The Unbearable Wokeness of Being
Asteroid City, Part I (Headless Chickens) - My English Traits - Chapter 42
You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep
Augie Steenbeck, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City
You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep
So go live your dreams and live them real deep
There is some countin' money and there's some countin' sheep
Oh, you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep
From the Jarvis Cocker song, played over the closing scene of Asteroid City in which a Looney Tunes-like road-runner scrambles backwards and forwards across a dirt track like a headless chicken, apparently forever.
I know no speck so troublesome as self.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872
Zuka was a wizened old stick of biltong of a Zulu whose job it was to make the fire that heated up the water tank that circulated hot water to the taps in the kitchen and in the bathrooms of the old New Dell farmhouse near Hidcote, Natal, where we lived from 1956 until 1965.
My mother said he was older than Methuselah and blacker than the ace of spades. She didn’t mean it in an ageist or racist way. There was no such thing as ageism in those days, and she didn’t have a racist bone in her body. All she meant was that he was very, very old and very, very black.
He was. His skin and his peppercorn beard and the big black pupils in his very red eyes were blacker than the soot he excavated from the red-brick fireplace beneath in the boiler every Monday morning. He wasn’t one of those shiny black Zulus with skin as silky and smooth as the sheen of a brinjal. Zuka’s skin was a shuck of dusty charcoal, as if he himself had been charred and shrunken in the fire of the ages, or like a finger of boerewors forgotten on a braai when the coals smouldered until three o’clock in the morning and nobody was sober enough to notice.
Bruce said if you cut him open he would have perished tractor tyres inside instead of flesh, and instead of blood he would have the black oil drained from the crank-case of the old, grey Massey-Ferguson ten years too late.
We had moved to Natal from our sheep farm in the Eastern Cape at my mother’s bidding. If marrying a farmer had committed her to living a life of rural parochialism, the rural surrounds of the Natal Midlands would at least remind her of George Eliot’s Midlands, the narrow-mindedness would at least be expressed in its native language of English, and accessing Durban’s cultural splendours would take only two hours in the Chevrolet.
When you bought a farm in South Africa in those days, the labourers and their kin were thrown in for free. You could bargain to have more or less of them, depending on your needs, tastes and preferences. But, unlike livestock, they were traditionally understood to be as much as part of the property as the streams, dams, fields and forests.
New Dell came with six Zulu families and Zuka. This last was living in the charred remains of a hut of mud and thatch he had recently burned to the ground by accident. It hadn’t been the first or even the second one. The other Zulus had long ago stopped inviting him into their kayas for their traditional Sunday afternoon tea and profiteroles with their extended families from Bruntville and Wembezi.
This was conveyed to my father in isiZulu-for-beginners. He had grown up speaking fluent isiXhosa, its close Nguni relative, so he got more than the gist of it. Which is how and why he put Zuka in charge of the fire. It wouldn’t go out as long as we lived there. Except one Easter.
He had found his vocation at last. Or so Dad thought until he discovered that Zuka had been hiding his true light under an eight-gallon bushel of indolence.
Since Zuka had nothing to do but throw an occasional log in the fire every few hours, and since he was far too old to lift, carry, hew, dig or draw water like the other Sons of Ham, my father offered him a few more shillings a month to chop the heads off chickens for lunch or dinner.
Which is where it gets interesting. He had a way of coaxing them to succumb to their executions with hypnagogic indifference.
You can find videos on how to hypnotize a chicken on YouTube. All of them will work, but not for the purpose of a clean beheading. Their versions of chicken hypnotism are feeble acts of amusement, as if to remind us in the most lighthearted possible way that our inhumane devastation of the natural world hasn’t gone far enough to demonstrate our god-like dominion over non-human creatures and all of their kingdoms on the planet. The text and the subtext are the same: See how stupid this chicken is compared to us.
The basic technique for inducing catatonia in poultry and many other species of mono-gastric animals is simple and effective. Take the chicken, for example.
Take it and pin it to the ground with at least one of its eyes at near-surface level. Now, starting from a spot in the sand as close to the chicken’s eye or eyes as possible, and at an angle of precisely ninety degrees from the lateral surface of its eyeball or eyeballs, trace a straight and clearly visible line in the sand with a finger or a finger-width stick with a slow, firm and steady movement away from the chicken’s eye or eyes, and continue as if towards infinity. Infinity for a chicken is approximately four and a half feet. Lift your hands away from the chicken and it will continue to lie frozen in precisely the same position, possibly forever. I don’t know. We never tested.
The popular practice of holding the chicken’s head upright and forcing its chin to the ground with its beak digging vertically into the sand will work, as per the example above. But for the blade of an axe to chop through the gristle and bone of chicken’s neck and into the earth in one clean stroke without the mischance and mess of a wobble between the underside of the neck and the surface of the ground is well nigh impossible in this posture.
To avoid the cruelty of having to chop several times to disentangle the head from the body, only Zuka’s method will suffice. He would hold the chicken on its side, the length of its beak parallel to the ground, the single uncovered eye staring in mute wonderment at the line in the thick New Dell dust he drew outwards with a finely honed twig of green wattle.
There would be no squawks, no fuss and no bother, except very briefly for the chicken of course, when Zuka’s axe sliced through the air, the neck and into the ground with French precision and a cracking and squelchy African thud.
Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off.
With or without the correct punctuation it’s true that a headless chicken can continue walking about and scratching in the dirt for several hours and even days, apparently, quite unperturbed by the absence of its cranium. The Smithsonian Magazine records the case of Miracle Mike, a chicken that lived for eighteen months without a head.
In 1946 its owners, the Olsens of New Ulm, Minnesota, took it on a tour of the neighbouring states and eventually the country, charging punters a quarter each to get a view of The Headless Wonder Chicken. They kept it alive by dripping a mixture of milk and water down its exposed throat with an eye-dropper. It died in 1947 while on their national tour. In a scene that Wes Anderson could have, should have and might already have dreamed up himself, Mike passed away in a squawkless frenzy of gurgles when the Olsens left the eyedropper behind in a motel room and couldn’t find another one in time to save him.
We witnessed the phenomenon of the headless chicken only once at New Dell. It wasn’t one of Zuka’s.
On that particular Easter Sunday, Zuka was indisposed. He had got indisposed by celebrating Easter Saturday even more than he had celebrated Easter Friday. Now that he had a full time job, he took his holidays very seriously.
My brother Rodney volunteered to keep the home fire burning in Zuka’s place. Brother Bruce volunteered to assassinate the Easter chicken. He had watched Zuka do it many times, absorbed and fascinated by the ritual transition from consciousness, to sleep, to death. I volunteered to pretend to watch.
The chicken was pinned. The line was drawn. The chicken succumbed to catatonia. Bruce lifted Zuka’s black axe, shouted “Ubani bulala!”*, and severed the head from the body in one clean stroke.
He took off his glasses, picked up the chicken’s head, and looked steadily into its unlit eyes as if in the hope of discovering where its life had disappeared to.
The air stood still. The farm stood still. It seemed for a few deathly seconds as if the whole world had stood still.
Then the chicken stood up, wandered unsteadily in a circle around the site of its execution, and began to scratch in the dirt for a worm for breakfast.
“What the f—-,” said Bruce.
“Classic displacement activity,” said Rod from the kitchen window. “Konrad Lorenz.”
“Stand back,” said my father from the kitchen door.
Daphne screamed from the bedroom window.
We stood back. Two blasts of eight-bore from his shotgun reduced the beast to a bloody but stationary pile of mince.
“There,” he said through a haze of blue smoke. “It’ll be tasty enough when we’ve picked the lead out.”
Zuka would explain when he was sober on Tuesday. You have to chop an inch or more further down the neck from the head. The Smithsonian confirms it. Some significant parts of a chicken’s brain reside in its neck. The head turns out to be only a part of its functional intelligence.
That’s what Asteroid City is about.
To be continued…
*Ubani bulala means, “Who is going to kill?” It was the first phrase of Estcourt High School’s infamously unwoke war-cry.