Well-being is a wallow

When you are in love, you are continually looking for that one familiar face in every queue or crowd. In any other situation, it can become a great annoyance to always face that bewildered mad maze of strangers.

For humans, crowds excite our discontent. It is there that we are most clearly reminded of the cureless certainties of all our lives – toil, death and ignorance of our fate.

Husbandry once suggested that pigs, and many other farm animals, think in herds and so find comfort in the press of crowds. It is now understood that pigs, at least, more likely go mad this way.

The confinement and crush incite a sense of sorrow and catastrophe. Pigs can only recover their well-being slowly, in open spaces, one by one.

the Porcine Oracle

In crowds we have queued, hectic but hopeful, for snacks and knick-knacks, for tickets and technologies. Always amid an aura of escalating foreboding and a feasible failure of fulfillment.

Humans and many of the world’s creatures have also queued for death. Death in the varied butcheries of human history. Death in the varied slaughterhouses of human industry. And is not life itself nature’s extended crowded queue, moving us all towards death?

Only by ignoring both history and nature for awhile can we dispel these feelings of pervasive foreboding that arise in the crush and drift crowds.

We need quiet study and meditation to combat this sorrow. Well-being is a private wallow of uncommon contents, we must each build and protect our own.

From the Porkopolis Archive:

• To an optimist, even the smallest puddle is a wallow
• The stubbornness of pigs – King Bladud of Bath obliges swine to wallow
• The Junior God who wallowed awhile with the swine
• Robert Peters pig, Gyp: Gloriously he wallows in the finest muck-holes / Believing he is in Paradise, awash in tarry ichor.