Bestiality of the Involved - Softcover

Ulmer, Spring

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1733674128 ISBN 13: 9781733674126

Publisher: Etruscan Press, 2020

Synopsis

What does it mean to want to become a mother, as children around the world die of treatable diseases, are killed by bomb or bullet, are held in cages? In Bestiality of the Involved, Spring Ulmer lives this question out loud, refusing any easy answer.

About this title

About the Author

Spring Ulmer is the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles and The Age of Virtual Reproduction. She teaches at Middlebury College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I lean into Heart's rib cage and press her hip up against the agricultural mesh to try to calm her. It hurts to give milk. It hurts, too, to tell one's life story to a stranger who thinks your parents are crazy, believes in some other political purpose, and calls your home interesting. She does not shake my hand when she leaves-this arbiter who will present my childless case and intent to adopt to the State. She says some people think too much of their genetic makeup. I rage on about eugenics. She and I share certain opinions when it comes to race. But I sob after she's gone because I feel I've prostituted myself. What is this game of wanting a child? What is this needfor milk? Heart, tell me: Is there a better way? How should I approach when you are on your knees? You are tired, are you not? If it were up to me, I would let you dry up immediately.

My parents once subscribed to the 'far out isn't far enough' back-to-the-land movement. I was reared without electricity in the woods. Today, however, my generation isn't attempting to revel in nature; those of us who care are attempting to save its remnants, archiving seeds and freezing the eggs and sperm of mammals that are going extinct faster than we can harvest their unborn. Alan Weisman in The World Without Us, however, is hopeful: without us, life will continue. We invasives, we serpentine creatures, we haters of our own species, we owners of everything can only be so destructive. Our demise promises new life.

The night before receiving this phone call announcing your existence, I had read an essay­ "Take Me To the Water" by James Baldwin that had shaken me to the core. His description of a certain beautiful white man who lost his child to divorce and was virtually adopting another one, black, this time, included an observation that the man had emotionally ceased to exist and appeared to be able to love only the helpless. It took me a while to piece together the fact that Baldwin's essay was about the emotional poverty not just of a particular white man, but, rather, of this country's total white populous. What he was writing, in other words, was that this is a nation afraid of its own soul.

Edition details

• Publisher: Etruscan Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1733674128
• ISBN 13: 9781733674126
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208