Page 120 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

sacrifice, is not cowed by sacred cows, and is a self-confessed expert on

indigestion. She says, “There is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and

not to become with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable, no way to

pretend innocence and transcendence or a final peace.”

Haraway’s view is cosmicpolitical, but she is not without a moral compass or

deep and passionate sympathies. She is not implying that any way of eating and

killing is fine. There are consequences, all the way up and all the way down.

“Multispecies human and nonhuman ways of living and dying are at stake in

practices of eating.” There is no relief, especially in our dietary practices.

Indigestion is a chronic ailment all humans must bear.

Thomas Thwaites, author of GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human,

is human-weary. He wants out of his homo sapiens sapiens life. He thinks too

much, and he worries. All humans worry, he notices. “Even the Queen who is

born into a life of the utmost privilege and prestige. . . . Yes, even the Queen has

worries. To be human is to worry.” (And he is only in his thirties!??) Thwaites is

not overly impressed by brains and is quick to point out that human brains have

shrunk considerably over time. “That’s the thing about brains—without some

embodiment, a connection to the real world, it doesn’t matter how capable your

mind is (even if you are René Descartes).” But smart Thwaites is, and savvy,

and obviously endearing. He manages to get a very prestigious artist’s grant

from the Wellcome Trust in London who think his plan of becoming an elephant a

“wonderfully engaging idea.” OK, he had a bit of a track record; he made a

toaster from scratch, mining the iron and making the plastic himself. The toaster

was later acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum. Even if it was a one-off, it

was quite a success.

A toaster is one thing, but an elephant was of a different, rather larger,

categorical order. Thwaites began to imagine building an elephant exo-skeleton

he could inhabit while he went along eating grass. But after a trip to South Africa