Ina sonshe
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 24/Aug/2010 09:16, 34 days ago
In the Goblet of Fire (the book, not the roughly carved wooden cup.  Or the film), Moody (to Ron’s dismay) enlarges a hairy black spider in order to demonstrate the effect of the nastycruciatuscurse.  In the course of its torture, Rowling writes that it was‘twitching horribly’.  I really like that.  Not because I’m into arachnid torture – or not that only – but because those Latinate words and the ugly rhythm of the phrase really convey (for me) the jerking, agonised pain of the beast and (in the context of the book and this post more importantly) they imply something about the awkward, stupid, nauseating wrench of being the ones who sit at their desks (not Nigeria, then) and watch.In the last couple of weeks, I’ve tortured innumerable cockroaches to death.  Not with my magic wand– I save that for emergency use only (insert your own joke here) – but using some insect spray called (brilliantly) ‘Rambo!’.  It seems to be more powerful than Zeus’ aegis: spraying it in a hole still kills anything coming through for the next twelve hours or so.  So I can barely comprehend the agonies of receiving a full snorting thwack in the back while you quietly munch on some discarded potato peelings.  I should say that, normally, I’m fairly scornful (in my head) of emoting about insects’ pain: generally, the very little research I’m aware of suggests that vertebrate and invertebrate nervous systems are so different that the term doesn’t really make sense (though much of that seems to be in the name of justifying boiling lobsters, which feels unlikely to be objective research).  Its a theory I can cling to when squishing little things, or really irritating things like mosquitoes.  But, just as Moody enlarged his spider, a really big cockroach which I squirt just because it alarmed me while washing up is different.  From passive observation of human life– it may have been the David Attenborough of our attic – the thing whirled around the room, frantically flailing into everything and rapidly losing control of its wings and limbs.  It ended its days twitching horribly and pathetically in a damp, dirty sink while I stood, nauseated and transfixed, by the door.The need to watch pain is bizarre and absolute in me.  I like to imagine that it’s a little like Byron who bought some binoculars to watch a public execution (by guillotine, which he admired as humane compared with English methodology) to see it ‘as you should see everything once: with attention’.  It’s probably also a little like Coriolanus’ silent child who sets his teeth to tear a butterfly: just the mania to destroy and feel powerful.  And it’s probably also because (like rubberneckers at an accident) I like a bit of drama, and what’s more dramatic than painful, undeserved death? Whatever, it strikes me powerfully that while the responsibility is entirely mine, and the pain and innocence entirely the cockroach’s, I find both the twitching being, and the frail object it becomes, entirely repugnant.  Which is a strange transferance, really: the observer holds all the guilt, and shifts it onto the observed.  In time, were I to keep the little chap alive (and it somehow gained a human consciousness), I’m sure it’d learn to share my revulsion at itself.  Maybe I’d teach it to cover itself up, or not to come outside at all, and in time I’d forget it existed and I certainly wouldn’t share my resources with it. I find being an observer an intensely awkward (can something be‘intensely awkward’?) position, particularly when I feel impotent in the moment of observation, but – in the past – responsible.  And it’s very hard for me to avoid lifting the weight of guilt and stupidity and ugliness and putting it on whatever I’m observing.  That’s not something I’ve learned here, but it is something that’s more present here – largely because it’s harder to throw the baize over the budgerigar (that’s from HP, too) – so maybe I’ll develop some finer coping strategies for poverty and deprivation and inequality.  Perhaps my carapace on return will be just as shiny, but even more impregnable, than my six legged victim’s.  I doubt it.