I Want Nothing Dead in Me
Among many overlooked music loves I’ve fallen for lately is Leftover Wine, a collection of live recordings by summer-of-love folk singer and Woodstock alumn Melanie Safka. While you’re likely familiar with the schmaltz of “Brand New Key,” the simple warbled lyric that comes to mind these days for me is her sing-song ballad to a vegetarian diet.
“I Don’t Eat Animals” was never performed in a studio, best I can tell, and Melanie’s well-trod vocals fill a theater like a cold drink of water. In Melanie’s telling, vegetarianism is not a tribute to one’s own physical health but, instead, a pursuit for spiritual and physical purity:
“I was just thinking about the way it’s supposed to be
I’ll eat the plants and the fruit from the trees
And I’ll live on vegetables and I’ll grow on seeds
But I don’t eat animals and they don’t eat me.”
Through her pained singing, this simple melody and daisy-chain lyricism evoke the spare rote of a children’s church hymn — Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so. It is not a song made of argument. It is not the brute force persuasion defining veganism today — grainy films of mass slaughter by factory or the rightful attachment between food production and any number of exploitative systems, from the soil hosting factory feed production to the wretched working conditions that make a cheeseburger possible. For Melanie, vegetarianism is as pure in its sense as a playground song about sharing.
Oh no, I don’t eat animals ’cause I love them, you see
I don’t eat animals, I want nothing dead in me
I want nothing dead in me. When I revisited this song — during a therapeutic tour of my mother’s tape collection conducted over the last year — those words found me in a way they simply couldn’t through constant replays as a child. What about the things I consume are, in fact, dead? What does it say about my life and my body that it relies on the consumption of the dead? Not merely animal products— the things that are living and now aren’t — but the products, systems, people, and inputs surrounding me and many others which rely on death, which generate death, which steal lives even when they leave the body living?
In her 1987 tract When Society Becomes An Addict, the author Anne Wilson Schaef argues for such a broad redefinition of death with an eye on consumption and habits. In her telling, most of us are living within and among an “Addictive System”, defined as “a system that calls forth addictive behaviors” — late capitalism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, you name it.
These include the chemicals and behaviors we often associate with addiction — alcohol, nicotine, gambling, codependent relationships — as well as any habits, institutions, or people which command from us the behaviors that sustain addiction — dishonesty, forgetfulness, self-centeredness, and the enabling of the people near us. Though written two decades before most of us would start a Facebook account or send a tweet, the ravages of social media on our sanity, our time, and our democracy could clearly fit under this umbrella.
Schaef refers to these systems as “nonliving” and encourages us, like the addict, to choose to live instead of simply choosing not to die:
“Choosing to live means we can no longer support the system as it is. Choosing to live means that we cannot eat much of the food in our supermarkets, breath the air in many of our cities, allow our groundwater to be polluted by toxic wastes, or sit back and wait for nuclear holocaust. The addictive system asks us to accept these things — and more — as inherent to being because they are inherent to the addictive, nonliving system in which we live and hence ‘reality.’”
Predating Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Schaef warns this “White Male System” relies on the myth of its own inevitability and perpetuity — a myth challenged by the consequences of this system endured among our people and our planet — and exhibits the attributes of addiction in doing so. The impacts of addiction to our relationships and bodies are, as the consequences of capitalism, buried under a cultivated apathy, an enthusiasm for shallow pleasures, and the mutual willingness of those around us to participate in the rituals demanded by the substance or habit.
Anyone who has experienced addiction in themselves or their loved ones knows the mythology which sustains it is impervious to what is generally thought of as logic or reasoning. Nor is shaming for the consequences of said addiction all that motivating a factor, usually further stigmatizing the person at hand and further cementing them as a product of their habit. Motivation for change comes from strange places within us, odd valleys of our self-consciousness and self-conception that occasionally verge on the spiritual.
Particularly when facing a problem like climate change — enabled and created by massive systems — it can become easy to defer on the impact of individual actions or changes in the habits of everyday people. But as Schaef argues, even the systemic changes needed to prevent further climate-induced calamity will require inducing the motivation for change and sacrifice from the broader populace. It will require a new portrait of joy and meaning, one that embraces the living over the nonliving, one that encourages people to want nothing dead in them.
As Kate Soper writes in her recent book Post Growth Living, an “alternative hedonism” will be needed to manifest current and future generations which do not rely on the consumptive habits that have left us drunken on convenience and comfort at the expense of many beings and creatures. One should of course be wary of neoliberal solutions which emphasize nothing but individual input, but as Soper writes
“…to recognize the negative impact of austerity measures and inequality on the support for higher duties on fuel is one thing. It is another to ignore the extent to which workers as consumers as collusive in the reproduction of the capitalist economy — an issue on which much of the left has so far been extremely evasive. ”
Soper is highly skeptical of leftist intellectuals who promise utopian visions of the future which still depend on mass consumption and eternal growth — “fully automated luxury communism” which, all things considered, still relies on the production and enclosure typified by American consumerism and belied by disappearing coastlines, flooding rivers, and drastic heat. Indeed, most leftists and progressives who poo-poo efforts to change individual habits when it comes to the climate will rightfully recognize their impact on matters of racial or gender justice; The very term “microaggression” suggests we are willing to rout out individual and inter-personal habits we see for their danger and disruption. Likewise, labor organizing has a long history of pressuring people against becoming a scab — stepping over the rights of other people to participate in a destructive system being challenged by those very people.
Cleansing ourselves of consumptive habits is a daunting task — even Melanie’s vision of internal purity consumes dairy, “some raisins and cheese.” Ensuring I put nothing dead into me requires a gut check on the complicity in the exploitation of more people and lands than can be reasonably comprehended by any one person. It touches everything from the electricity in my air conditioning to the tags on my clothing, the apps I use on my phone to the cops I pay for with my tax dollars. There is hardly a headline in any day's news feed that does not rest on the complicity of myself and many others to this nonliving system.
Choosing the living system, as Schaef urges, requires a wholesale rebuilding of both my conception of death and my conception of what I mean when I say “I want nothing dead in me.” A pandemic can certainly remind us that we live in a society and are interconnected with all beings who reside near us, whose labor we depend upon, who are changed by our actions (or inaction), and change ourselves in turn. Appeals to sympathy for other beings can often miss this point — we are those other beings, those factory-farmed chickens, those fleeing refugees, those displaced families. They make up our existence as surely as food makes up the body, and ignorance of that fact is a key demand of the system which perpetuates their exploitation.
“Every atom that belongs to me,” wrote Walt Whitman more than 160 years ago, “as good belongs to you.” Building that presumption into my personal habits is not a matter of selfish reification nor a cottagecore vanity project. It is a daily reminder that the systems themselves must change alongside my complicity in them because one relies on the other. If the decisions you make on any given day were truly meaningless, you would not be so bombarded with bids for your attention, your love, your money by the Addictive System.
A common refrain in recovery is to avoid demonizing the addictive habit without simultaneously building a life you do not want to escape. It is not merely replacing the cigarette with a brisk walk, nor replacing the cheeseburger with trail mix. It is reconceptualizing yourself and your reality around the desire to live, to be full of life instead of death. Systemic change must be cultivated alongside it, but a personal commitment to the living can awaken us to the rot of our own experiences and inspire a new commitment to quit.
