Nothing happened for a few days. Perhaps it had been an isolated incident, an anomaly. Perhaps it hadn’t been there at all, a trick of the eye or mind, wishful thinking, paranoia, hallucination. After a few days, a false memory.
But no. Some nights later, I half-saw the animal again (or perhaps a different one). It’s true that I had once again consumed several drinks that evening, but not so many as to mistrust the evidence of my own perceptions. One sighting could have amounted to a freak happening. Twice constituted the early signs of a pattern.
The next day I purchased a rat-trap. Setting traps was not an activity with which I had previously been familiar, so I was meticulous in following the instructions on the rat-trap’s packaging. Despite widespread depictions, it seems that cheese is not the most effective enticement for rodents of any size. I set the trap with a small piece of meat. Rats are, as further attested to by the packaging, neophobes, and I prepared myself to wait several days for this particular one to work up the courage to get itself killed. In addition to occupying a chair from which I had a reasonable view of the trap, I checked the trap many times a day. I did not touch or move it which, so I had read, would likely have reduced the trap’s effectiveness.
Initially I’d been satisfied with the whole of my enterprise, but the trap was not successful. It trapped nothing, not even the slug which had worn away at the food scrap one evening and trailed off across the carpet, still in one piece. I was pleased not to trap the slug, which would have been unpleasant, though it was disappointing not to have trapped the rat, if that’s what it had been. Perhaps or probably, I concluded, given that no rat had been captured, the animal had not been a rat. The absence of a rat would explain the failure of the rat-trap. And if the animal had not been a rat, so I reasoned, it was best not to have trapped it.
Life slowly returned to its previous pre-mammalian form. Nothing disturbed my living room for the next seven well-observed nights. The rat-trap had either been a false step or a complete success as a deterrent. Either way, I wrapped the trap in an old piece of plastic, and tucked it at the back of the cupboard under the kitchen sink. With a glass in hand, I returned to the lounge chair. All was quiet. I could have imagined it, the whole thing, the animal, its paths, its peripherality. If I stopped imagining things, it would be for the better. People like me aren’t supposed to imagine things. Imagining things is a bad sign, and nobody likes bad signs.
And yet, one evening later, I couldn’t not see what I thought I saw. Surely not! Were there two of the creatures running across the room double-helix style, and was there me, sober as anything? And two nights beyond that, after a single quiet night, not one or two but three further little mammalian entities? The whisky level only moderately diminished. One, two, three creatures, and not a single clear sighting. I might have reset the trap, but I wanted first to identify the little mammals. Knowledge before outcome. I substituted a notepad and pen for the trap and meat.
Time passed. Hours, days, the less formal measure of bottles. No resolution. The notepad accumulated tally marks but no details. A tally mark represented a blur, a smear in time. There was nothing clear enough to be detailed. If anything, deterioration: the animal or animals became more common and perhaps a little larger, but also fuzzier, less distinct.
The fact of not getting a good look at them was hard to reconcile with the concrete nature of the world. Why were they always running across the edge of my vision and never through its middle? Why were they always just a bit too fast to see clearly but not too fast not to see at all? Were they watching me, waiting for me not to watch them? If so, what was their purpose, or what was the purpose to which they had been put? Had setting the trap set them off me? Could I redeem myself through leaving food unconnected to trapping? Could I calm them through pure demeanour? These were all very good questions, as I assured myself.
I devised little experiments: I would stare at a certain point for fifteen minutes, in order to test whether the paths of the animals were somehow controlled by the direction of my gaze. I placed elaborate roadblocks designed to funnel the animals towards my field of view. Why did they not appear at those times I had prepared myself, or at least when I had told myself I was ready for their appearance? Why did they only run in or through places or follow routes which had not been readied for them?
The animals were highly intelligent, so I concluded, and they must have waited for me to blink or shift my head before running across. Nothing I did hindered them in any way; no diversion seemed to divert them in the least. If I set up a camera and left the room, there was never anything to be seen. They were clever, these animals, and a little larger each day.
The larger they became, I reasoned, the more difficult it would be for them to maintain their hiding places. I searched the house for holes, burrows, hollows, anything that could have provided shelter. There were no signs of habitation.
Troubling as the complete failure of my investigation to that time had been, much more disturbing was what followed. The animals, if that’s what they were, slowed markedly. Their movements loosened and became more languorous. In slowing they acquired a – it was the phrase that came to me – divine grace as they followed these unmarked paths along which they could not be properly seen. And yet with their reduced speed, the creatures became no more visible and observable than they had been. I pursued my attempted surveillance with even more rigour and vigour, but with no success or even promise.
The animals were so large now they loomed from the edges of the room and cast shadows over everything I owned. They flowed from corner to corner alone or in pairs or trios, and always I felt as though I could with the right movement possess them and always I chose wrongly.
My calls to them were more desperate now, a pleading, the repetition of the word ‘please’, a whimpering which came from within me as though detached from my will. They must have been heartless: their lack of response, their continued pauseless drifting hither and thither, as though they had no will but were nasty earthbound clouds of flesh subject to the whim of a force unseen. I tried to hate them but I couldn’t; I only wanted them. Please.
The more they slowed, the more they grew. It was a vindictive non-Darwinian evolution. The room had the impression of being loomed over. The animals perhaps lost some of the grace they had earlier gained. My space diminished and I was pressed into its centre, the centre from which I ought to have been all-seeing. I had given up on my tallying by this point, as there always seemed to be at least one of the animals present, resistant as ever to observation. Despite the animals’ size and probably mammalian presence, the room itself became colder. I wore all the clothes I owned, rugged around me, slightly constrictive – but what choice did I have? If these animals were warm-blooded as they seemed, their warmth must have been taken from the air, all currents flowing towards them, sucking the heat from anything available, anything including me.
Violence is not really part of my nature, but I admit I tried violent responses to the continuing attacks by the animal or animals on my comfort and enjoyment of the property. I swung chairs. Eyes closed, I struck out with a fork, almost overbalancing due to the failure to make contact. With my eyes open I could see nothing.
They taunted me with their slow growth. Over time it seemed that the animals were growing together, coalescing, that there were no longer three or even two creatures just beyond my grasp, but a single vast entity. Was this possible? Vastness beyond measure or extent and invisibility brought together in the one entity?
It enveloped me. I desired nothing more than to leave this place, to abandon my home to the great heat-sapping beast and to go anywhere else, to find somewhere beyond its reach. This was the great contradiction: it reached me everywhere and yet I couldn’t come close to it.
Did I sleep? Did I wake? Did I move or was I held still? Did I love it as it loved me? Did it feel contempt for me as I resented it? Did it feel? Did I feel?
The n
umbness started in the pit of my stomach. It spread not by moving to contiguous parts but by establishing little colonies of absence in my knees and shoulders and elbows. It found a dwelling place at the back of my jaw.
There was nothing more to drink. I knew none of this could have been my own doing. It was all caused by this creature which had somehow discovered a path through me, through my body and my being. The numbness at times supplanted the cold and at times amplified it. If only I knew how to summon help. I felt as though I knew nothing anymore. In a prior existence I had had access to knowledge and to methods. Surely this was a true statement.
But I could no longer be certain. The feeling or, rather, the lack of feeling stretched up the back of my head, these formerly tight little colonies now sending out tendrils or (ivy-like) aerial rootlets along my main internal carriageways.
I could feel myself about to fall asleep, but I never did.
War Against the Ungulates*
1
Everywhere humans continue to grow unevenly. This lack of consistency has come to be considered ‘texture’. They attain different heights, widths, densities and varied pigments. Some display prowess on the sporting field, some demonstrate admirable levels of intellect and many show profound aptitude in the unguided formation of sexual relationships. One can rarely predict with accuracy their rates of progress in any of the measurable paradigms.
The humans pursue diverse activities, forming small but workable trading communities. As the centuries have passed, so have these communities evolved increasingly specialised commercial practices. One can thus trace the development of acts seemingly as simple as the burning and consumption of flesh.
2
Some of the humans are unwell but (unlike the ungulates) will soon recover. Some suffer and (also) hold dissonant attitudes. Some will soon die, and it is our duty to minimise pain.
The sheep are scattered in the field, and the cattle in clumps near the fence. Insect life continues in abundance. Great machines are the pinnacle of human achievement, both for their scale and for their central role in producing lattices and other terrains of convenience.
These days we require a rationale for each failure to govern that which is governable, and each rationale spawns self-perpetuating terms. The cameraman holds (is duty-bound to hold) empirical attitudes, and is not interested in justification.
3
‘The Information Age sure is producing a lot of information.’
I love text, how it lies all over the country, how its tonality infects every local and national newspaper equally, how no diagram survives without its gnomic insistences, how it gulps and gulps and swallows formerly productive soil formations and suddenly they are replaced with vistas. What I love least about text is seepage. What I most love about text is particularity. The journalist might have expressed the practice in this way.
4
The war against the ungulates begins with declarations. There is much public discussion of strategy. Should they be stalked or confronted, herded or separated? Should they be burned or buried? Can we eat them?
Arguers are ranged against distinctive landscapes; the cameraman frames the more seriously and directly affected among them squinting into direct sun. This is not company policy, but neither does policy preclude his approach. Mode of framing is the means by which one identifies a professionally developed photographic aesthetic in digital media.
Experts are lit from the side, their faces a balance of light and shadow, reason and sorcery, illumination and the promise of knowledge’s dark depths.
5
The content of fields and paths and disease vectors is harmless to all but abnormally susceptible humans, side-lit experts explain. There is no reason to alter behavioural patterns.
6
The roads crisscrossing the countryside have no history. Instead, they are distinguished by unique technical specifications, sensitively calculated in relation to geological and topographical demands.
The cameraman disseminates this information compassionately: his disclosure may shock those following heritage trails. (Almost certainly it will be faux-shock, as the contemporary citizen cannot be troubled by information other than vicariously on behalf of hypersensitive others.)
At least these drivable myth-lines are open, unlike footpaths sealed shut to protect the soles of human feet from the harmless viral seepage. Camera trucks rumble slowly to each new event, drivers heeding speed restrictions and occasional diversions.
7
Meanwhile, there are problems with unmanned video apparatus. In the cities, surveillance fails to distinguish between the noteworthy and patterns of ordinariness. The problem lies in audience-delivery failure. The cameraman grieves that security-conscious citizens record so many useless hours of unobserved tape. He pities the soft focus and poor framing, and it tears his heart that so much action remains uncentred. Everyone regrets the lack of audience for all these many, many performers, each doing his or her duty (in passing beneath security apparatus), each performer inconsolable.
8
Inside television, there is a city without boundaries in which humans and vehicles move as if at random behind carefully casual reporters. The cameraman is always conscious of governability.
9
Sheep so rarely stray into camera-shot that one usually forgets the countryside exists. This is the accusation from non-urban areas and from those the cameraman thinks of as TV-naive. He is relieved that organisational perceptions are that coverage of the rural is proportionate, and there are sanctioned and dissuasive complaints procedures in place to manage the trickle of dissent.
The cattle are out standing in the field. The farmer’s in the dell.
10
The war against the ungulates necessitates rhetoric other than the usual rehearsal of democratic principle given above.
They were ‘produced’ and are faulty. They have violently lost value, to the extent that they must be propped up. Unfortunately for them, their textual transformation is irreversible. One can mourn the cattle without farmers. Sheep herded, but no one titled ‘shepherd’. Highways all over the nation. Camera trucks moving through the countryside. These fires have become a commonplace of the countryside. I have made it so, reflects the cameraman.
11
When someone publicly enunciates the term ‘unfortunate’, violence will be justified. Cameras display glowing red lights, but then the press conference ends, the lights blink off and cameramen straighten to ease backache. There is insufficient disagreement among the humans, and camera trucks disperse in search of authenticity.
12
One refers to the war against the ungulates because it is impossible to have war with them. They will not acknowledge the situation in which we all find ourselves. Humans at war against the ungulates are at war unilaterally. Marginal humans unilaterally declare themselves at peace. But there is no conventional or radical peace with the unacknowledging ungulates. Instead, is there peace against the ungulates?
13
Mobility necessitates war: this is as it has always, always been throughout history. The process is:
1. Humans move;
2. There is war;
3. Then: disease.
Oftentimes, an observer may note deliberate attempts to merge 3 into 2. Humans toss their enemies’ contagious bodies over ramparts, smuggle smallpox scars in blankets, infect explosive devices with all manner of transmissible organisms.
14
The cameraman has noticed that in crisis no one acknowledges history, only distinguishes present circumstances. Sadly, the past cannot be reconciled.
15
The roads along which we travel have appeared as if impetuously. They do not follow the routes of ancients who could cope with angles and curves and travelled little except to conquer, and were sick and whose teeth fell out through lack of nutritio
n, and who practised rituals which may be regained through patient meditation and openness. The ungulates used to be governable but are no longer.
16
The cameraman thinks of his youth, with its scattered memories of normal ruminants wearing grooves along hillsides. The ungulates do not appeal for peace. They do not speak out against the war and (thus) through their silence condone it. They do not seek out humans who share their views. They are confined to certain pastures and they move here and there along roads which have appeared for precisely the purpose of bovid movement.
17
The country is capable of growing some of the best grass in the world, and yet …
18
Members of the government warn us to drive carefully. An opposition spokesperson applauds the government for its measures to counter viral communication, with the rider that the opposition (had it controlled parliament) would have achieved precisely the same results even sooner.
In times of war, one cannot hope for greater vigour than this barest level of debate. An opposition politician proclaims: ‘No one wants unnecessary sacrifice.’
19
The terrain extrudes the most nourishing grass in the world. Its herbivores need eat nothing else. The virus reproduces most rapidly in pigs and is most easily taken up by cattle. Cattle are brought in from the fields and fed something else. Pigs eat slop, are rarely permitted to roam the fells.
20
These pyres disturb the cameraman and they disturb optimum landlines. A fellow professional counsels that low angles easily compensate, that news editors appreciate silhouetting, and that with careful framing, one need not challenge the Golden Ratio. The cameraman does not confess the shapes he perceives in the spaces between corpses. There are multifarious vases and other vessels, sometimes buildings reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, sometimes primitive representations of human faces. As the flames settle, heat concentrates at the base of the pyres. He hears helicopters. The corpses collapse. The pyre makes a strong diagonal against the sky and the perpendicularity of a background stately home. It is machines that effect the burning and humans stand aghast, complexions of flickering pallor.
When I Saw the Animal Page 2