Sacred Cow

Tis the season of the jigsaw. But can you bear the pain of Jigsaw Break-up Day?

“Life is like a bowl of All Bran,” the Small Faces sang. “You wake up every morning and it’s there.”

I think life is more like a jigsaw puzzle. You wake up one morning and it’s finished. And then there is only emptiness and desolation.

Oh, and a picture of a cow in a farmyard.

And you think: “Is this all there is?”

And you cry out to the unhearing dining room chairs: IS THIS ALL THERE IS? A picture of a cow in a farmyard? Was this worth all the late nights? The sacrificed party invitations? The backache? The tears?

This is the Zen of the jigsaw puzzle, for when the puzzle is finished it is a bigger puzzle than when it began.

For days now, life’s exotic banquet has passed you by untasted, while you searched through little pieces of cardboard for a beigey sort of foreground bit with the merest hint of hoof that didn’t quite seem like hoof. Your hair has grown long and tangled, the cat has left home, you forgot to go to the Palace to pick up your MBE, your wife has started going to tango lessons with her boy Friday and a new jumbo-size Pritt Stick has been launched onto the market.

The world has changed. And all the while you were bent double, labouring on the dark end of the cowbarn, where the deep burnt umber hues of twilight wood segued remorselessly into the darker corner shadows of the black end of eternal nothingness and - so help you ‑ you thought you would go mad: and not a single hint of light, not a lone speck of a moth wing to lighten the dismal monotony of that ordeal.

And all for this: this cow picture. Not a proper picture either, really, because you can’t pick it up without bits of it falling off.

You look up, because that is what people who are not doing jigsaw puzzles do, and you try to focus on an object more than 12 inches away. You can’t focus. You can’t think.

And you don’t know what to do next. Well, deep down, you do know what you must do next. You must kill the sacred cow. You must smash the thing that beguiled you with its promise of Oneness. After all, one day you may want to eat from the dining room table again. Yet what a terrible sacrilege it seems! A single violent act will render your recent past meaningless.

For days now you have been telling yourself, your bank manager, your friends who invited you on the opera weekend in Medieval Bruges, your mother who phoned from her deathbed - “If I can only get this damn thing out of the way then everything will be all right.” If I can only get it done the sun will shine on my back yard once more, the spots will clear up on my bottom and the Equita bailiff will go and bother some other unfortunate.

For the compulsion to jigsaw is as powerful as the sex drive: all those drawn-out evenings of obsessive effort, all that hopeful interlocking of unlikely parts, the failing eyesight... True, in sex you’re not likely to lose a vital part up the vacuum cleaner, but when you finish you do make a cup of tea and think: “Is this all there is?”

Well, now the jigsaw is finished. But boy has it cost you! You might never see the cat again. Bailiffs will, however, continue to call. Plus, there is the real possibility that you have gone mad and will be shunned by people out there in the straight, non-jigsaw world.

You can try to kid yourself that this is an achievement. An uphill marathon. A mountain you have conquered alone (apart from the easy straight bits, which your daughter put together before giving up for ever). You took an arbitrarily fragmented cow and by your own supreme efforts you made it whole. You made it. You brought the cow back from chaos. You rendered it bitless.

And there was a moment, a single, blissful, euphoric moment of hallucinatory elation, when the last bit of beigey sort of foreground with the merest hint of hoof that didn’t quite seem like hoof that had been evading you all this time snapped precisely into place, making you clench your fists and shout “Eureka!”, when you felt as the Creator himself must once have felt, back at the beginning of all things. And then you realised it was actually nothing to shout about.

You will kid yourself that the jigsaw puzzle, as has already been mentioned, is a metaphor for life. Do not look to the cow, you will tell naysayers; look to the broader picture. The cow is a symbol of our human drive to make order out of chaos: to come out from the dark side of the barn into the light.

You laboured long and hard to render it whole, and at the very moment you thought your task was complete, the cow spoke unto you and said, “there must be more to it than this”.

The truth is that it is only in smashing the cow that you can liberate yourself from it. It will be an epiphany, for in that act of destruction you will glimpse, yes, your own death: the possibility of everything coming unravelled in just such a moment. You will be forced to embrace the chaos, and then you will become one with it all. Thus doth the puzzle make less puzzled people of us all.

Well, all except the Atkins family of Ilkley, who have proven unable to face the horror of Jigsaw Break-up Day, and in their anguish and desperation, have taken steps to preserve the cow forever, as a mummified relic, glued together in a special frame, which involved doing the entire puzzle again with the application of the new jumbo Pritt Stick; neither proper picture, nor any more puzzle; worshipped daily ‑ “Oh, felicity! Oh, great interconnecting scheme of Oneness!” – varnished for enhanced immortality.

And now everybody who enters the room – Mrs Brackish from next door, those dreadful people the Smithsons, the vicar – sees it and says: “Why didn’t you just buy a picture of a cow, if that’s what you wanted?”

“Oh, you’re just missing the point,” they spit back. But you know, and the vicar knows, the Smithsons, Mrs Brackish and the cow knows: they are lost. Untethered. They are but pieces of arbitrarily scattered matter, randomly spinning in the void of space.