all. But of course no one intervened. He never intervenes.

“What are you gawping at?” I cried. “Have you fallen asleep? How can you listen to such nonsense without batting an eyelid? Have you lost your minds? Or your hearts? Have you still got hearts?”

Anger always leaves a large void behind it, into which a flood of sorrow pours instantly, and keeps on flowing like a great river, without beginning or end. My tears came; once again their sources were replenished.

It’s just that I refuse to let anyone encourage children to do evil things or teach them hypocrisy. Glorifying killing is evil. It’s as simple as that.”

Suddenly I saw the four of us in a different way—as if we had a lot in common, as if we were a family. I realized that we were the sort of people whom the world regards as useless.

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right?

A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

Those Deer we saw outside the house had told me. They chose me from among others—maybe because I don’t eat meat and they can sense it—to continue to act in their Name.

Not just for the Deer, but for other Animals too. For they have no voice in parliament. They even gave me a Weapon, a very clever one. Nobody guessed a thing.

The epigraphs and quotations in the text are from Proverbs of Hell, Auguries of Innocence, The Mental Traveller and the letters of William Blake.

Father Rustle’s sermon is a compilation of genuine sermons by hunt chaplains sourced from the Internet.