The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization (PETA) have some horrific video and photographic footage of how blood is taken from horses at the Refik Saydam Hygiene Center, in Turkey. A horse is forced down, legs tied, throat slashed, and blood drained from it until it expires. Once dead, it is dragged out of the premises and left there.

According to PETA,

RSHC produces horse serum for the government as a cheap but dangerous substitute for human serum in medical products. The United States long ago used horse serum for rabies shots and other antitoxins until it was discovered that horse antibodies lead to a dangerous condition called “serum sickness” in 16 percent of patients. Today, horse blood is increasingly unnecessary for medical use in the U.S., but when it is needed, obtaining it is nothing like what happens in this house of horrors run by the Turkish government.

The Europeans and Americans, when they take blood from horses do so as they would from human beings, with a needle, and have the horse supposedly standing comfortably in a stall.

Anyway, yesterday I send an email to RSHC President Mustafa Ertek and asked:

1. What is the RSHC’s official response to PETA’s request to stop this cruel technique of taking blood?
2. How soon can the RSHC stop this technique and adopt a more humane one, such as collecting blood with a needle?
3. How quickly do you think technicians can be trained to make proper needle insertions instead of slashing the throats of the animals and leaving them to die?
4. How quickly can RSHC premises be prepared (with the building of stalls to comfortably house horses giving blood, etc) to adopt a new and more humane method of taking blood?

I await a response.

Meanwhile, the footage still haunts me. It’s with me everywhere. Hangs over everything I do. And I think about the problem of evil and what literature can/should do about it.

Should writers address the problem of evil?

I have some unreferenced notes which I think belong to Susan Sontag as reported by a friend, Liesl, who heard her speak somewhere some time ago. The now late Sontag, if my memory of the origin of these notes is correct believed that it is our task “as narrator” to enquire about the nature of evil. To question simultaneity, to question why evil and misery can exist in the same world where good and happiness exists.

I thought about simultaneity: it isn’t precisely so, because when one is present, the other is not, and visa versa. Happiness only exists when misery is hidden. And misery exists when happiness is hidden.

Seeing the horse video made me unhappy for the duration of the video and for a few days afterwards. Had I not seen it I would have remained happy during that time.

The video is obscene. I’m not sure whether you should see it or not. When I saw it I was sick and crying and couldn’t sleep. It took me a few days before I could compose the letter above. I wondered whether it was just too obscene, too terrible, and whether I would try to forget I ever saw it instead of remember it and write a letter.

In Elizabeth Costello J.M. Coetzee gives an etymology of the word “obscene.” Costello “chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage.” “To save our humanity, certain things…must remain off-stage.”

Costello is talking about the writer Paul West and his “obscene” book, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, which “shows what ought not to be shown”, namely the “horrors of the Nazis.”

Costello wonders whether a writer can delve deep into the horrors of the world and emerge unscathed.

…certain things are not good to read or to write. To put the point in another way: I take seriously the claim that the artist risks a great deal by venturing into forbidden places: risks, specifically, himself; risks, perhaps, all.

Costello is accused of being “a weak vessel” at risk of being infected with evil, while West is praised as being “stronger rather than weaker, more determined never to let the evil return.”

So, what is the business of the novelist?