The armed guards attended the stooped stone entryway of Kashi Vishwanath temple, a structure blackened and stained by the humid air of the Ganges River plain. They watched over the space between the centuries-old temple and the adjacent Gyanvapi Mosque, which was built after a Mughal emperor that tore down much of the grander Shiva temple that once stood on the site. Barbed wire surrounded the two buildings, which were almost one, a grafted screaming structure, an architectural battleground.
We were only atmospherically aware of the tension. We looked wearily at the guards with frowns under their military caps and thick black moustaches. We had been given a brief introduction to the site by a man with a lisp and hair plugs in a makeshift classroom. Ten of us – pasty Americans, the men in awkward kurtas and pyjamas, the women with their saris, all ridiculous, with American naivety and individualism bursting through the breezy fabrics – did know that we were not supposed to be there, strictly speaking; the site was forbidden to non-Hindus, but our leader, a small, fiery Italian woman who had married an Indian man and converted, who spoke fluent Hindi, had pulled some strings.
In the gray dawn with its thick yet somehow chilly air, we were led into the dark gap in the stone. The air was thick with chanting and stares. For some, it fulfilled a decades-long dream – to visit this most-holy site in the most-holy city of Shiva. Devotion and resentment mixed in the dark space, as we huddled together in the candle-lit dawn. The worn stone was almost geological. The pillars were spiked with forests of burning incense.
It had begun to rain as entered the courtyard, and we could barely make out the white domes of Gyanvapi above. We were handed small clay pots and became slowly part of the bodies which were compressed and released as we moved towards another slumped stone structure. I looked down and realized the vessel was filled with milk, and as we were guided towards the small room, we saw a cluster of fabric and skin and minds gathered around a stone sculpture, a Jyotirlinga, a phallus of God. We approached the blunted pillar and let worn hands guided our wrists, our hands, to bathe it with the milk. Our offering baffled the stone in its eternal smoothness. Apprehension dissolved. Oblivion.
Freud had much to say about human milk. It is the material at the origin point where desire and sustenance combine and then diverge, forever entwined – “where love and hunger meet” – the breast of the mother, which is then sublimated to the bottle – machine mothers – and to the teet of the cow, which of course is never directly accessed.Now, we slam sexuality and food together in advertisement, we divorce certain sources from our psyches, veiling them with narratives of cuteness, stupidity and evolutionary hierarchy with the cow.
It’s perhaps too easy to wonder how milk as a concept has morphed as we have, as our civilizations bloomed and crumbled. How its mechanization, marketing, and mass production can be read alongside the psychic processes of capture that come with the contemporary.
In 1879, a New Jersey Farmer named Anna Baldwin applied for one of the first American patents, under the name “Hygenic Glove Milker”. The evolution of this technology means that today, industrial milk farms can milk as many as 220 cows in one hour.
We can assume that the prevalence of this technology has freed up many hands; that the hands become idle; that the many-tentacled vehicles of extraction seek to eddy their way into every crevice of the material and psychic world. Someone asks, carefully, in an old-timey Hudson lilt, “Weren’t we born to suck and suck until it’s dry? Or are we ever full?”
Sometimes big boobs are “jugs”. As far as vulgarity goes, it’s relatively innocent, right? If asked, most would assume that this comes from a comparison with full milk jugs, an obvious comparison – but the opposite is true. It’s widely accepted that Jug was a nickname in the 15th century for Joan and sometimes for maids or female servants in general. Later, the word would evolve to be a slightly derogatory name for women, like Dick for men or Sheila for Australians. Like Dick, Jug came to also apply to parts of women, and then, ultimately to the inanimate vessels for carrying liquids: the milk jug. The slow metonymic movement of language from name to generality to body part to plastic closely traces our physical ability to morph the natural into the plastic, the mechanical, the vulgar: a three-faced god of consumption, tubbed, eyes full of vengeful order.
Mentions of milk in the Christian Bible abound. Descriptions of desirable places sought, from Israel to Heaven; “A place of milk and honey” (Deut 6:3)(Ex 3:80). It’s often paired with wine.
The apostle Peter compares a man’s search for knowledge with the baby’s need for milk; “like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word.” Curdled milk is often an example of corruption and waste.
There is an apocryphal story told to young students of ethnography. An intrepid European anthropologist heads south to Africa or South America, to someplace written over as a place out of time, and he finds a remote group, a people who have never been studied before and who have little conception of Western culture and academics
He is accepted as a visitor into the community and observes, like a “good scientist” the customs, behaviors, and familial relationships between the people, without ever getting too involved. But, one day, the man is shocked to discover that the day’s meal involves bleeding a skinny cow into a bowl, which the anthropologist cannot make sense of. Is it a ritual? Is it for sustenance? No one understands his broken questions, so he must set things right.
Delirious from the sun and mosquito bites, the man steps up to the cow, who eyes him with suspicion. The man pats the cow on the back, just like he did back home in Provence or Rhone. The people watch the man, interested in his action – they were beginning to think he was either unwilling or unable to do anything useful. They watch him kneel and bring his white hands covered with black hair up to the cow’s utter, placing his small tin cup beneath the teet. He proceeds to milk the skinny animal, and it’s able to produce a few meager drops – but it’s enough! He smiles and looks around at the young boys and girls who have gathered close, fascinated. He drinks. The crowd exclaims and begins to talk to one another until the chatter grows into a roar and the smile is wiped off the anthropologist’s milk-moustached face. He realizes quickly that he must flee the village and gathers his things; whether they believe him a pervert or a thief, he doesn’t know, but in his hurry, he forgets his tin cup, which the people refuse to touch until it knocked over by rain and wind and forgotten.
In 2004, celebrity twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen posed, heads together, with milk moustaches for the Milk Processor Education Program’s iconic “Got Milk” ad campaign. They’re wearing all the fashion of the age: lo-rise jeans, blond highlights, a graphic tee with the famous Warhol banana painting from the Velvet Underground album – signifiers of youthful, fashionable consumption. The text hovering just under the napes of their exposed necks reads: “All Grown Up” and at the bottom, “We’re not little girls anymore, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped drinking out the neck.” The American obsession with milk is an obsession with adolescence, but a sick adolescence, one that has no desire for the future, only to perpetuate itself.
In 2002, historical preservationists in India rediscovered an ancient mixture to clean the Taj Mahal, Multam Mitti, which consists of soil, cereal, milk and lime – it was once used as skincare. The method was a success and was even adopted by some Italian preservationists who wanted to re-whiten the ruins of Roman antiquity. The glittering teeth of empire.
The TV buzzes, somewhat obscured from the plush red couch as viewed from the round circular table. Around the table are four plates heaped with pork and potatoes and four tall glass cups in perfect geometry. Viewed from above, the suburban mandala radiates fragile discomfort. The glasses are filled to the brim with milk. Two children drink it quickly, but the mother and father sip, savoring the taste of sublimated youth, of origination, as the children try to get passed it.
Anna Baldwin looks out from a faded sepia photograph. She is dressed in all white, and her hair is done in a long braid that falls down from a complicated hairstyle, as if she put on her best clothing for the image, taken near the dawn of photography. She stands in front of a wooden gate, next to a dairy cow that faces away. The white of her face and her dress and the spots on the cow are washed out, they seem to glow. She looks angelic, old-fashioned, standing as she is on the muddy ground. She has one hand on the cow’s back the other stretched in front of her, on her machine. She doesn’t look at the camera but down, towards her invention sitting in a pool of liquid eddying in the muddy ground, maybe milk maybe not. It is conical, obviously metal, with tubes running in every direction and attached to the utter of the cow, which faces away. The machine seems alien in the rustic setting. The woman, the machine, and the animal form a grotesque trinity. The photograph shows us the passing of that old relationship, of nourishment and youth, into the machine, of mediation. The connections at the beginning of the techno-age. These time slips that mark the slip of concepts into consumption.
Almond milk was popular among the Catholic aristocrats of the Middle Ages. Because milk was often prohibited during fasting it allowed them to enjoy something similar while still adhering literally to the rules of the fast. Milk as the indulgent and the holy. The rise of the substitute allowed for a sort of moral get around, a feel-good replacement.
Richard Öste is credited with inventing oat milk in 1990. The drink was relatively unknown for years, with many people in America preferring soy and almond as replacements. Through millennial-oriented marketing campaigns and the dwindling popularity of dairy milk and soy milk, for reasons of both health and unethical production, it has quickly become one of the most popular dairy substitutes in the United States. It allows for a moral get-around to the dirty associations of massive dairy farms that hum with the children of Baldwin’s first machines. However, the use of these products remains very much the providence of urban middle and upper-class people, used widely as creamer for coffee or for vegan baking. In the country and in cities that have not undergone Brooklynization or Austinization, many cafes and restaurants still default to cream or whole milk for coffee creamer.
According to the WHO, around 41% of human babies are nourished solely by being breastfed. In Sierra Leone, UNICEF has adopted a program to encourage breastfeeding that involves a “pageant” where the plumpest, cutest baby gets an award. It is said that the rate of breastfeeding in post-industrial nations such as the UK is so low because it has connotations of poverty. Scientists have begun having success at synthesizing artificial breast milk, but some are afraid that the variability between even two people or two cows of the same species will have negative effects, as though milk with its chemical differences constitutes a sort of language, between the one who drinks and the one who makes.
Mother god becomes mechanic. Upgrade/. Attendant milkers. The metal hands of power. The pure silver pool. Moats of blood and promises. A lip-stained glass at the center of childhood. Brims, overflowing, taking, fueling, ceasing, drying, wanting, singularity, no choice, no option, string cheese, limestone cliffs and the mother and the child at the center of the wound that is the unspeakable birth of language.
In the early 1990s, two New Zealand dairy technicians were assisting with cheese production in Iraq in an attempt to restart the industry there. The factory where they worked was also involved in turning dairy byproducts into baby formula to alleviate the region's hunger crises. During the Gulf War, the United States bombed the facility, claiming, without evidence, that it had been converted to making chemical weapons: a line repeated up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell. The technicians, who were not present during the bombing, said that they doubted that the facility could have realistically been converted. The US government cited the fortified nature of the structure as evidence of its use.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the poem “The Lime-tree Bower, My Prison” after his wife accidentally spilt a skillet of boiling milk on his foot, confining him to the country house of his friends as the others went out to pray.
Human milk consists of 87% water, 1% protein, 4% fat and 7% carbohydrates. It contains many minerals such as phosphorous, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and, of course, calcium – as well as many vitamins. A similar structure holds for most of the other mammals. Harmless bacteria such as lactobacilli, loctocolli and enterocolli inhabit it, whole worlds within the foggy liquid that supports so many mammals, and is essential to the production of laboring bodies, imaginaries of purity and utopia and health, class boundaries. To control its flow and production and aesthetics is similar to controlling the path of a river.
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The ancient Romans called the train of stars across the sky the Via Galactica – the road of milk – the Milky Way. Abundance is written across the sky. Now, it’s difficult to see from my window in the city. But it’s there; and we rest knowing that the fullness of our galactic totality reflects in our eyes as something so simple, yet so essential, beyond commodity. This links us to the drift of language as it moves in time, and the symbols as they link us to the distance stretches of the galaxy and the other species on Earth. If the sun gives us energy without asking for anything in return, then the splendor of the galaxy gives us symbolic sustenance that, should, bring us out of ourselves. String Cheese Theory.
And then, a doorway appeared at the bottom of a dirty stairwell on some quiet Lower East Side street. The crevices around the door – rotten and covered with old posters – were highlighted with a soft white light, an attractive glow that cut through the dark and grime and tempted me to abandon the belief that to enter was to transgress, in fact, transgression no longer seemed something desirable. I avoided the trash on the steps and pushed my way through the door, which was almost sealed shut with advertisements for dead bands and forgotten products.
I felt free of time, pushing through the paper skin of the hasty past; I felt free of judgement when everything that once stood in color had decayed. It opened easily, but with pleasing resistance, like a long-time lover. Through the door, I came to a tunnel with water-stained walls like a subway tunnel. The air was thick and even though the darkness and decay frightened me, I went on. Soon, there was another glow, stronger this time, illuminating an arched entrance to a grand cavern, wider than the length of three football fields. Stretching further than I could see was a pool of a white substance, like clouds. A slight, clean breeze made the pool ripple and there was no stagnation, no desire to run.
I waded into the pool without thought. It had no bottom and I soon needed to swim. There was no smell, but the liquid seemed to amplify my scent – but it wasn’t bad or musky like it should have been, walking for miles in the city. No, it was sweet, like an imagined childhood. There was little light from above, and it was impossible to make out the sides of the place, except for the suggestion of massive forms like bridge trusses that snaked up and down the sides.
Right when the darkness seemed like it might overwhelm me, overpower the embryonic bliss, I saw a change in the face of the pool up ahead. Light from above. I swam faster, eager to orient myself, and as I reached it dared to turn on my back and look upwards. On my back, the liquid held me so I barely needed to tread. I drifted forward like in a dream. And when I saw what was above, I gasped. It was not a creature waiting in prey but the whole of the unadulterated sky. Some of the clouds poured into my open mouth, but I didn’t choke or cough. I simply stared at the shining bands of a billion blended lights, intertwined by purple and black voids, dotted here and there with bursts of orange and blue and green like Christmas lights. It was time. It was beyond. It was plentitude and there was no limit and all of the blemishes on my body fell away, my skin became a colorless layer that existed only to give me a buoyancy, like the buoyancy of the babble before words, before thought. I became a translucent page that says everything and nothing and needs nothing and was the cessation of all wanting, the gloss of consciousness before doubt, the fall, the looking glass that attends to every paradise and every apocalypse.