0458
PARTISAN REVIEW
the blood-avoiding law of Moses. But consider it as an order to feel
no blame and have an innocent appetite. In things like this the secret
of health and eating is to be found. A Paschal lamb. To the ancient
Greek islanders, a fish. And if Christ's blood ran for us, why shouldn't
the blood of steers run, and why should anybody flinch at the
butchering of the calves or the trussed pigs that go thrashing and
squealing round on the big stockyard wheels in the south part of
our great city? Now this is just the appropriate place for the ques–
tion, for the threads are spun out here that lead to thousands of
Minotaurs a day through pens and galleries, and if the knackers'
hammers stopped falling there would have to
be
some other ground–
note to hold up the harmony. But friends let us be careful. There is
so much prosperity and fame out of packing that we dassn't think of
the awful names of the Carthaginian or Canaanite demons or Moa–
bitic Peors in connection with it unless we have something to pro–
pose and speak to a useful purpose. So remember what the subject is.
Health of the person. Original vigor.
Mens sana in corpore sano.
And
you see that I am no mock-duck vegetarian or nature-curer or Fletch–
erizer urging you to chew; nor a health-parson saying that consecra–
tion is good for the nerves and that the saints and apostles were pole–
vaulters. Nor am I here to frighten the young men with warnings of
gleet and morning-drop and other threats and terrors of the street–
guide or admonish the girls not to take drugs tampering with their
courses. No scares nor superstitions, nothing like that. I'm talking
of nutrition, plain and simple, and the deep causes of good and bad
health, and I began with hamburger meaning to explore why the
shape of the creature is ground up--not only in hamburger but
in its allies chopped-steak and salisbury steak, and other euphemisms
of the menu as well, and in croquettes and hash-ground and hidden
with the best formal art of Thompson's and Pixley's for the noon–
hour ravenous, not to give an evidence of the living and a hint of
obligation to reverence and indebtedness. Is that a deep offence, the
beginning of sickness? Does that make cold tallow out of the fat
which should be the grease of love? I believe so. For there is a bad
conscience somewhere about it. The injurious part is that a reality
is subtracted along the way and something spoiling creeps in. Things
have to be accounted for in full by a demand of our nature, and in
that respect the wild Melanesian and the Kalahari dwarf are in a
