The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [183]
Ambivalence and ambiguity are the hunter’s lot, and according to Ortega it has probably ever been thus. Like John Berger he believes that the mystery of animals—how they can be at once so like and unlike us—has always been one of the central mysteries of human life: “Humanity sees itself as something emerging from animality, but it cannot be sure of having transcended that state completely. The animal remains too close for us not to feel mysterious communication with it.” Those moderns who have had the clearest idea about the animals, and therefore the least uneasiness about killing them, were the Cartesians, who decided animals were, in effect, mineral—insensible machines. Unfortunately for us, they were wrong.
So we are left standing there in the woods with our uneasiness and our disgust, and disgust’s boon companion, shame. I mentioned earlier that I had not registered any such emotion in the moments after shooting my pig, but eventually it dawned, or fell, on me, like a great and unexpected weight. It happened late that evening, when back at home I opened my e-mail and saw that Angelo had sent me some digital pictures under the subject heading Look the great hunter! I was eager to open them, excited to show my family my pig, since it hadn’t come home with me, but was hanging in Angelo’s walk-in cooler.
The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater was kneeling on the ground behind a pig the side of whose head has erupted in blood that is spreading like a river delta toward the bottom of the frame. The hunter’s rifle is angled just so across his chest; clearly he is observing some hoary convention of the hunter’s trophy portrait. One proprietary hand rests on the dead animal’s broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with an expression of unbounded pride, wearing a big shit-eating grin that might have been winning, if perhaps incomprehensible, had the bloodied carcass sprawled beneath him been cropped out of the frame. But the bloodied carcass was right there, front and center, and it rendered that grin—there’s no other word for it—obscene. I felt as though I had stumbled on some stranger’s pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could. No one should ever see this.
What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that picture feeling? I couldn’t for the life of me explain what could have inspired such a mad grin, it seemed so distant and alien from me now. If I didn’t know better I would have said that the man in the picture was drunk. And perhaps he was, captured in the throes of some sort of Dionysian intoxication, the “bloodlust” that Ortega says will sometimes overtake the successful hunter. And what was I so damned proud of, anyway? I’d killed a pig with a gun, big deal.
Like the mirror in the convenience store earlier that afternoon, Angelo’s digital photo had shown me the hunt, and the hunter, from the outside, subjecting it to a merciless gaze that hunting can’t withstand, at least not in the twenty-first century. Yet I’m not prepared to say that that gaze offers the more truthful view of the matter. The picture is a jolting dispatch from the deep interior of an experience that does not easily travel across the borders of modern life. Angelo’s pictures—there were more, and eventually I looked at them all—resemble in certain respects the trophy photos sent home by soldiers, who shock their brides and mothers with images of themselves grinning astride the corpses of the enemy dead. They are entitled to their pride—killing is precisely what we’ve asked them to do—and yet do we really have to look at the pictures?
I’ve looked at Angelo’s pictures again,