Reflections on the Death of a Rat

SA 2016

When exiled in Essex looking after an elderly parent in need of extensive and intensive care due to a serious neuro-cognitive impairment, it can quickly become isolating: friends fall away and family members stay away. And it's virtually impossible of course to communicate with the natives, or get to know the next door neighbours. 

And so, like Dr Doolittle, one turns to the animals for companionship; whistling to the little birds, observing the slugs and snails in all their soft beauty, and attempting to befriend a very timid but rather fierce looking local cat who likes to sit under a big bush at the top of my back garden, disappearing through a hole in the fence whenever he's approached. 

I've been leaving him a small tin of Gourmet Gold chicken and liver chunks in gravy at night for several weeks now, which, judging by the emptiness of the tin each morning, he seems to enjoy. Indeed, in what I like to interpret as a gesture of gratitude the cat today left a freshly killed (and semi-eaten) rat on the lawn for me to find.       

Now I know that many people find such feline behaviour gross, or might raise a moral objection to cruelty (it's amazing how many self-professed animal lovers are in denial about the murderous and carnivorous nature of reality). But I must admit to feeling rather touched by this attempt to reciprocate kindness and share food.     

I understand that domestic cats have an effect on wildlife numbers, killing many millions of birds, rodents, and other small creatures each year. However - and this might surprise many readers - there is no scientific evidence that predation by moggies is having any serious impact on other species here in the UK.

What the research does show, however, is that rapid loss of natural habitat due to human activity is the major factor in why biodiversity is shrinking; over 60% of British species have significantly declined in recent decades and 10% face extinction. And it's we - not our pets - who are to blame ...

We Are All Hunchbacks

One must inevitably clash with those individuals - such as my sister - who are beyond reason and kindness; those who are fatally burdened with history and round shouldered with memories of the past, allowing this to deform and define who they are.

To be crippled and subjectified in this manner - to literally have too much behind one - is to suffer cruelly. But, as Zarathustra says, if you take away the hump from a hunchback you take away their soul.

Besides, are we not all of us to a greater or lesser extent hunchbacks? That is to say, are we not all of us made a little monstrous by our parents and our upbringing? 

As Philip Larkin so memorably pointed out in verse, the misery and resentment that we feel and spend a lifetime trying to overcome is passed down the generations just as surely as certain genetic conditions, including debilitating forms of kyphosis: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.

If only my sister could be made to understand this, then she might learn not only to think a little more philosophically, but be a little happier - which, in turn, would make me a little happier and enable us to develop a connection of some kind.

Notes: 

For Zarathustra's encounter and discussion with a hunchback, see 'Of Redemption', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse', from which I quote, can be found in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003).

A Brief Note on the Case of King Lear (For EF)

Goneril, Regan and Cordelia 

© SingerofIceandFire (2012)

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Is there a more hateful and pathetic figure in Shakespeare than Lear? Self-righteous and self-pitying, he deserves the offspring he begets and the tragedy that befalls him. 

Thankless children might be sharper than serpent's teeth, but vain, selfish parents for whom nothing ever comes of nothing - and nothing their sons and daughters do is ever good enough - leave deeper scars still with their blunt dentures and constant grinding criticism.

More often than not, the young are more sinned against than sinning and blessed is the orphan without the dead weight of family history or filial obligation to pull them down. 

(There's a duty of care, yes, but not at the expense of one's own well-being or sanity ...)

Anti-Oedipus

Blood is thicker than water, so they say. Which is true enough, but why should viscosity and a certain heavy stickiness be privileged over fluidity and sparkle? Why should family bonds be thought of as so much more vital and important than friendships formed?

There is always something suspect about those who fetishize the blood and pride themselves on their genetic inheritance. I would never put siblings before strangers simply on the grounds that I share parental DNA with the former and it seems to me that non-familial connections are the source of real joy in this life.

And so when she said her sister was dearer to her than anyone else, I had to conclude that she was all too human in her incestual primitivism and probably a fascist at heart.