For a lively three-star Reedsy Discovery review by Jennie Louwes of New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, go here.
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As always, for my other books, go here.
BLOOD
“Blood!” exclaim Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, uttering their newfound watchword, in anticipation of a midnight foray into a cemetery where they will, in fact, witness a murder. (This, at least, is how it was in a children's theater version of the story that I saw long ago.)
Blood: The word conjures up all kinds of meanings and associations, some pleasant and some the very opposite. It can mean heredity. “Le bon sang ne ment pas” (good blood doesn’t lie) is a saying in French, used by the old nobility to talk up their superiority to commoners (i.e., you and me).
Blood is one of the four humors of medieval medicine, a notion that originated with the Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.), considered the founder of modern medicine. The perfect balance of the four — black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood — supposedly guaranteed health. Furthermore, an excess of any one humor determined a person’s personality. Black bile made people melancholic (sensitive, artistic); yellow bile made them choleric (full of vitality, but quick to anger); phlegm made them phlegmatic (calm, open to compromise); and blood made them sanguine, meaning joyful and optimistic — a meaning that survives in the word today. So according to Hippocrates & Co., a bit too much blood isn’t a curse; what’s wrong with being joyful? If “blood” has a bad press, it’s not his fault.
Growing up, I was told by my parents to eat meat, because meat builds red corpuscles, and red corpuscles make one strong and healthy. I remember blood swabs recorded in the family doctor’s office, little splats of color smeared on cards year after year with a date. As I grew up, mine progressed from pink to deeper pink to red. But not because of red corpuscles, I suspect, for I loathed meat, wouldn’t eat it, was left alone at the lunch table for up to two hours at a time, staring at the cold chunks of meat that, even when warm, repelled me. My solution: I hid the uneaten bits of meat on a small ledge under the table and later removed them to my knicker pockets and from there to the trash. But once I forgot to empty my pockets, and my mother, preparing to send my knickers to the laundry, was amazed to find the pockets full of stale chunks of meat.
Blood is red, and the color red suggests fire and violence, an association reinforced in me more than once, upon seeing a whole building (not my own) engulfed in flames. Violence often means bloodshed, the taking of life, which in most people inspires a feeling of horror. One major exception: hunters view the shedding of animals’ blood as normal; it’s simply part of the game. My father was a hunter, and he explained to me that hunting is an instinct, stronger in some people than in others. He was a hunter; I was not. He taught me at age sixteen to shoot a shotgun, but the gun's recoil gave me a shoulder ache, and I had no desire to kill the blackbirds flying overhead, or the rabbits scampering through brush, that were the targets of our shotgun outings. I didn’t even relish fishing, and winced when my father occasionally caught a fish that then flopped about in panic on the floor of our rowboat, until he bashed it against the side of the boat. No blood, perhaps, but violence nonetheless.
In the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks were designated “Reds,” and in fact were quite willing to shed blood, to kill, if they deemed it necessary. And not just the Czar and his family, but even fellow revolutionaries, if they challenged Lenin’s authority.
The French Revolution found a means of executing efficiently en masse: the guillotine. It shed blood, but ended life with one quick stroke, therefore was deemed, in its way, humane. But the horror of the revolution’s violence is well summed up in prints showing the executioner holding up the severed head of Louis XVI to a cheering mob. Scenes such as this inspired Tennyson, very English and very conservative, to deprecate “the red fool fury of the Seine.” Ironically, the king’s failure to hold the revolution in check at an earlier stage was due to his refusal to have his troops fire on the people; he abhorred bloodshed.
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| Robespierre's death by Madame la Guillotine, July 28, 1794. His death marked the end of the Reign of Terror. A French engraving, circa 1799. |
Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine (the Church abhors blood) was a tenet of the medieval Christian Church, but that didn’t keep the Inquisition from sentencing heretics to death. Granted, death by fire — by being burned at the stake — might not involve bloodshed, but the Church avoided the violence of executions by handing its victims over to the secular authorities, who nursed no such hypocritical reservations. And merry bonfires there were, and well attended, with the victims sometimes crying out, “More fuel, good people, more fuel!” in hopes of speeding up their death. If the wind was wrong and the fire burned slowly, what was usually a half-hour torment could stretch out to a full two hours.
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| Chained heretics burned at the stake. Date and source unknown. |
Yes, bloodshed is abhorrent. The ultimate in horror is attained when a psychopathic killer drinks his victim’s blood. Yes, such acts have been recorded, and the offender isn’t a fictional creation like Dracula; he’s very real. (Yes, usually a man.). But these are individual psychopaths, not typical of society. And yet, in wartime one may wonder. Wartime films rarely survive into peacetime. I recall a film from World War II in which an Australian civilian showed his righteous rage and patriotism by choking a Japanese soldier to death. I can’t imagine it being shown in peacetime; it would be … yes, abhorrent.
But what if a whole society thinks that its survival depends on drinking human blood? Such was the Aztec belief. Only the sacrifice of human blood gave strength to the sun; without it, the sun would be overtaken and destroyed by the pursuing forces of darkness, causing the extinction of the human race. On prominent display in the National Anthropology Museum of Mexico City is the Aztec Calendar Stone, also known as the Aztec Sun Stone, a heavy circular stone close to 12 feet in diameter and 39 inches thick. When I saw it there many years ago, I was overwhelmed. Thinking that maybe, on this very stone, human sacrifices had once been performed, I felt both chilled and fascinated.. This may have been my overwrought imagination at work, but the stone is certainly linked to sacrifice. In its very center is a god holding a human heart in each of his clawlike hands, his protruding tongue in the shape of a sacrificial knife.
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| Rob Young |
Depending on the state, in this country we allow the death penalty for certain crimes, but in modern times we don’t want blood to be shed. Too gross, too icky. So we shun the guillotine and try everything else: the electric chair, which sometimes has the victim twitching in agony; hanging, which sometimes leaves the victim likewise writhing in agony; and the gas chamber, a ”scientific” contraption that also lacks the quick finality of Madame Guillotine. No matter how you go at it to avoid the shedding of blood, it’s messy, and often downright cruel. I hadn’t anticipated ending on this note, but here indeed we are. Messy as they are, the guillotine and the stroke of an ax are mercifully quick and definitive.
Coming soon: Hot Mama: Goddess, Mother, Virgin, Whore. Not, in any conventional sense, a hymn to motherhood.
© 2020 Clifford Browder
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