Were I a rat, I could love cheese without understanding how it was made exactly
'If, to Man, the cricket seems to hear with its legs, it is possible that to the cricket Man seems to walk on his ears'
Anon., 19th Century.i
Be More Rat illustration by Eve Sakai-James
Hear the drumbeat in the walls, weaving pipes through a dweller’s box-shaped mind. Here I am: a soldier of hope, though never a hopeful soldier, alighting the floor-bored crumbs of imagination that humans scatter left and round. Their electronic silence gnarls my fingernails into fishhooks, on which I scurry into mind soundscapes that know oceans only from maps - maps for sailors who certainly did not plan on losing their satsumas. What good is it fishing in a museum, when the waves of whimsy will never roil or roll royally on paper?
Then today, I caught a ponder. Over yonder, a thinker tinkered with the lights, snaring me and scaring me with how loud they saw to think. I thought I would thank this sea of sudden sight, but then - then they dimmed the light, electricity flowing from the bulbs straight into their flowering brains.
That’s not how it is supposed to go. Human musing should be slower, jumping around the wire circuit circus, doing it right as in this scripture I write before the human eats too much from the light. I sense the onset of a permanent night. So quick! Be more rat!! Tell them wire will tire them and tie them down, that wine shows us how thought ferment can present. Hop around; have hope.
Be More Rat. Embrace our tat-a-tat-tat.
Have you done just that?
Fishook. One H, our two worlds colliding. Crossing centimetres. I step to the stop of my chime as a rat.
Out Spells the Human:
“If rats do love cheese, I wonder how they feel about loving something they cannot make by themselves - lest of course I’m only thinking that noise pest is in rest because he found a pet pot and goat to make a cheesecloth of my wall.”
“Does it matter that only humans can churn cheese - does this not take away from rat joy? I thought safe blankets of love would be made with full creative control, that to enjoy the fruits of ferment, four-fingered hands would hold all the most knowing ingredients. A rat taught me otherwise.”
“I suppose then love is fermentation - a slow growth that goes from something lovely but squishy (a grape) to something scary and/or wonderful (wine). Could that grape still grow knowing it awaits this fermenting fate with monks underground? That its barrels and caskets can never be coffins when the shine of torch-fire on bald-patches still feels like the sun on their vine? Two kinds of growth – could they really handle both?”
“Maybe that’s how I see love: a terrifying something sum that you can’t come back from - this thing that changes you. The rats accept and celebrate change. In their patchwork of fermentation, I realised I am eating the grape of the vine even if I name this drink wine.”
“Soil and cheese. They do not go in the same mouthful. I must not always look so far back.”
“The stinky little bits of death that bind and bundle up love are my fermentation. The death of any-old relationship brings creatures together from centimetres apart, measuring from the end of your toe or rib. Connect with what is around by standing on new and scary ground.”
“I speak to the silenced secrets of the tat-a-tat.”
“Were I a rat, I could love cheese without understanding how it was made exactly. Exactly! I feared following templates of love that I did not personally lay down, knowing that whilst they could lead to something delicious, they might also be in a rat trap. It’s a good thing I’m not a rat.”
i Quoted in James Thurber, The Beast in Me and Other Animals: A New Collection of Pieces and Drawings About Human Beings and Less Alarming Creatures (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), p.3. Accessed from Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/beastinmeotheran0000jame_m3d4/page/n17/mode/2up?view=theater [accessed 27 February 2024].