Let the seemingly profane title mislead no one: we are discoursing not on animal husbandry but on an exceedingly subtle faculty of man, inspiration. Is it possible to formulate points of law on one of the most important dimensions of man, the inspired state? Does dry analysis not work against inspiration itself? And does anyone in an inspired state care about theorems and laws, about the otherwise valuable but lukewarm achievements of cool reason? A contradiction in terms – so we might call writing a matter-of-fact treatise on the inspired state…
Although livestock farming is enormously important in the life of the individual and of all humanity, and we squander vast resources on beef cattle, for instance, only for them to land on our plates as bloody beefsteaks, this is not what we shall be talking about. We can learn much from animals, for we are not exempt from the biological community of life: man lives on the Earth – also – as an animal. As apex predators, however, we do well to observe the life and mentality of meek, grass-eating livestock. Whoever has never herded livestock, never scratched the neck of a cow whose tears welled over with pleasure, does not know what I am talking about. My friend and his family lived on a farmstead, and they had a cow. She was a simple, one might say dim-witted creature, of the Hungarian Pied breed, small of build but always ready to stuff her paunch. She should have gone dry long before, and yet, well past the lactation period, she still gave milk, for her owners were as poor as church mice. Fehér – for that was her name – gave a litre of milk every day. On feast days, however, she gave more, a litre and a half, because she knew that more milk was needed then! And yet where was her calf by now, where now the plentiful fodder?
Among farmers it is common knowledge that livestock repay the care they are given. The master's eye fattens the cattle – everyone knows this saying. But there is a subtler law too: the emotional surplus. That is why, at milking, the calf is tied near the cow, within sight of the mother, so that through the feeling of motherhood, of care, not to say of love, the animal gives milk more abundantly. We might think: mere biology, a useful observation, folk experience – but what do we want to notice? If our attention only skims the surface, we cannot read the higher, finer stirrings of reality even in the plainest signs.
Propertius writes: ‘The sailor, when he speaks, speaks of the wind, the peasant of the bull. Of scars the warrior, the shepherd of his flocks.’ The choice of topic in conversation is specific to occupation and to the focus of attention, like any kind of perception. Each lives in a world of his own, even though we all live in one and the same universe. From the same message we read different lessons according to our ideals, our experiences, our hopes – in a word, according to our evolutionary maturity of spirit and soul.
A cow's giving milk is not merely a matter of lactation but, far more, an emotional phenomenon. As they say, milk is life, butter is love, and whom one loves, one bathes in milk and butter. If the cow is inspired by the sight of her calf, she gives more milk. Thus, prompted by a direct incentive, the cow yields more than the average. Man, too, functions in much the same way – without material and moral incentives, or without positive and negative feedback, very few are willing and able to function in complete selflessness. The calf's visitation does the mother animal good… Yes, visitation is a sensitive word. How strange that what is a stimulating, natural moment for cattle, seeing her calf, has become in human society an enforced legal formula, and that divorced parents often wage furious war over the visitation of a child. The joy a cow draws from her calf can be measured, and probably for man too the nearness of his offspring is an instinctive need, an undisguised source of inspiration.
And what a feral mechanism of self-defence, deflection and denial is betrayed by the reverse of this complex system of feelings, once the calf is out of sight: what the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over…