The thing about one’s partner cooking you and others a vast meal of roast pig and onions and potatoes and other sundry delicious things, when they themselves are vegetarian, as an act of love and Yuletide giving?
Well, I’m just grazing on leftovers since I woke up, and I keep thinking, “I’m just doing as my ancestors have done for thousands of years after a big midwinter feast.”
I think of boar as beast-of-battle, as lord of woods, fierce and terrible, the way pig is the eater-of-all, who is eaten – slaughtered, cured, crisped, cooked and condimented.
And with a mouthful of pig, teasing apart the protein changed by heat and condiments, now cool, I keep thinking about how pigs can go feral and regrow manes really quickly, or how chickens revert to having a breeding season. I keep thinking about how the pig feast continuity is also a break, a crack, a ritual that is both highly domestic, and yet loosens me from 21st century modernity in a way. An ancient ritual that simultaneously fetters and loosens.
I wonder, are these the moments of dis/continuity, liminal in-between eases that hint and beckon that we are, I am, in eating the-eater-of-all that is pig, realising something of the feral/domestic slash. Somewhen, where the environment, the interplay of more-than-chicken, more-than-pig, more-than-human fields and forces summons new-old responses to what is ever-ongoing.
Maybe that is what it is to eat, and be eaten in turn. To ever be one-with-many, to be an emergent coalescence bubbling up from the ancient fermentation of ancestral grief’s, joys, and hopes.
To be gone in a scant century if we stretch to our most, and yet be part of billions of those centuries across thousand of years of recognition of sun and moon and stars, and the way they shape our worldings?
Freyja, mistress of sorcery, taker of first of the battle-slain, teacher of Odin who himself is Slain-tamer – she rides a boar.
There is something here, as ever, about hidden things within the “human” of modernity, numinous leakages, signs and wonders, portents and portals, left behind ritual spoor so old that is purely “what we do, what happens”.
All that is required is that we notice, and do not give up sensing, for the sake of making sense.