The Branded Calf: How Strategic Narratives are Both Sins and Saviours

// As the calf, neck tucked between the arms and hands that feed them, is held firm, wrestled to the ground, viper-pinch pushing blood to its flushed nose, as the skin sizzles when hot poker greets its silently screaming leg’s flesh, it is well and truly branded.

The deed is done. A choice is negated and nullified for that cow spawn.

And although that deed — that violent, traumatic, tantalisingly morose branding — is but a small action for those holding the poker, it is life-altering for that calf.

The calf is now placed within a system, within a Strategic Narrative. Within the same Strategic Narrative the poker-holders are within — bed-fellows in being unconsciously branded.

// For, despite that fleshy disturbance to the psyche, as etched as an uncooked omelette’s stain in a cafe toilet, the narrative it has been placed within is effectively unknown to it.

Like overheard office gossip, the calf has fallen into a narrative at an angle, landing within a story it did not consent to. It lacks full context — it didn’t see the source, didn’t help design what counts as ‘logic’ and ‘coherence’ in this Strategic Narrative. It fell, the devil waving in time as they descend together, cast into roles.

// Marked, skin alight with fire, it shows the calf to the world — becomes a reference point for talking of the calf. It can now be considered property — meat — an animal — an other to the human. Positioned — death-row ducks.

// In life, our clothing carries the meaning others attribute to it.

E.g. The turtleneck = the posh toff with daddy’s money lining the linen wallet.

E.g. The hat = the hipster with a chip for originality embedded in their shoulder.

E.g. The suit = the by-the-book preacher of masculinity and money-on-my-mind.

Yet, our metaphorical clothes are effectively unknown to the wearer. We are somewhat aware — as if viewing ourselves through the shuttered eyes of a dying magpie, glittery and shiny, but far too far to bother paying attention to. But, the majority of it — the swirling stories, the narratives popping and floundering and thriving in the minds of everyone we meet — our minds make us forget. Our clothes become our unconscious flesh.

// Those who have done the branding of us? What of them?

That depends how far up the human food chain you go.

The single, physical branders are background characters. The fillers. The less-than-extras.

Above them, though, is a series of ideas and individuals with the resources and will-power to consciously, strategically — and with intent — arrange, organize, and craft these Strategic Narrative that will narrate the meaning of both the calf and the branders of the calf.

Above even these individuals, there are more individuals. A nexus of them. And the spiralling change of narrative-under-narrative-under-narrative continues.

It’s not quite a straight chain of command. Nor is it a circle.

It is closer to an ouroboros. The serpent eating itself, with no clear head.

It lives by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal: you cannot know both the origin of the narrative and how widespread it currently is. Gain sight of one, you lose sight of the other.

It has no rules, thus, those looking to craft new Strategic Narratives must play, but never play games with manuals already in place.

New games lead to new ways of living.

New — perhaps ‘better’ (whatever that word means in the new Strategic Narrative) — ways of narrating that calf.

Ones with less pain, more pleasure.

If not for all, at least for one. The one living that Strategic Narrative and truly believing in it.

For, even Mother Theresa was only as good as she said she was.