The intersection of pork and man was circumscribed with vagueness. Until now sausage was a mysterious world: the fenced-in landscapes of strange, exotic muds, the cloak-and-dagger butchers that veiled their conversations in Old French, the silencing of whole towns upon a nocturnal report of a flying swarm of oinks, the secret herbs and spices involved in the intestinal displacement before my screen. My own sacred art suddenly stirred a sense of understanding in me as to why pig farmers were so reluctant to explain their missing bicuspids to outsiders: sausage could not have effects.