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My Life as a Bat-M. Atwood
Critical Reading (AE221)
Boğaziçi Üniversitesi
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My Life as a Bat
Margaret Atwood, taken from Good Bones
- REINCARNATION
IN MY previous life I was a bat. If you find previous lives amusing or unlikely, you are not a serious person. Consider: a great many people believe in them, and if sanity is a general consensus about the content of reality, who are you to disagree? Consider also: previous lives have entered the world of commerce. Money can be made from them. You were Cleopatra, you were a Flemish Duke, you were a Druid priestess, and money changes hands. If the stock market exists, so must previous lives. In the previous-life market, there is not such a great demand for Peruvian ditch-diggers as there is for Cleopatra; or for Indian latrine-cleaners, or for 1952 housewives living in California split-levels. Similarly, not many of us choose to remember our lives as vultures, spiders or rodents, but some of us “do. The fortunate few. Conventional wisdom has it that reincarnation as an animal is a punishment for past sins, but perhaps it is a reward instead. At least a resting place. An interlude of grace. Bats have a few things to put up with, but they do not inflict. When they kill, they kill without mercy, but without hate. They are immune from the curse of pity. They never gloat.
- NIGHTMARES I have recurring nightmares. In one of them, I am clinging to the ceiling of a summer cottage while a red- faced man in white shorts and a white V-necked T-shirt jumps up and down, hitting at me with a tennis racquet. There are cedar rafters up here, and sticky flypapers attached with tacks, dangling like toxic seaweeds. I look
down at the man’s face, foreshortened and sweating, the eyes bulging and blue, the mouth emitting furious noise, rising up like a marine float, sinking again, rising as if on a swell of air. The air itself is muggy, the sun is sinking; there will be a thunderstorm. A woman is shrieking, “My “hair! My hair!” and someone else is calling, “Anthea! Bring the stepladder!” All I want is to get out through the hole in the screen, but that will take some concentration and it’s hard in this din of voices, they interfere with my sonar. There is a smell of dirty bathmats – it’s his breath, the breath that comes out from every pore, the breath of the monster. I will be lucky to get out of this alive. In another nightmare I am winging my way – flittering, I suppose you’d call it
- through the clean-washed demi-light before dawn. This is a desert. The yuccas are in bloom, and I have been gorging myself on their juices and pollen. I’m heading to my home, to my home cave, where it will be cool during the burnout of day and there will be the sound of water trickling through limestone, coating the rock with a glistening hush, with the moistness of new mushrooms, and the other bats will chirp and rustle and doze until night unfurls again and makes the hot sky tender for us. But when I reach the entrance to the cave, it is sealed over. It’s blocked in. Who can have done this? I vibrate my wings, sniffing blind as a dazzled moth over the hard surface. In a short time the sun will rise like a balloon on fire and I will be blasted with its glare, shrivelled to a few small bones. Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing? For some of us, the mythologies are different.
- VAMPIRE FILMS I became aware of the nature of my previous life gradually, not only through dreams but through scraps of memory, through hints, through odd moments of recognition.
would have headed for darkness, as is their habit. They would have crawled into holes in walls, or secreted themselves under the eaves of houses, relieved to have found safety. At a preordained moment they would have exploded, and the cities would have gone up in flames. That was the plan. Death by flaming bat. The bats too would have died, of course. Acceptable megadeaths. The cities went up in flames anyway, but not with the aid of bats. The atom bomb had been invented, and the fiery bat was no longer thought necessary. If the bats had been used after all, would there have been a war memorial to them? It isn’t likely. If you ask a human being what makes his flesh creep more, a bat or a bomb, he will say the bat. It is difficult to experience loathing for something merely metal, however ominous. We save these sensations for those with skin and flesh: a skin, a flesh, unlike our own.
- BEAUTY Perhaps it isn’t my life as a bat that was the interlude. Perhaps it is this life. Perhaps I have been sent into human form as if on a dangerous mission, to save and redeem my own folk. When I have gained a small success, or died in the attempt – for failure, in such a task and against such odds, is more likely – I will be born again, back into that other form, that other world where I truly belong. More and more, I think of this event with longing. The quickness of heartbeat, the vivid plunge into the nectars of crepuscular flowers, hovering in “the infrared of night; the dank lazy half-sleep of daytime, with bodies rounded and soft as furred plums clustering around me, the mothers licking the tiny amazed faces of the newborn; the swift love of what will come next, the anticipations of the tongue and of the infurled, corrugated and scrolled nose, nose like a dead leaf, nose like a radiator grill, nose of a denizen of Pluto.
And in the evening, the supersonic hymn of praise to our Creator, the Creator of bats, who appears to us in the form of a bat and who gave us all things: water and the liquid stone of caves, the woody refuge of attics, petals and fruit and juicy insects, and the beauty of slippery wings and sharp white canines and shining eyes. What do we pray for? We pray for food as all do, and for health and for the increase of our kind; and for deliverance from evil, which cannot be explained by us, which is hair-headed and walks in the night with a single white unseeing eye, and stinks of half-digested meat, and has two legs. Goddess of caves and grottoes: bless your children.
My Life as a Bat-M. Atwood
Course: Critical Reading (AE221)
University: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi
