Gill’s Story
by Gill McIntosh
Something that really struck me and has stuck with me from Hungry Beautiful Animals (HBA) is Matt’s exploration of a person’s inner ecology. Drawing from Thich Nhat Hanh and his likening of our inner parts (body, heart and mind) to provinces that need to be governed (ideally with benevolence), Matt speaks, in one instance, of the disharmony he endured when he realized, in an epiphanic moment, that his longing for meat was finally behind him:
But if my moral and emotional provinces made peace that day and longing for meat became a thing of the past, my intellect still felt estranged from both. One of the most uncanny features of being human is living in the temporal gap between experience and understanding, ever enduring a vivid present whose meaning must be retrospectively coaxed from shifting and suggestible memory. (p.131)
To restore inner harmony amongst these provinces, Matt turns his mind to the human/animal binary, and there begins the work. No spoiler alerts from me at this point!
Perhaps I am so drawn to the concepts of plural self-hood and of the effect of the passage of time when it comes to understanding is because this is so close to my own current work, which, in turn, is very close to how I live and explore my own life lately, and how I interact with loved ones. So, I’ll run with all this here and explore my own provinces (which I call ‘selves’) as they pertain to my experiences of HBA, my review of it, and my own inward-turning and outward-discovering.
What I’ll do first is share my review that is posted on GoodReads (on Amazon as well, as of 11/12/24), and then unpack it a little, perhaps to show that it isn’t just a review, but my review. That is, the review is unique to me; it is unique to me because it is informed by my unique set of experiences in this lovely, little life. In much the same way, your reception of HBA will be (or will have been) unique to you, simply because you are entirely unique, simply because nobody else has had, is having, or will have the exact same set of experiences as you. What each of us has experienced will inevitably affect how each of us responds to anybody or anything or, in this case, any book. We bring our ‘selves’ (provinces) to a book, we get to see our ‘selves’reflected in a book, we get some thing(s) from a book, and we take some thing(s) away from a book once we’re done reading. What we bring, see, get and take away from a book offers us a marvelous opportunity to discover a bit about who we were and who we are, and why, and to see how that book played a role in our discoveries.
So here’s the review:
This is a big book. Not the sort of big book that the ancient Greek poet Callimachus lamented (mega biblion, mega kakon; “a big book is big trouble”). No. Hungry Beautiful Animals is big in beauty and joy and kindness and hilarity and honesty and humility and hope and love. It is magnanimous in the word’s most literal sense: big-hearted (magnus + animus).
Here is an exquisitely written, ebullient book, an effervescent, soul-fueled, soul-filled labor of love, sometimes heart-wrenching, more often heart-soaring, always inspiring and entirely captivating. Hungry Beautiful Animals is so beautifully crafted that readers with the narrowest of visions and smallest of imaginations will find themselves transported by the compelling, inspiring, hopeful and energizing content, and see that this ‘going vegan’ isn’t just possible, but legit exciting, and, ultimately, necessary for the good of all living beings, including the planet itself.
Matt writes, “My hope…is to woo you, to dazzle you, to inspire you with a vision of a vegan world so grand that no rigid “-ism” [sc. veganism] with a one-size-fits-all rule book and infinite ways to get disqualified could contain it” (p.8). For in this book, you will find no shame, no blame, no judgment, no expectations of perfection. You will find possibility, wonderment, hope and understanding, and you will find out how, for example, dog turds and goose shit can proffer experiences of epiphanic proportion that catapult you towards and along a journey of uniting and opening the body-mind-soul. As the Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh noted, “No shit, no lotus” (more often translated as “no dung” or “no mud”). Thanks to Gus and the geese and Matt’s awakenings, we have the lotus that is Hungry Beautiful Animals.
I never expected to say this regarding a book on vegan living, but I was wooed and dazzled and inspired, and I imagine others will be as well. I read Hungry Beautiful Animals in only two sittings (it’s that hard to put down!), thoroughly captivated, in total enjoyment, and with an increasingly opening and warming heart. Hungry Beautiful Animals is, by my lights, a “kairos” moment.
A little over 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Catullus began one of his poems with vivamusatque amemus, “let us live and let us love”. The ‘us’ here is specifically directed towards the poet and his lover. To me, though, this exhortation, when expanded and issued forth to all living beings, captures well the essence and sentiment of Matt’s glorious work. Let us all live and let us all love.
Ok, so let’s see what might be discovered about my selves and my experiences of HBA. Bear in mind that my conscious mind was entirely unaware of all of this when I wrote my original review. It’s only after some time away from the review that I can revisit it, do some exploring and perhaps make some discoveries.
Let’s start with something a little unusual in my review, namely the bookended references to Callimachus and Catullus, the former an ancient Greek poet from the 3rd C BCE, the latter an ancient Roman poet from the 1st C BCE. I imagine that not too many other reviews, if any, refer to these Greco-Roman poets in their review of HBA. So why did I? Clearly, something about Matt’s book caused me to think about them, and to find connection between HBA and their own ancient works. Still, weird. Except, not so weird, since I happen to earn my living as a professor of Classical languages and literature. Such connections unfold organically for me, if seeming a little idiosyncratic to others. What we see, from these references, is that I brought my academic self to HBA.
Closer exploration reveals more. My reference to Callimachus concerns books. You’d be making a pretty safe inference, if you were to suppose that I’m interested in books. As an academic, I’d better be interested in books! So, I brought my book-loving self to HBA as well as to my review of it. Then there’s my reference to Catullus and his exhortation to living and loving. We see here that I am not just interested in books per se, but also in the content of books in general, and in living and loving in particular. Given this interest in living and loving, it is safe to assume (despite the dangers of assumption) that I brought not just my academic self, but also my heart self to HBA.
The presence of this heart self is also evident not only because of the Catullan reference, but alsobecause this review is so very far from being academic. When Matt first asked me to write a review, I imagined that whatever I wrote would be typical of academic reviews – a neat and cogent evaluation of HBA’s structure, central arguments, organization, strengths, value, &c. My usual m.o. is to take copious notes in the margins, summarizing the essentials of every paragraph. I then use those marginalia to compose the review. But with HBA, the margins arestuffed with ‘Wow!’, ‘Yes!’, ‘Lovely’, ‘Wonderful’, ‘Powerful’, and the like. Such comments are not great fodder for a fancyass review, but they do speak to my reception. Likewise, in the review itself, instead of the high-falutin’ language of the Ivory Tower, we find words such as ‘beauty’, ‘joy’, ‘kindness’, ‘honesty’, ‘humility’, ‘hope’, ‘love’, ‘inspiring’, ‘energizing’, ‘possibility’, ‘wonderment’ and ‘understanding’. Why? Why more heart self than academic self?
In part, this is because the ‘heart-ness’ of my review is also a reflection of my current self, areflection that would have been far different were HBA to have been published 18 months ago.Beginning in January of 2023 and running through until June of 2024, I was experiencing incredible stress and strain, both personally and professionally. My cortisol production was bionic, my blood pressure was through the roof, and I was running on empty, totally shattered but unable to find relief. Unsurprisingly, since living in fight-or-flight mode is not sustainable, my body became ill and forced me to stop. Surgery for a malignant melanoma on my lateral left thigh quite literally took me off my feet; I had to spend four weeks with my leg, fully bandaged from foot to hip, above my heart. No walking. Just lying on the couch or in bed. Sounds wretched, don’t you think? Yet, I was in fact very grateful for this enforced time-out because I just couldn’t keep going at such a frantic pace. I needed a break.
During that month, and quite without plan, I read a number of books and listened to a number of podcasts that tended to the relationship between our thoughts and our lives, our thoughts and our health, our thoughts and our past, our thoughts and our future. (Thoughts, of course, belonging to the inner provinces.) Some of the material was scientific, some spiritual. I also took to meditating, practicing gratitude, and looking for joy. I’m not really sure what exactly happened, but one morning, I was lying on the couch and a tremendous sense of surrender, aletting go of all the nonsense and irrelevance and worry, swept through me. I felt indescribable calm. Harmony. Ease. And ever since then, my heart has become open. I began to see, and continue to see, so much joy and experience so much gratitude. My life has become one of loving. Living and loving. It was under these new conditions that I picked up HBA. I brought my loving self to the book, and as a result, found much love within it. Having so much stress for so long, having cancer and surgery, and being unable to move for a month, was shite. But what emerged was pretty miraculous. No shit, no lotus.
In part, my review is more heart-informed than head-informed because my relationship with Matt and Susan and their family is one of love, not profession. When I read HBA, I couldn’t help but lapse into fond memories from when I lived in MI. During those years, I spent more time with the Halteman family than I did at my own home. We shared many wondrous meals, enjoyed marvelous conversations, nights of binge-watching telly, days and nights of scrabble marathons, and not too infrequently an indulgence in liquid overindulgence. As for Gus, well, that little guy was the first pet companion I ever came to love. He was adorable beyond compare. I could go on. But my point here is to say that I see my love for Matt and Susan and Gus and their family reflected in my reception of HBA.
So, to answer the “why?” regarding the non-academic language, I guess I’d say that that’s because my heart self, my current self, and my Halteman self have sort of trumped the academic version of me in terms of volume. Those selves are more loudly reflected in my review. And that’s because those selves have informed my reception – what I see, what I don’t see, what I gravitate towards, what I overlook, what I enjoy, what I get and what I don’t get.
So what do I get from HBA? I get loving kindness, open-heartedness, awe, acceptance, humor, non-judgment, forgiveness, hope, honesty, humility, authenticity, abundance, understanding, imagination, inclusion, thoughtfulness, spirituality, beauty, truth, wonderment, joy, and then some. All that just for starters J And I get not only to witness these tremendous values unfold in Matt’s work and life, but I get also to be intentional about putting these same values into my own daily practices – at work, at home, out on a hike, at the yoga studio, at the grocers’, and pretty much anywhere and everywhere that each day takes me. What a gift.
These values, then, aren’t just what I get from HBA; they are also what I get to take away from my experience of reading this book. Moving forward, I now see that HBA has contributed to bringing me closer to the version of me that I aspire to be, perhaps because all the goodness within it now abides at a more conscious level in my own mind. I feel inspired to be well, to do good, and to show especial care and love towards all creatures. So, when I brought water to a withering wasp, when I picked up a caterpillar from the middle of a busy hiking trail and put it in the shrubbery, when I caught a moth inside my house and released it into nature, and when I picked up my neighbor’s planted tree that had toppled, I was in some sense guided by HBA. And with each small act of loving kindness, I was brought back to HBA. And I was then fueled to do more, because, wow!, what a wonderful feeling it is to step out of the self and give to others.
Here's another example of what I take away from HBA. After reading Matt’s book, I found myself quite unable to eat the eggs that were in my fridge. That was fine for a while, but then the ‘best before’ date arrived, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to be a poor steward and toss the eggs in the compost, but I also just couldn’t bring myself to prepare them in any way. So, I texted my friend to see if she happened to need eggs. It was a peculiar and random thing to text to somebody, but get this: she wrote back to say that she had just gotten home from the grocers’, and the one thing she forgot to purchase was …you got it… a dozen eggs. She was especially bummed because she had been planning to bake a cake that evening to honor the second anniversary of her mother’s passing (which fell on the very next day). She was beyond delighted to take me up on my offer. I ran the eggs over to her. She baked the cake for her mother. I found relief for my conscience. And I got to thank HBA for being an unwitting facilitator in this marvelous synchronicity.
Ok, one more! The direction of my own book, currently under construction, has taken a turn in part because of my experience of HBA. I’ll spare the details, but the short version is that I’d been struggling for almost 2 years to ‘get’ what I wanted to say. Why for so long? Because I was trying to write for my institution, for promotion, for academic ego-fulfillment. I was trying to be clever and erudite and sophisticated. But none of that was working. After reading HBA, and after bearing witness to this “soul-fueled labor of love” – i.e. a work from the heart – I contemplated my own work and realized that what I really wanted to do was write from the heart, not the head. Who knows where it will go, but for now, inspiration, enthusiasm and authenticity are with me and guiding me as I move forward. And the process is so much more enjoyable, devoid now of the pressure and humdrummy, doldrummy -ness of academic writing. More gratitude for HBA then.
This inquiry into what I brought to HBA, what I see of my selves reflected in my review, what I got and what I take away from HBA as I look at it in retrospect, has been so helpful, if only because it brings many wonderful things to the forefront of my conscious mind. The experience of reflecting on my experience (and review) of HBA, on my own person, and on the interactivity between the two has been informative, helpful, and deeply enjoyable. If you’re still reading this, here’s what I would suggest: you might like to write your own review (and post it or not), then take a look at it in a month or more and see what you discover. I suspect you’ll find it rewarding.
