Bats on Strings - New English Review

by Theodore Dalrymple (December 2018)

The Window, Henri Matisse, 1916

Nature is red in tooth and claw, but there is still quite a lot to be said for her nonetheless. I am inclined to my present dithyramb in her praise by the sound of the cuckoo that is coming in at my window as I write this.

I haven’t seen a wolf as yet, but they are not far away. Perhaps they are closing in: certainly there are enough wild boar locally to sustain them, that turn gardening into a Sisyphean task by churning up everything with their very powerful snouts as soon as we plant anything.

I watch the lizards on the stone terrace, scurrying hither and thither, with no purpose that I can detect, but very busy in their own way. What is going on in their minds? Do they have minds? At this time of year they chase one another, I presume for sexual purposes or in defence of their territory. They can be quite aggressive: one, whom I thought of as a big bully, caught a smaller one in his mouth (I assume such aggression to have been male) and would not let it go. Was he trying to kill it, and if so why? They were locked, intertwined, in a struggle so serious, and which so preoccupied them, that they did not notice my presence, which normally (even the mere shadow of my presence) makes lizards on the terrace flee in all directions.

I could not help but invest the struggle with meaning, not only for me but for the participants themselves. The smaller lizard made intermittent but frantic and unavailing attempts to escape: it was suffering. Because I invested its struggle not only with meaning, but with moral meaning, according to which it was being picked on and bullied by the larger, I decided to intervene. I touched the now thoroughly interlaced lizards with the edge of the cover of the book I had with me, but still they took no notice of me: their tiny titanic struggle absorbed their attention completely.

Eventually I flicked the two lizards a little harder with my book, hard enough to part them. The smaller of them, now liberated from the jaws of the larger, shot off with the larger in hot pursuit. They took no interest whatever in what giant force had separated them: they were still utterly wrapped up mentally (if lizards can be said to have mentation) in their dispute, whatever it was. They disappeared over the side of a wall and I lost sight of them. I have no idea of the denouement of their set-to.

I moved on to the large Pyracantha rogersiana shrub nearby. At this time of the year (May) it attracts a huge number of beetles, some of them handsome, if you like beetles. I took out my local insect book, Insectes de Méiterranée, Arachnides et Myriapodes, by Gwenole Le Guellec, in order to identify them. By far the most numerous were Cryptocephalus globicollis, a substantial, fattish beetle of a dark green metallic hue that changes constantly with the angle of the light, becoming brown or golden. Even though it moves slowly, at least as it crawls over the flowers of the pyracantha, its sheen changes constantly: it is at its most beautiful when it is emerald green, but it is never that for long.

Is there not here a coleopteran metaphor for life, whose most beautiful moments are evanescent and instinct with regret (for the person who experiences them) that they cannot last? I think I would have liked the Cryptocephalus globicollis to shine at its most brilliant green all the time, from whichever angle one looked at it, but this is impossible, and on reflection—if I may be allowed an unintended pun—perhaps it is as well that it is so. Bliss cannot be other than short-lived. To reach bliss you must know, if not misery, at least less ecstatic states of mind.

My fear is a legacy of having watched too many Dracula films when I was young, when vampires, in the form of bats, tried to enter the bedrooms of maidens who were destined to become victims and then vampires themselves. The maidens felt sorry for the bats that wanted so insistently to enter and opened the windows to them. Fatal mistake, proving the dangers of sentimental anthropomorphism!

The films were nonsense, of course, made on the cheap, and sometimes one could even catch a glimpse of the fine threads by which the model bats were made to flap their wings in the studio set. (The films were mainly made on a tight budget.) But for all that, they frightened me, though I laughed them off to my friends who accompanied me to them. Is it not a strange testimony to the power of the irrational that, fifty years later, a bat at a window should cause me a tremor of fear still.

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The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd (with Kenneth Francis) and Grief and Other Stories from New English Review Press.

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