A Bright Clean Mind. Camille DeAngelis
spring of 2010, I was granted a residency at Yaddo, the artists’ retreat where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes stayed in the fall of 1959, and every day I climbed the winding stairs at West House to the same sunlit study where Plath worked at rounding out her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems. Some evenings my new friends and I would curl up with a cocktail on the yellow velvet sofa in the drawing room and laugh to one another, “Oh yes, they definitely did the business on this very spot.”
My time at Yaddo was exactly one year before my “vegan conversion” at Sadhana Forest, and in my journal, I mention eggs for breakfast and the Yaddo chef’s infamous chocolate mayonnaise cake. These entries are also tinged with a cheerful sort of insecurity: I think it’s a good thing to surround yourself, on occasion, with people who make you feel slightly obtuse. I told myself the writing was going well, but it wasn’t really. Maybe I’d hoped my invitation to such a hallowed literary institution would change me somehow, give me the validation I needed to silence that desperate voice inside me chirping, “Let me show you how interesting I am!”
But I also recounted conversations in which I articulated (perhaps for the first time) the conviction that artistic development is linked to spiritual growth. Plath knew it too. During her time at Yaddo, she wrote, “[G]et rid of the accusing, never-satisfied gods who surround me like a crown of thorns. Forget myself, myself. Become a vehicle of the world, a tongue, a voice. Abandon my ego.” I wish I could ask her what she meant by becoming a “vehicle of the world”—practically speaking—and I wish I could tell her how I’ve chosen to interpret those words. In letters to friends and family, Plath expressed unease at the pleasure her new husband took in fishing and hunting. One night Hughes took her out tracking in Yorkshire and shot a doe and her fawn, and though Sylvia had been cooking for him daily in his mother’s kitchen, she wasn’t willing to make a stew out of such beautiful, gentle creatures.
© Nava Atlas, The Narcissist’s Library, detail, 2017.
When I went vegan, I finally found the transformation I’d been yearning for since childhood, the natural result of a momentous shift in perspective: for what is my anxiety compared to the seventy billion land animals facing the dis-assembly line each year or the thousands of workers (many of whom are undocumented) who suffer serious injuries and appallingly low wages in order for our meat, dairy, and produce to reach the grocery store? This is not to invalidate what I or Sylvia Plath or anyone else with “first-world problems” have felt, but to suggest we turn our explorations outward and ask what logical steps we can take to alleviate the suffering of others.
I’ve come to believe that an obsession with metamorphosis indicates an impatience, an unwillingness to “do the work” on oneself—to focus on making one kinder, braver choice at a time until you evolve into the person you want to be. There can be no surefire fixes for self-loathing—particularly where mental illness is involved—but ethical veganism may very well provide a philosophical framework that prevents your emotional pain from eclipsing the world around you.
Better Self-Esteem through Emotional Hygiene
My friend Dixie once advised me to “be my own mama,” which is an effective method for managing lingering feelings of self-loathing. The concept is simple: treat yourself as you would a small child in your care. Systematize your self-soothing practice into two types of actions: daily maintenance and strategies for “emergency” situations (e.g., a negative thought spiral). For me, simple maintenance includes making the bed, writing in my journal, going to yoga class, meditating for at least five minutes, and lighting a candle or incense to set a calm and cozy mood in the evenings. (A hand, foot, or face massage would be ideal, too, though truth be told, I almost never do it.) At the top of my emergency list is “headstand for at least ten to fifteen breaths,” which is the only thing guaranteed to turn my mood around. (I would put my head on the floor of a filthy bathroom stall if I really needed to.) The idea here is to be more deliberate about caring for the softest parts of ourselves, so that we in turn can recognize the softest parts of others.
© Meneka Repka, Nest Face, colored pencil, 2016.
Sticking point #3: “The beautiful thing in my head withers as soon as I begin committing it to paper,” or “I know perfection is unattainable. But if I can’t do it as perfectly as humanly possible, why do it at all?”
In the 1940 film, My Favorite Wife, Cary Grant plays a presumed widower whose wife (played by Irene Dunne) was lost at sea seven years before. Naturally, Irene finds her way back from the desert isle just as Cary’s about to marry again. As the long-separated couple reacquaint themselves, Cary becomes suspicious of the man with whom Irene was shipwrecked (played by Randolph Scott). How could they be stuck on an island together for seven years without any messing around?
Cary’s first glimpse of his competition happens as Randolph executes an impressive dive off the high board into a hotel swimming pool. When the three sit down for lunch, Cary seems desperate to pick any sort of hole in the man’s genial and confident demeanor (especially when he finds out they’ve spent the past seven years jokingly calling each other “Adam” and “Eve.”) His perfection is infuriating. When the waiter recommends the turkey à la king, Cary turns to Randolph with a steely glint in his eye. “Does turkey appeal to you, or do you confine yourself to raw meat?”
“Never touch it,” the man replies blithely. “I am strictly a vegetarian.” He proceeds to order “a glass of carrot juice, a milkshake, and some raw carrots” (your clue that the screenwriter would have ordered the turkey). Randolph tells Cary that while he and Irene never behaved dishonorably on that desert isle, now that Cary is about to be remarried, he’d like to marry Irene. “I’ve known your wife for seven years,” he says, “and no man could ask for a better companion, a truer friend, or a more charming playmate.”
“Isn’t he impulsive?” Irene laughs, and Cary loses his temper. “Impulsive? He’s full of carrots!”
Randolph’s character is strong, handsome, easygoing, respectful, and sincere, but the audience knows he doesn’t stand a chance. Cary’s jealousy is comfortingly realistic, whereas a man such as Randolph could not possibly exist in real life.
Popular culture loves to paint vegetarians—never mind vegans!—as humorless clods strapping themselves to an impossible ideal, and they’ve been doing it since PythagorasIV (who isn’t nearly as well known for his ethical vegetarianism as he is for a2 + b2 = c2). One of the more notorious examples in the history of animal-rights activism is Henry Brougham’s dressing-down of Joseph Ritson, author of An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty, in the Edinburgh Review in April 1803. Not only was Ritson writing his treatise using quill-feathers stolen from geese and oak-gall ink (inevitably containing crushed insects) by the light of oil from slaughtered whales, but as Tristram Stuart wryly recaps, the author (along with every other human who ever lived) was “murdering whole ecologies of microscopic organisms every time he washed his armpits.” Ritson wore wool and leather, drank milk stolen from calves, and ate eggs that should have grown into chickens.
IV Since Pythagoras was the most renowned vegetarian of the ancient world, we were called “Pythagoreans” before the word “vegetarian” was coined in 1842.
Brougham was right. There are animal byproducts in all sorts of things I use, from the tires on my rental car to the glue that holds my secondhand furniture together. The lettuce I buy at the grocery store might be grown using fertilizer made from cow manure. If I were to adopt a cat, I’d have to feed her meat because cats are obligate carnivores. I’m killing ants and God only knows how many more creatures every time I go for a walk in the woods.
So