Encounters with Strangers & Ideas Posted by James Killus, 15 Oct 2007 05:07 am

Killing the Goat

I read the story some years ago, in The Wall St. Journal, I think, in the first page center column where they put their “strange but true” features. It concerned an occurrence at a semiconductor plant in Indonesia.

The work was semi-skilled labor, of the sort that required close eye/hand coordination, for which the local native women were well suited. Much of it was done under the microscope. The overall situation was stressful: clean room standards, long hours of intense concentration. After some months the women began seeing things under the microscope. They called these things ghosts, and told the supervisors that the place had become haunted with the spirits of the dead.

The plant engineer, being a practical fellow, paid a visit to the local shaman. The shaman confirmed the diagnosis of ghosts. “What must I do to rid the plant of the ghosts?” asked the engineer, doubtless in the spirit of playing along with local customs.

An infestation of this magnitude requires the sacrifice of a goat, he was told.

“How much do you charge to do this?” asked the engineer, probably in the spirit of expecting a bit of a shakedown.

No, the shaman explained, the head of the enterprise must do it, (thereby demonstrating that the principle of separation of powers is not a purely Western invention). If it were in the village, the chief would be the one, but since it is in the manufacturing plant, the engineer himself would have to do it.

Needless to say, this took the engineer aback somewhat. This was more playing along with local customs than he’d bargained for. But after much thought, and probably silently cursing his fate, the engineer went through the ritual sacrifice. He killed the goat.

And the ghosts went away, and the women went happily back to work.

Now the first question that you should ask yourself is “were the ghosts real?”

I realize that the expected “rational” answer is that they were not “real,” that they were “merely” the products of the women’s imagination. Then, having blamed the women for their perceptions, a “rational” procedure would have been to put the women into counseling or perhaps give them tranquilizing drugs. We know pretty much how well these procedures work; not very well, and they are expensive. Is this rational?

No, the engineer did the rational thing. He performed the ritual and the ghosts went away. Cost, one goat, and a certain amount of embarrassment on the part of the head guy. Sounds fair, doesn’t it?

But wait, what about the ghosts. I’m not really saying that they were real, am I?

Yes, I’m saying that they were real, but I’ll explain more about that when I answer the second and third questions.

The second question is, what were they made of? The third question is, were they supernatural?

The ghosts were made out of silicon, and plastic, and glass, and microscopes, and clean rooms, and Indonesian women. They were not supernatural. How can something so ordinary be supernatural?

Ah, so you think I’m saying that they were not real after all, yes?

Now I ask that you consider that sentence. You read it, it makes sense. Is that sentence not real? It is made out of phosphors or a computer screen, or paper and ink, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same sentence either way. So what is it made of?

The same thing as ghosts. The same thing as all magic. Whatever is available.

People say “occult” and I will leave the room. Occult means hidden, and magic is not hidden. We live in it. You can’t escape it. You can refuse to look at it, however.

I once told the story of killing the goat at lunch once with a friend of mine, Al, and his co-workers. One of the party, a guy named Mike, just would not stand for my stating that the ghosts were real. “No, no,” he kept saying. “They were merely imaginary.”

“What’s ‘mere’ about imagination?” I asked. “The nature of a hammer is different from a hurricane, but they are both real. Magic is of another different nature. But it’s still real. The ghosts were real.”

“No, no, that’s wrong,” he kept insisting.

Al later told me that Mike had a Korean wife, and about a year before she had a child that died at birth. Some months later, after seeing the ghost of the child several times, the wife had performed an exorcism. Mike would have nothing to do with it.

“He’s still pretty touchy about the whole thing,” Al told me.

“The exorcism or the death?” I asked.

“Both,” he said.

“How’s his wife doing now?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s fine.” he replied. Al knew what the story was about.

Trackbacks

Responses to “Killing the Goat”

  1. on 15 Oct 2007 at 7:35 am 1. JP Stormcrow said …

    Of course we never chase ghosts in our society!

    Economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy … Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will strive only for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.

    A quote that just lays it all out there. From what is actually an interesting article in Newsweek on money buying happiness. The shocking result - happiness goes up as income moves from destitute to getting by, not so much from there. I think our economic policy can now be summarized as the Gore Vidal quote: It is not enough that I succeed, others must fail.

  2. on 15 Oct 2007 at 10:29 am 2. spyder said …

    This reminds me of the time i started a graduate seminar with the line: There are generally three main categories in the taxonomy of spiritual entities of indigenous American Indian religions: those that relate to the natural elemental processes of the Earth such as rock, water, weather, energy and so forth; those that relate to the souls of sentient beings and living organisms; and those that are not of the Earth and of the Earth’s life such as entities of the stars and between worlds!

    This comment did not (and for Zeus’s sake, does not) imply that i concur in that these are real in my relationship with this cosmos, but that for the first nations of this continent these relationships are real, present, and demonstrative. From more than a hundred interviews i conducted with shamen, medicine keepers, dream carriers, herbal and crystal healers, brujos and curanderas, from the tip of Cape Horn to the Arctic circle, i felt confident in my statement. The human mind is fucking amazing in its imaginative capacity to collectively (in communion with others) generate constructs that fulfill the perceived needs. Whether this be a small Amazonian tribal band’s protection against a “magical attack” from a neighboring group, or the development of the most sophisticated technological healing machines, or even weapons that can kill all life on earth–human beings have power.

    For your own fun and amusement i strongly recommend visiting Rupert Sheldrake’s realms. There you can experiment with various imaginative aspects of the human mind and access

    Rupert Sheldrake’s groundbreaking book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World:
    A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science     which examines unexplained natural phenomena and suggests explanations that push the boundaries of science. How does your pet know when you are coming home? How do pigeons home? Can people really feel a “phantom” amputated arm? These questions and more form the basis of Sheldrake’s look at the world of contemporary science as he puts some of the most cherished assumptions of established science to the test. New edition with results update.

  3. on 15 Oct 2007 at 11:30 am 3. Oaktown Girl said …

    James, I love this story. Sometimes people get so attached to their beliefs that they can’t see when it’s going into the “irrational” zone.

    In general, I’m all in favor of whatever ritual people need to do in order to heal/move on from any painful situation, as long as it doesn’t infringe on others too much. I think the engineer that killed the goat made a wise and rational choice, and I say that as a serious animal lover. My working assumption here is that the sacrifice was fairly quick and merciful. I can’t imagine the situation would call for anything particularly grim, nor that the engineer would agree to go along if it did.

  4. on 15 Oct 2007 at 12:20 pm 4. James Killus said …

    I assume that the goat was killed in something approaching the Islamic tradition, as much of Indonesia is Muslim, and there tends to be a high degree of cross-fertilization of rituals for religions in proximity.

    This story is part of my ongoing attempt to revalue subjective experience in modern life. Another part of this quixotic task is to teach people the differences between “objective,” “relative,” and “absolute.” Those who call themselves “Objectivists” for example, are actually Absolutists, whereas “relativism” is an objective principle of science.

  5. on 15 Oct 2007 at 4:18 pm 5. Bill Benzon said …

    Great story, James. May I immodestly suggest that you read my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture? As the title suggests, it’s about music. And music is capable of engendering some very powerful experiences of Higher Beings and Higher Realities. Part of my reason for writing the book was to establish a framework in which we can discuss such things without either invoking the Twilight-Zone of supernatural or reducing them to mere psychology, as though the fact that they are generated out of the mind somehow means they aren’t real.

    Years ago I was teaching a composition course at RPI and had the students read a chapter from Wm James’ The Variety of Religious Experience. On a whim, I asked the class how many of them had had some kind of mystical experience, expecting to see, say, 3 or 4 hands out of 22 or 23. Two-thirds of the class fessed up. I was stunned.

    And dismayed. For most of these students had had experiences for which their intellectual culture, as represented by RPI (and the world of which it is a part), as nothing useful to say. “It’s all merely some strange stuff the mind does.” I’m sorry, but that won’t do.

    That too was very much on my mind as I wrote that book, which got a rave review in Science, and a somewhat critical review in Nature, by a classical fiddle player who was upset that I took hip-hop seriously. Oh well.

  6. on 15 Oct 2007 at 5:56 pm 6. Oaktown Girl said …

    by a classical fiddle player who was upset that I took hip-hop seriously. Oh well.

    Bill - can you please name that fiddle player (it’s public record, so it’s not a secret that would get you in trouble, right?). I’m a huge fiddle aficionado and am dying to know who it was.

    By the way - you probably already know this, but some young classically trained African American violin players performing to hip-hop music can be found on YouTube (search on “Black violin”).

  7. on 15 Oct 2007 at 8:30 pm 7. James Killus said …

    I’ll certainly try to find a copy, Bill. It sounds like a fascinating book.

    I do understand the perspective of your students, however, or at least one possible perspective. Why should we consider the mystical experience to be superior to other sorts of experience? Indeed, other experiences can be more readily communicated, shared, and factual information can be gleaned from them (through objectification, and I’m saddened that such a useful word and technique has developed such foul connotations. When most people use the word “objectification” what they are really meaning is “depersonalization” which is not at all the same thing).

    The mystical experience seems more limited in some ways; not a dead end, necessarily, but primarily an end, nonetheless. The mystical experience seems more like a maze that can be endlessly followed, but when you exit the maze, you are still more or less where you began, although I will stipulate that the time passed within the maze seems worthwhile…

  8. on 15 Oct 2007 at 8:33 pm 8. Bill Benzon said …

    David Juritz, based in the UK according to the blurb about him.

    Maybe I should tell you about the time I was page turner for Cecil Licad at a Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg recording session (the Brahms Horn Trio).

  9. on 16 Oct 2007 at 9:27 am 9. Oaktown Girl said …

    Bill - very cool to get to hang out with Nadja!

    Too bad it was not for a more interesting piece. (Just about any chamber piece with “horn” in the title is a major snooze fest as far as I’m concerned, even for the Brahms).

  10. on 16 Oct 2007 at 9:41 am 10. Kiera said …

    I couldn’t resist wondering what you expected from a Brahms anything, considering what he’s best known for to music heathens like myself is a lullaby (Wiegenlied: Guten Abend, gute Nacht, Op. 49, No. 4.).

    BTW, the goat killing is still working for us…two down and two to go to bury the Red Sox for 2007. GO INDIANS!

  11. on 16 Oct 2007 at 10:11 am 11. Bill Benzon said …

    Kiera — What I expected in the situation was simply to get paid; and I also hoped I wouldn’t f**k it up. Granted, turning pages isn’t much of a task, but I could miss a turn (I didn’t) or some change in my pocket could jiggle and mess up a take (it did).

    When I took the gig I had no idea who was performing or what was being performed. It was just a chance to make some spare change in an interesting way. When I arrived at the hall and saw this sorta tall and slender fiddle player I said to myself, “Is that the awesome fiddle player I saw on Johnny Carson? This could be interesting.” It was and it was.

    Of course, I wasn’t turning pages for Nadja, I was turning them for the piano player, Cecil Licad, her long-time friend. She’s a short petite Philippino woman with a baritone voice, which was rather disconcerting. The horn player was John Cerminaro. The engineer put him through hell checking levels before things started.

    And Nadja, she was nice to me and professional about the whole thing. One guy — the piano tuner — was expecting her to be all prima donna and when, on the second day, she lost her temper at one point, he glanced at me all knowing. What a dork. Recording in that fashion — start and stop, bits and snippits — is hell. It’s a wonder the musicians were able to get through it at all.

    And then at lunch everyone ordered the same thing as Nadja, everyone, that is, except the horn player and me. I mean, it was embarassing to hear people change their order to match Nadja’s order once they heard her order.

    The big thing, of course, was that Dizzy Gilliepie died the first day of the session. Of course, that didn’t have anything to do with the session, but Dizzy was one of my musical heroes.

  12. on 16 Oct 2007 at 10:49 am 12. Kiera said …

    Sorry, Bill, I should have included Oaktown Girl’s comment about “a major snooze fest” to make it clear what I was addressing with my lullaby response.

  13. on 16 Oct 2007 at 11:04 am 13. Bill Benzon said …

    No problem, Kiera. I knew you were addressing Oaktown Girl, but it made for such a convenient seque that I just had to use it. Sorry about the confusion.

  14. on 17 Oct 2007 at 11:36 pm 14. montag said …

    Of course you know that your line of analysis here also demonstrates that God is real, God exists, and rather than being supernatural, God is totally natural.

    All of which results in 2/3 of the class responding positively when asked whether they had had “mystical experience”; such states of consciousness are utterly natural.

    A view that holds such events to be “merely imagination” appears to not be aware of the importance of Images and their “grammar” in human cognition.
    What would Memory be without Images?

    Oaktown Girl’s comment shows the use of imagination in understanding:
    “…I can’t imagine the situation would call for anything particularly grim, nor that the engineer would agree to go along if it did.”

    Here we see “imagination” has created a scenario which is used to understand the story. Furthermore, the “imagined” engineer who would not go along with something “grim” has many of the characteristics of the ghosts of the Indonesian women.

    A most interesting post and commentary.

  15. on 18 Oct 2007 at 10:14 am 15. Oaktown Girl said …

    Bill -
    Thanks for the letting us inside the recording session a little bit. Very interesting. That guy who was so determined that Nadja meet his expectation of being a prima donna - how shallow…and sad. Closed-mindedness in one of its many and varied forms. And why wouldn’t he just allow himself to be pleasantly surprised to find she was actually a decent human being? Pathetic that he found more satisfaction in making himself “right” about her being “wrong”.

    Oh, and let’s change our freaking lunch order to match the star soloist? As if the Nadja gave a flying fuck what anyone else had for lunch. Laughable.

    Us classical geeks know just how important the page turner is for the pianist. Rather stressful task in many instances, as a matter of fact. Can’t imagine that at a recording session it is any less so. But change in your pocket, Bill? [*cluck*] Tsk, tsk!

  16. on 18 Oct 2007 at 1:04 pm 16. James Killus said …

    Of course you know that your line of analysis here also demonstrates that God is real, God exists, and rather than being supernatural, God is totally natural.

    –montag

    I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

    –Penn Jillette “This I Believe”

    Two plus two equals three for small values of two.

    –old math joke

  17. on 19 Oct 2007 at 1:55 pm 17. Oaktown Girl said …

    montag – I understand what you’re saying, but I’m afraid you’ve missed my point. When I used the verb “imagine”, it was only a figure of speech. I was not using my imagination. I was using my intellect to make my assessment based on the information presented.

    The American engineer, finding himself in a position of leadership among people of a very different culture, would have to find some middle ground in order to be successful. If he totally poo-poo’d his workers’ concerns and beliefs, the work would suffer. If he tried to jump in completely and only honor his workers’ culture, dismissing his own beliefs and values entirely, that would cause problems as well, and once again the work would suffer.

    While it may be more accurate, saying “it is my assessment” as opposed to “I imagine” sounds sort of stodgy and pretentious.

  18. on 20 Oct 2007 at 12:44 am 18. montag said …

    To Oaktown Girl:
    I did not mean to imply that you used “imagination” in the dismissive and perjorative sense that something is merely imaginary and, hence, fictional or made up.

    Not at all.
    As I read your commentary, I composed a mental model of an engineer - rather like Tom Hanks - who found himself in the goat situation. This was an imaged individual who might find himself in a “grim” spot, but who could not go along and must somehow change things for the better.
    (Thus sounding more and more like a Tom Hanks film.)
    I sort of used your comment as a paradigm of how the imagination works to help us understand things.

    Since neither of us actually knew much at all about the engineer, this Model of an engineer…this image…shared some characteristics of the ghosts in the story in that actual entities closely corresponding to the imagined ones might be a bit hard to find.
    For example, the actual engineer might be himself rather grim.

    Instead of Imagination, I think of it as Cognition’s Imaging System.

    To James Killus:
    Thanks for the link to Penn Jillette.
    I was overwhelmed by the number of times he used the expression “believe in”.

    He seems to be an individual obsessed with the need to believe…or disbelieve…various credos and dogmas.

    I got the distinct impression that the two of us, Montag and Penn, were considered to be antipodes of a world of intolerant belief and disbelief…and we were both a couple apples short of a bushel…or a pair of 2s short a couple of decimal points.

    Perhaps.
    However, I never used the expression “believe in”.
    Indeed, we might ask at this point: why does the use of the word “God” which is not immediately followed by terms of abuse imply that the person speaking “believes in” God?

  19. on 20 Oct 2007 at 3:49 pm 19. James Killus said …

    montag,

    Penn Jillette was writing/speaking on a recurring feature on NPR entitled “This I Believe,” and you were struck by the number of times he used the phrase “believe in.” I believe that you may be unclear on a concept.

    I quoted the Jillette piece because it gave a good description of how the word “God” can completely lose all relevance to anything if you redefine it any way you want. A God that is not supernatural (literally “above nature”) but is instead subordinate to nature, is something other than the God of every major religion that currently exists. Why not just use a different word? (I suggest Vuutle, as no one seems to be using it at the moment). You’re not just asking for confusion here; you’re demanding it.

    And God knows, with your last question you’re just being silly .

  20. on 25 Oct 2007 at 4:10 am 20. montag said …

    Good point.
    I quite agree.
    The question was silly.
    Certainly “silly” in a Shakesperean sense - like the fool in “Lear”, at least.

    In my defense, your rather delphic statements are hard to grasp due to the protean nature given them by their obscurity (in the oracular sense) and intricacy.
    I myself have often done the obscurus per obscurior, so I suppose it is a taste of my own medicine.
    (Note that the necessary brevity of our comments forces us into a sybilline prose.)

    I do, however, think we are dealing with a bit more than names and definitions…and we have come a great distance from goats.
    And if Mr. Jillette’s goal is truly what we believe it to be in the last commentary, then one wonders why Mr. Jillette feels constrained to comment upon the obvious: misuse of names leads to confusion.
    I mean, all he had to say was what would the world be like if someone asked me where the Judiciary Square station was and I gave them directions to Reagan Airport?

    My point ( obscurus per obscurior) should be that not only our use of names, but our use of language, our logic, and our use of images is all confusing and contradictory: to wit; a God that is omnipresent cannot reasonably be said to be here and NOT there, such as supernatural and not natural- or above nature and not subordinate to nature.
    (I took the route of supposing “omnipresent” was meant seriously and no radical divide existed between the Creator and his creation - but now I should be condemned for pantheism…under the existing logic.)
    I suppose a theist could patch up this problem of “omnipresent yet also above nature”, but it would be a ptolemaic patch applied to a theological orrery that had slipped its bloody gimbals.

    Be all this as it may be, you and I most evidently have other fishes to fry, or other goats to sacrifice, and I have greatly appreciated this correspondence.

    sincerely, montag