When Ruth Uzki wrote her successful debut book, "My Meat Year", in 1998, which became a seminal book in the fight for animal rights, she did not intend to write about the meat industry at all.
She wanted to write about how the television and film industry, where she worked in those years, distorts reality according to the demands of large corporations.
"I wanted to write about the money that changes reality as it is represented for us on television, and I knew I had to look for a product. I said, I can write about cigarettes and I can write about meat. When I was doing television, I worked for corporations in both fields, but cigarettes are less funny. So I chose meat." .
Is meat funny?
"The first scene I wrote was of a cameraman and a sound engineer who buy a 'Hassler' magazine, hang the poster of the model on the wall and shoot her in the chest with an air gun they bought at Walmart. I wrote it because it happened to me when I worked in television. They were my colleagues, and when I walked into the room I was shocked Of them. They were drunk, and after we drank and I told them I hated them, the next day we continued working together. When I realized that these scenes were part of a novel, I decided to choose meat, because it relates to feminism, to the treatment of women. So it was actually feminism that brought me to write about the meat industry."
She herself is not a vegetarian, although she tries to eat as little meat as possible, and when I ask her about her attitude to what has happened to vegetarians since the publication of her book and the increase in awareness of what the meat industry is doing, she says: "When I talk to young people, I see that they are much more aware of what which involves the production of their food, but did it have an effect on the meat industry? I think that in the meat industry they continue as usual. Even if there are many more vegetarians than 20 years ago, this movement is very much related to economic status."
A poetics of hoarding
Economic processes - and their strange and hidden ways of mixing in our lives - occupy a central part in what Ozaki's gaze reveals in the world, throughout her work.
In fact, what brought her to the field of literature was money, as strange as it sounds.
At that time, she says, she had a credit debt of 30 thousand dollars, and she could not afford to finance more films.
"I thought, maybe I'll write a book and cover part of the debt."
fascination with objects.
the new book
You were already in the television industry, and you wanted to turn to literature to make money - isn't that absurd?
"The difference was that writing a book doesn't cost money, and I didn't have the money to finance another film. To write you don't need to spend almost anything - you need a roof, stationery, pages. I received a grant of 10,000 dollars to write a screenplay, so I said, instead of writing a film that I won't have How to implement, I will use the money to write a book."
The room in Vancouver's Chinatown neighborhood where she sat and wrote "The Year of My Meat" overlooked a small, dirty alley - the same small, dirty alley that also appears in the opening of her new novel, the fourth, "The Book in the Eye of the Storm" (published by Em Oved).
The opening scene of the new book seems to be taken straight from the first book: a truck loaded with live chickens enters an alley where a slaughterhouse is located.
The alley is full of black garbage bags and crows, and it is hard to distinguish between them Kenji, a Japanese clarinet player, stoned or drunk after a performance.
The meat truck runs over him, and his death throws his small family - Benny, his 14-year-old son, and Annabelle, his loving widow - into turmoil.
My son starts hearing voices.
At first it is his father's corpse that speaks to him, and then objects.
And the house is full of things, because his mother Annabel becomes a hoarder after her husband's death.
She can't let go of things and buys more and more of them with money she doesn't have.
Things get especially serious when she moves to work from home, and the office sends her home boxes of papers and CDs, which fill it in piles that leave no free floor space.
Like the voices that don't let go of my son, Anabel's objects are also her way of grieving.
A seminal book.
"The year of my meats",
"Obviously she is in mourning. But she has the instincts of a collector, and as soon as she is required to turn her home into her workplace, things get out of control. This is something we all felt during the epidemic, when the offices were closed, and we had to turn our homes into broadcast rooms with microphones and green screens." .
But your characters like objects, they remind them of things.
"We love objects. Annabelle wants to mingle with the material world. Like her, I also like to walk around the stores for creative materials, among the stationery, the papers, the paints. They calm me down."
A problem arises. On the one hand, your characters are very attached to objects, which are also spoken to. On the other hand, empathy for objects drowns them under a mountain of rubbish. Maybe what we need is to love the objects less and start alienating them?
"I think we should love them differently. What I'm interested in is trying to hoard fewer things, and take care of the ones we already have. When I see broken or neglected things around me, it depresses me. I try to appreciate the things I have more, and if I don't appreciate them - I'll give them to someone else. I wasn't always like this, maybe it's an age thing. Today I'm 66, if I'm lucky I'll have another 20 years to live. Since I don't have children, I need to get rid of things as much as possible so my friends don't have to deal With everything I left behind."
There is a character in the book who is based on the order priestess, Marie Kondo. Are the arrangement and organization methods from the Kondo school a solution, or is this another way to free up space at home for new purchases?
"The main idea in Kondo's book, 'The Secret of Japanese Magic,' is that you have to love objects in a different way. Her method is actually based on the treatment of objects in the Japanese tradition. The Shinto religion is an animistic religion - objects have a soul and therefore you need to take care of them. If your socks are worn out, you You can't just throw them in the trash, you have to take the time to embrace them and appreciate them - and then throw them away.
"There is a tradition in Japan of taking care of objects. For example, when women would sew kimonos for their families, and the needles and pins they used would break, they were not allowed to be thrown away. They would keep the needles, and once a year they would bring all the broken needles to the temple, where the broken needles would be stuck inside a lump of tofu, so that they would have a soft rest.At the end of that week, the Shinto priest would conduct a short funeral ceremony for all the broken needles of the women of the community.
One of the characters in the book is based on her.
Priestess Marie Kondo, photo: GettyImages
"There is another matter: if you believe that objects have souls, and you don't bring your broken needle to the temple for the rest it needs, it may get angry with you and take revenge on you - maybe it will stab you. That is why it should be disposed of in the right way. According to the Japanese tradition, the relationship between us and objects They are mutual relationships. We take care of these objects and thank them, but we also know that they can hurt us."
"Our identity is a story"
Ozaki, who was born in the USA to an American father and a Japanese mother, did not speak Japanese in the home where she grew up. Her mother, who grew up under the shadow of the racist attitude towards the Japanese during World War II, wanted her daughter to grow up without the shadow of her Japanese heritage, even though she herself was a Japanese teacher by profession. During her college studies, Ozaki traveled to Japan, where she studied Japanese literature and was captivated by the culture and language that her mother kept her away from. Today, she lives in Massachusetts with her husband, the environmental artist Oliver Klehammer, and teaches at Smith College, a private women's college where she also attended in her youth.
When did objects start talking to you?
"It was when I cleaned out my parents' house, after they died. They were both born in 1914 and grew up during the Great Depression, so as kids they didn't have a lot of things, so when they grew up they made up for it. They kept everything. Aluminum foil that they used - They washed and folded for further use. Also plastic bags, boxes, their house was full of things I had to throw away, but there were also lots of beautiful and valuable things. My father was an anthropologist who worked with people from indigenous communities, and received gifts from them - paintings, sculptures, letters - and I thought that if only all these objects could talk, I would know what their story is, whether to keep or throw them away.
"For example, when I was little, my mother had a box of small cut stones, coated with varnish. I played with them and I was sure they were very expensive, I felt special and rich. They are really not expensive, but later I learned that these were stones that my Japanese grandfather collected when he was imprisoned in the detention camp in Niu Mexico (during World War II, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US imprisoned more than 100,000 Japanese, most of them American citizens; KD). He worked as a prisoner in a stone-cutting factory. In this case, I know the story of these stones , and they are dear to me. But what about all the other objects that I don't know what their story is? If only the objects could talk!
"This is true for almost every object. Here, this pin holder" - she picks up a red pin holder that is lying on her desk.
"It's made in Taiwan. So many people were involved in making it, designing it, running the machines, packing - so many ghosts involved in it. Wouldn't it be interesting to hear what all those ghosts have to say? Even in my previous books I was busy trying to trace The production processes, a question that in the meat industry becomes particularly tangible, because the decisions that are made along the production line - such as the decision whether to inject hormones into a cow or not - end up in my body."
"We have a moral duty to the young generation that grew up here not to give up."
A kangaroo that survived the fires in Australia, photo: Photo by Jo Anne McArthur on Unsplash
"Books have their own world"
The one who speaks in "The Book in the Eye of the Storm" more than any other object is the book itself.
It is indeed quite common for books to speak to us - in fact they address us all the time - but in this book, the book presents itself as a character with its own point of view, and it speaks to us as if it were not a tool of the author but an independent being.
"When I wrote, I played with ideas. What would a book think of itself? I think a book must think of itself as superior to a pin matchmaker, that it is more intelligent than him, because it is closer to its creator than a matchmaker."
So books are not part of the world of products?
"I think books belong in their own world."
But they also take up space, are mass-produced, and we have too many of them. They are also systematically destroyed by the spenders when they are not bought.
"That's true, but it seems to me that books are more than material objects, because they contain language. They're not just a product, they're a form of communication. There's a limit to what you can do with a pin match. What's magical about novels is that they create a space for joint action. The book This is an object, and we think of it as a single object, but actually everyone who reads it creates a different book. The book you read is significantly different from the book that someone else will read. The number of books of 'The Book in the Eye of the Storm' is like the number of readers who have read it. A book is not a static object, It exists within the people who read it. I know what I wrote, I don't know what you 'wrote', meaning which book you internalized. It's a Buddhist idea, that we don't have a fixed self, but a collection of stories we tell about ourselves. Our identity is a story."
So maybe when objects in a book have their own stories and they speak, they become a kind of books, book-objects.
"Books are objects, and if you read a book, you also hear objects talking to you. Then it collapses the distinction between you and my son, which the psychiatrist defines as schizophrenia. It puts us in the same mental state as him, who hears the voices of the objects talking to him all the time."
Along with her work at the university in the creative writing program, Ozaki was certified a few years ago as a Zen priestess who, among other things, also teaches meditation and Buddhism, conducts funerals and accompanies prisoners who believe in Zen.
"I don't teach the students to write creating a Zen, but it flows. I do teach them meditation, because it helps them to be patient, and patience is an important quality for writers. It takes me eight years to write a book. They say about writers that we don't like to write, we love That the things are written, and that's true. Writers are impatient."
Writing is suffering.
"Yes. The first truth that Buddha taught is about suffering: that human beings suffer. It can be great suffering or minor suffering of discomfort, irritation, a feeling that the world is not exactly as I would expect it to be. The second truth is that there is a reason for our suffering, and the reason is Our attachment to objects and people. I loved my mother and she died, so I suffer."
Does this mean we should stop loving and bonding?
"No, but we must understand the causes of suffering. I must understand that if I love my mother and I deny the fact that she is going to die one day, I will suffer."
But in the meantime, the more you are in denial, the more complete your joy with the people you love.
"I would say no. Because on a certain level you are aware of the impermanence of things, even when you deny it. According to Buddha, the way to alleviate suffering is to accept impermanence as a fact, and still love."
Towards the end of the book, there is a story about an ancient and beautiful tea cup, which is passed down between Zen priests, and one day it slips and breaks.
The teacher looks up from the book he was reading, comments "it was already broken", and continues reading.
It's a lesson in the impermanence of all things: "The nature of the cup is to be broken. That's why it's so beautiful now, and that's why I appreciate the fact that I can still drink from it."
If we accept that things are already broken, what will be the motivation to change them?
"At some point in the future it will break, but it's not broken yet."
Usually revolutionaries think in terms of redemption, of a drastic solution and a fundamental difference.
"It's a very Judeo-Christian idea, the central concept in Zen is far from that."
Are you optimistic about the climate crisis? Jonathan Franzen wrote in his collection of essays, "The End of the End of the World", that we should be more realistic and begin to mourn what we have done.
"I like Antonio Gramsci's saying, 'Pessimism of reason, optimism of will.' When you look at human behavior, at American politics, you have every reason to be pessimistic. But as long as we live, we have to try to change. We have a moral obligation to The young generation that grew up here will not give up. We cannot solve the problem, but my religion is to remain optimistic."
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