Capra hircus
By the time you write yourself a
letter, and carefully fold the aerogramme, and lick the gluey edges so that
they seal, and hand it to somebody else who will stick a stamp on it and put it
in the post for you – by the time you’ve done all of those things, and then
waited two or three days for the letter to arrive, you’ve nearly forgotten that
you sent the letter at all; and thus, when you open your letterbox after coming
home from work in the near-twilight of a mid-spring evening and see in there
the exuberantly patterned aerogramme that was in your possession for ten or
fifteen minutes the previous weekend, there is a moment in which you don’t
recognise what it is that you’re looking at; you don’t remember having ever
seen, let alone touched and marked and addressed, such an envelope before. Then, just an instant later, you remember,
and the surprise and delight is so startling that you can’t help but grin. You can’t help but be happy.
It’s the same sensation, perhaps,
that you would feel if you climbed the stairs of an extravagantly decorated
1920s theatre and found, near the bar, a small goat defecating discreetly on
the carpet. You would probably have been
to this theatre before, on an earlier Sunday, and so you would have expected to
see a goat, or some other farmyard animal; or if not necessarily expected it,
then certainly anticipated it as a possibility; yet seeing the animal,
nonetheless, would be such a great joy and surprise that you would be unable to
prevent yourself from crying out and touching the goat, stroking its hair, laying
your fingers gingerly upon the horns growing out of its head.
There’s something endearingly old-fashioned
about a goat. There’s something about a
goat, the look of it, the sound of its bleating, the wiry yet surprisingly soft
texture of its coat, that marks the animal somehow as ancient – and indeed the
goat is one of the oldest of all domesticated animals. Starting with the Wild Goat or Bezoar (Capra aegagrus, still
found throughout central Asia and the Middle East today), our Neolithic ancestors began herding goats millennia
ago, and despite all the unfathomable time that has passed between then and now
neither we nor the goats have changed very much.
The earliest evidence of the domestication
of goats comes from two sites, in Turkey
at the north of the valley of the Euphrates
River; and in Kurdish
Iran. Remains of Domestic Goats found in
these two sites date back some ten thousand years; a few thousand years later
the long stretch of land roughly between these two sites would become the
cradle of modern civilisation: Mesopotamia.
It was here that urbanisation began, with the emergence of arguably the
world’s first cities; as populations grew and these early cities became larger
and more frenetic with activity it became necessary to develop a method of
keeping track of trades, finances, debts, and all the other daily negotiations
of human society. People began making
marks in clay to serve as aides memoire
– people, in short, began writing.
In Mesopotamia,
writing began as a means of keeping track of traded goods. Then as now, a great part of the economy was
based on agriculture – and there must have been more than a few goats tabulated
in those ancient rudimentary written words. Then and now goats must have been bought and
sold by the hundred: the goat, wild or domestic, has always been a herd
animal. This must have been one of the
things that made it attractive to humans in the first place; and perhaps it’s
not so fanciful to imagine that our ancient Mesopotamian ancestors recognised
in herds of goats some kind of kinship: that animals such as goats group
together to feel safer from tangible threats such as predators is not really so
different from the way in which more abstract fears – loneliness; isolation;
estrangement – lead people to seek out the company of each-other, particularly
in cities.
Though we prize our
individuality, we want nonetheless to feel that we are part of a community
greater than ourselves. We live cheek-by-jowl
with each-other; we cherish good neighbours; we start to feel strange when we
haven’t communicated with anybody in a while. How excited must the originators of those
first early written missives have been, to have created a new way to
communicate to each-other previously incommunicable thoughts? We write because we wish, in some way, to
share our perception of the world with our fellow humans – to ask if anybody
experiences the world the same way we do.
Though we too readily forget it now, we in the Western world have
inherited from the ancient Mesopotamians a culture and a sense of community
that is based in a fundamental way on the written word.
Yet the written word is useless
if it is not read. It is the reading,
the listening, the experiencing of writing by others – whether that writing is
mercantile, practical, fanciful, or fictional – that gives the written word its
purpose. Writing is about reaching out,
grasping at comprehension across the otherwise unknowable boundary of another
human’s individual consciousness; writing ensures that words and stories and
experiences can survive beyond the fragile lives of their creators; writing
creates communities, and through communities, comfort.
Every month just such a community
– loose, shifting, growing, but always unified in spirit – gathers at the
Thornbury Theatre, in Melbourne’s north.
The Thornbury Theatre was once the Regent Theatre, a cinema opened on
the 8th of August 1925. Now,
after decades of dormancy except as a banquet hall, it hosts live events of all
kinds, from music to wrestling. For the
last two years it has also hosted Women of Letters, a literary event in a city
full of them but one which almost immediately, and completely organically,
acquired the kind of excitement and dedication that people only bestow upon
things that they truly love.
If you live in Melbourne you
probably know all about Women of Letters already; if you don’t, here are the
basics: created and curated by Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire, at the end
of each month the event draws together, before an invariably sold-out audience,
a disparate group of five women – different women each time, though several
have by now appeared more than once.
These women will each have been asked to write a letter inspired by a
particular theme; they then read the letter out. Anything beyond that is left to the writer’s
discretion, and the letters range from the bawdy to the raw to the wry to the
heartbreaking – usually all in one afternoon, frequently all in one
letter. Between the reading of the
letters and a brief question-and-answer session, the audience is provided with
pens, postcards and aerogrammes, and invited to write a letter to somebody, to
be posted by Marieke and Michaela.
That’s what happens in literal
terms, but such a description gives no impression at all of what it is that
keeps several hundred people coming back to the Thornbury Theatre every month,
begging for tickets if necessary and turning up early to queue out onto the
street. There’s a promise of a Sunday
afternoon’s entertainment, of course – but entertainment can be found
anywhere. What Women of Letters provides
more than anything is a sense of belonging.
A male friend of mine asked me a
couple of weeks ago if men were welcome.
It’s true that the great majority of the audience is made up of women,
but nobody who attends a Women of Letters event is made to feel out of place. It’s precisely this warmth and openness that
brings people to Women of Letters. We’re
all there to listen, and hearing women – hearing people – recount astonishingly
frank and honest stories of their own lives galvanises us into the
understanding that community, fellowship, a sense of shared experience, will
always be the essential aspect of the experience of being human. We are social animals; we are the only
animals on earth who create anything like a city: a space shared by millions of
individuals with no genetic relationship with each-other, no base biological
reason to put up with each-other.
We make our communities not just physically, but
emotionally as well. Above all,
emotionally. And in our better moments
we try to reach out to others – to our fellow humans, and sometimes – though
too rarely – to other animals caught up in the maelstrom of human life. Besides celebrating the art of
letter-writing, Women of Letters was started expressly to support the work of
Edgar’s Mission, an animal shelter outside Melbourne dedicated to providing
sanctuary to animals from factory-farms.
Factory-farming is the brutal end-point of domestication: a production
line of animals bound in servitude to a life and death of the utmost cruelty
and despair. From time to time one of
the animals from Edgar’s Mission will be brought to Women of Letters, up the
stairs to the upstairs entrance of the Thornbury Theatre, to remind everybody
what it’s all about: to remind us all of the consequences and responsibilities
of the thousands of years of domestication and animal use and abuse that have
been at the heart of human life for longer than we can remember. From before we had writing; from before we
had cities; from before, even, we had communities, we had animals in our lives.
They are there still, every aspect of
our life is abundant with them; in their own way they are part of our community
– and as we talk to each-other, write to each-other, listen to each-other, we
should make the effort to remember them, too.
They have been with us for so long.
Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org
