Oregon Humanities

Goat

Coming to terms with the physicality of consumption

John R. Campbell

Mornings, on my way to work, I see him. A domestic billy goat, white, standing stoically near Highway 99, alongside his igloo goat-house. He’s tethered in a rural backyard, posted to keep the blackberry vines at bay.

One spring day, I pull off the road for a visit. Close up, the goat is smaller than I expected, scrawnier and more vulnerable-looking. He’s understandably uneasy, too, not knowing my intentions. He begins to fidget, and then to nod. He drops his horns. He lifts a cloven hoof and opens his mouth halfway.

I sigh and turn away. I can see there will be no understanding between us.

In the early 1980s, I lived for a time near Crescent City, California. Called “Depressant City” by some of the locals, it’s a small coastal town just south of the Oregon border. Like most coastal communities, its timber and fish economy has suffered over the years. Add to that the fact that the entire downtown was destroyed by the 1964 tsunami, and Crescent City is a ragged testament among rugged coastline, redwood forests, and convoluted mountains.

At my rented house north of town, second-growth redwoods towered all around, and at the margins of the woods, blackberries thrived. Each morning I picked berries for my yogurt, out near the double-wide, where my landlords lived. And of course I’d say hello to their goat.

I can’t quite remember his name. It might have been Oscar, or Herman—a human name, in any event, as the landlords were fond of him. And why not? The goat did his job. He ate everything in his path, most notably the blackberry vines, some of which were thick as lariat rope. The goat ate slugs, redwood fronds, dog food, shriveled grapes. He ate old brown lettuce. I’d feed him scraps—he was indifferent, but hungry.

This was the Reagan era, when Americans were instructed to trust their futures to the affluent, whose wealth would surely trickle down to the masses. I trace some of our current obsession with consumer goods to that time, when the gap between the rich and the poor widened into a chasm. While the rich acquired unprecedented wealth, the middle class aspired to improbable luxuries and became riddled with debt. The poor, of course, were more and more estranged from the material American way.

At the time, I taught high school English to the children of second- and third-generation welfare families. In my crowded classroom, I read James Baldwin to Anglos, most of whom were either angry or asleep. I read Shakespeare to bemused Yurok and Tolowa Indians. It was my first year of teaching, and I hadn’t yet learned the dynamics of rural poverty. I remember being surprised when someone started a petition to have me fired for teaching D. H. Lawrence.

Exhausted, and puzzled by my own inexperience, I’d go home and stare out my picture window, just sit and gaze. The yard was an amphitheater ringed by trees, and in the clearing stood that goat, chewing all day at the world.

In his very demeanor, the goat seemed to mock my idealism. His was an animal acceptance of circumstances. His world was circumscribed, severely, by the radius of his tether, and he took it all in. Calmly. Disinterestedly. Often he took it in literally, ingesting it, digesting it, then pooping it out in little pellets. What was it about his presence that absorbed me? Was it a direct physicality, was it a coming to terms with the world as it is, unselfconsciously?

For much of my life, I’ve craved some version of that purely physical presence, as a balm, perhaps, for injuries incurred in more abstract battles. The irony is that I already hold such presence, if only I could come to realize it. That construct, my ego, battles with the world, while that gift, my body, dwells here most naturally—is dying here, too, but what could be more natural than that?

The goat consumes. Most anything. But he does so out of a purely physical need. His desire, unlike mine, demands no moral compass. An animal quelling hunger does exactly what’s required. Even “gluttonous” animals are merely storing protein and fat against the likelihood of future scarcity.

The old nature deity, Pan, was half goat, half man. It was said that anyone who actually saw Pan in the wild would experience emotional duress, would “panic” in the presence of the god. Now, twenty centuries after Thamus proclaimed that the great god Pan is dead, I experience a curious reversal. I seek Pan’s presence, or at least, the locus where a goat and a man might meet. Rather than panicking there, I feel a calm that is strangely familiar. The goat is alien to me, with his acerbic voice and his odd, rectangular pupils. But the goat is akin to me, too. We are subject to the same imperatives of nature. Fellow subjects provide what mere objects cannot—a sense of belonging in a shared and autonomous world.

Belonging: the state of being comfortable in a place or community. As opposed to belongings: the things people own or have with them.

We were once subservient to fickle gods, who demanded certain machinations. We appeased those gods with sacrifices, with lambs and goats. And we thrived. Still, look around—our hard-won prosperity is periodically threatened by forces we barely apprehend. What to do now? What to sacrifice?

I want to trust in personal sacrifice as a better, secular version of the old sacrificial ritual. I want to believe that we’re not completely ensnared by superficial desires. That American individualism might accommodate a greater good.

And it may be so. There are those who do with less for the sake of their families, or, according to an environmental ethic, for the sake of the earth. There are those who choose right livelihood over purely monetary concerns. But let’s face it, for many of us, personal sacrifice is an anathema. Even those who offer their time and money to family, community, or church are loath to give an inch when it comes to material goods. Drive a less-prestigious car? Downsize my rambling house? Why shouldn’t I have a big-screen TV, as big a screen as I can possibly manage? I like my images big, my reality in high-definition. I want to be rewarded for my virtue, for my sweat. And the rewards that consumer goods offer satisfy me, if not deeply, then at least tangibly. They are quantifiable. They’re visible. They signal an affluence owed to me, don’t they?

Yet in the midst of these desires, a more elemental craving recurs. We’re visited by weather, by sunlight, by bare winter ground and luxuriant summer growth.

It’s a strange dynamic, this craving for physical presence. How can I crave what I already have? Maybe I’ve come to define a possession as something bought and owned, rather than something inherently held. Maybe I desire possessions as imitations of a presence that wholly suffices. But possessions don’t sate desire so much as they stimulate further yearning. It’s hard to sit still among them.