Peripheral Visions

relationships between God and humankind and the nature of the cosmos.
    The sacrifice of a sheep links several religious traditions. The Patriarch Abraham, we are told, was commanded by God to sacrifice his son—Ishmael in the Islamic version, Isaac for Jews and Christians; then, at the last moment, he was provided with a ram as a substitute. The story is emphasized most in Islam, representing the value of total submission to the will of God, a God who proves compassionate. Volumes have been written about the relationship between this single observance and older traditions of human and animal sacrifice and their echoes in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic worship. In the rituals of Passover and Easter, the recurrent sacrifice is reshaped in various ways: the shank bone of a lamb on the Seder table, the Lamb of God imaged in the single atoning sacrifice of Good Friday and its year-round memorials. There in that garden an ancient symbol connecting many faiths was still a real sheep that would bleed real blood.
    The sheep was given a drink of water and turned toward the south, toward Mecca. Then, saying “in the name of God” and “Allahu Akbar,” the gardener quickly slit its throat, letting the blood gush out into a ditch. I was holding Vanni on my hip and explaining what was happening, for children can handle such scenes (including those we see every day on television) if they see them in the company of an adult who both interprets and sets an emotional tone.
    The sheep was skinned and its various organs removed. The gardener made a slit above one hind hoof and began to blow into it, forcing air under the skin to separate it from the flesh, so the body gradually puffed out and he could slit down the front and remove the woolly pelt. Deftly he spread the fleece, wool side down, on the ground, to receive the various edible organs one by one. “See, Vanni,” I said, “that’s a heart; every animal has one. Its job is pushing the blood around the body all the time.” I wondered if I should introduce the word pump ? No time. Intestines, stomach, liver…some were harder than others to explain, and my mind was racing for vocabulary to convey an understanding of the similarity of all mammals that would not trigger too much identification with the dead sheep. The fleece and the organs neatly laid out upon it would be the butcher’s portion.
    I had slipped into a teaching role, taking advantage of the visual aids to give a minilecture about each organ, using a vocabulary appropriate to a verbal two-and-a-half-year-old. Then suddenly, just as I was saying, “That big thing is a lung, see, for pulling in air and breathing, and the sheep has two of them, just like we do—here comes the other,” I thought, with a moment of intense shock, Why, it’s huge. In fact, I had never observed the death or dissection of any mammal larger than a mouse. Because I had an abstract knowledge of anatomy, distanced from the reality, and because I was preoccupied with Vanni’s experience, it was almost impossible to realize that I was encountering something new myself. What I was passing on to her was not knowledge based on direct experience but a set of labels, whose theoretical character was invisible to me until I was jolted by a detail I had failed to anticipate. My words could hardly have been more abstract if I had started from theology or Biblical history.
    Just as I could say, “That’s a heart, that’s a lung,” we go through life, saying, “I must be in love,” “Oh, this is seasickness,” “This is an orgasm,” “This is a midlife crisis.” We are ready with culturally constructed labels long before we encounter the realities, even to the point of saying, “This is a heart attack,” “I must be dying.” We can call our fate by name before we meet it. It will not retreat, but we are often relieved when doctors name our conditions.
    The facts of the body both separate and connect. They testify to the links between human beings and other mammals and living systems, but they divide the sexes and the developmental stages. The body’s truths are often concealed, so it is not always easy to learn about birth or sex or death, or the curious and paradoxical relationships between them. We keep them separate and learn about them on different tracks, just as we learn separately about economics and medicine and art, and only peripheral vision brings them back together. Experience is structured in advance by stereotypes