Cutting homage to murderous muscle-memory

My local supermarket ran a promotion. And what they had on offer was knives. Bread knives, chef’s knives, vegetable knives, cleavers. The display by the checkout would have brought gasps from a jury.

Knives are as old as our species and a staple find on archaeology programmes. The first ones were flint. When exhumed after 10,000 years they’re as sharp as the day they were knapped. Warriors were buried with their knives, ready to take on the afterlife. A knife dealt to everything. It stabbed your enemies and your food.

Knife. Listen to it. The word is the thing and the thing is the word. And the word could only be AngloSaxon. It’s as hard and as sharp as the nordic climate. The long i glitters like a blade. When the knife was born, life and the language were brief and violent. No soft Latin polysyllables. No time for meditation. Only for a quick think, and a thrust knife. The word itself wants to plunge between the short ribs.

A knife murder is still the most murderous of murders. The proximity, the immediacy, the sheer intent of a stabbing. It is meant. Killing by gun is remote in comparison, is cowardly. Killing by knife can only be personal.

A knife has two parts, kn and ife, handle and blade, the handle grippable, the blade, well, just you try. Even to think of it is to wince. The handle points back to the holder, the blade to a hostile world.

Every desert Arab wears a knife in his belt. It has an ornate hilt and scabbard and a thin curved blade to cut a throat in silence. The Arab is never without it. The knife is to him as the sting is to a bee. With it he’s who he is. Without it he dies.

All boys are desert Arabs. Knives sing to them. The knives we were given as kids were pen knives. Perhaps to the adult mind the name seemed to render them safer. They got that name from cutting nibs on quills, but by the 20th century it had become ironic. The pen was school, the knife the weekend.

We played chicken with our pen knives. You stood opposite your opponent, legs spread wide, and you threw your knife between his feet. If it stuck in the soil blade first he had to bring his feet closer together for the next throw. You kept throwing and bringing his feet in until either he chickened out or your blade failed to stick. If the blade failed to stick it was his turn. It was a war game, a game of courage. Every boy’s a baby Viking.

The knife hasn’t changed. There’s nothing to alter. It was born perfect. And after millennia it remains indispensable. Every kitchen abounds in knives and no meal is made without them. A knife can do anything from stirring to serving, but it exists to cut. And it still occupies an OSHless world, a world of actions with consequences. Lapse with a knife and how unhesitatingly it turns on you, and what very short work it makes of a fingertip. It is almost painless. Only a sudden electrical tingle, and the instantaneous sickening knowledge that your flesh is cut. The wound gapes white. You think perhaps it might not bleed. Then it bleeds. The blood forms droplets, then drops, then drips. The knife lies on the counter, ruthlessly innocent.

A knife murder is still the most murderous of murders. The proximity, the immediacy, the sheer intent of a stabbing.

The moment I saw the knives at the supermarket some atavistic switch was tripped. I wrapped my hand around their chunky handles and I just wanted them. There was no sense to it, of course. These days I do very little murdering and in the kitchen I already had more knives than I needed.

Generally I used only two, a sharp little paring knife for delicate work and a $10 cleaver from the asian store in Cashel Street for everything else. But reason not the need, as King Lear said of servants. Lust trumps need every time.

You got a token for spending $30 at the supermarket. Three tokens equalled a knife. I had my tokens in three days. ‘‘I’ll take the chef’s knife,’’ I said. But I was told I’d have to wait a week to get it. They’d already run out of stock. I was not the only reawoken Viking.

All that happened last spring when the hills around here just teemed with game in need of stabbing and then butchering with knives. But now the summer’s waning and the supermarket’s running another promotion.

This time it’s storage jars. We Vikings can smell autumn on the wind.