The Regularly Paced Ups and Downs of Farming
Morgan has been living the cyclical life of a farmer for thirty years when a young actor begins interviewing him for background information about a play. Morgan’s life is quickly boiled down to the essentials of that cyclical nature: birth of crops from noting but dirt which are instantly slaughtered for sale. Ditto the animals sold for meat. Touched by the prevalence of birth and death as a constant that never wavers and never even shifts according to animal or vegetable, the actor—being an actor—inquires about how it makes the old farmer feel. Morgan—being a human being who just so happens to be farm—responds with a perhaps unexpected and surprising metaphorical take on the issue. Or perhaps an entirely expected one:
“Miles, it’s an emotional rollercoaster.”
Brown-Eyed Bow-Legged Bovines
Just before he gets to the question, Miles shares a moment when he was communing with the animals that are part of the cycle of birth and death. A brown cow—not the one that smells like vanilla—named Daisy and the actor shared a special a moment made all the more emotional because of the metaphorical resemblance to humanity in the the cow’s face:
“She looked me on the eye, she—Daisy has these eyes that are like brown tennis balls. She stared and stared right at me.”
The Secret Life of Cows
Cows don’t actually appear on stage over the course of the play, but they are the center of enough conversation that it may be easy to gets confused over time and assume they did. From what the audience learns of cows in the referencing, maybe that would not be a bad idea for a performance piece. Who knew cows led such mysterious lives:
“Go into the barn, sit down with cows. At first they’ll seem real casual. But just watch them for a while, and before long you’ll see just how much pressure they’re laboring under. They’re all tense as cats.”
Miles, the Cow
Miles learns a lesson about his own place in the slaughterhouse during a discussion about how his position within the theatrical collective. The farmer, Morgan, learns that Miles has been collecting information to be considered for insertion into performances, but nothing is guaranteed. When he inquires about the potential for the obvious—what would happen if nothing he gets from his experiences actually makes it into the production, Miles answers that he would probably be release from the collective. The response of the farmer to this transforms the conversation into metaphor:
“So, if you don’t produce, you die—is that it?”
