This was written while I was working at Fujitsu in Bracknell. It was my custom to walk for an hour each lunchtime, and let thoughts flit through my brain, often composing a blog post in my head, or dictating it into my voice recorder.
I’ve been in a dark mood lately. We notice especially that which chimes with our state of mind. Out of a myriad details absorbed on a recent stroll, what remained when all the rest had been washed away in draughts of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, was rat poison.
Wherever food sends its aromas out to our whiskered grey cousins, you find dark green boxes discreetly positioned by a wall, with a small hole at each end. I will spare you an illustration of these ugly contraptions. Here’s one that shows desolation instead:
Let me continue empathically in the imagined voice of a rat:
“Humans entice us here with the aroma of food, so we make pilgrimage to this holy place. It may be discarded fast-food to them but it’s staple diet to us. We like their cooking! We have families to rear and support. Our rat-nature offers us no alternative perspective (and if you don’t like this, then blame that God whom the humans declare to be All-knowing, All-powerful and Omnipresent). We would like to thank humans for their generosity: but one thing restrains our gratitude and perpetuates our mistrust. I refer to the disappeared ones—as in Chile during the days of General Pinochet. That’s the price we pay for being fond of human cooking. From every brood of well-loved offspring, we lose a few to the green boxes. This is our sorrow. We are grieving for our ‘disappeared’ but what can we do?”
All creatures are my brothers and sisters, including insects and shrubs (with which I’ve enjoyed ecstasies almost sexual in intensity) but this does not explain why the plight of rats struck me so forcibly, and remained whilst more gracious ideas slipped through my fingers before they could type them.
You are to know the reason. In February as this blog relates I was drawn by the sweet smell of money to desert my nest of retirement and sign on at the MaxiRam Corporation as a hired hand. All went well for several months. Though the oldest worker in the building, I was much in demand, and even respected as “cool”. For a while.
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!
O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.
No sooner had they renewed my contract than I found myself with nothing to do, ignored, bypassed; invisible to those on high and despised (as I imagined on little evidence) by my peers. I will not bore you with crises and politics and technical glitches which led to this situation. It wasn’t my fault though it’s true I’d become complacent.
Despite a vow to remain aloof from the rat-race—keep cool and stay wild whilst trading liberty for a bribe—I’d become truly a rat in a trap.
When primordial fear knocks at the door, we are caught beyond reach of reason. It’s the deepest instinct, to “keep our head above water”: we’re forever at the mercy of life’s tide.
My dark mood has lifted, but I wish we could treat those real rats—members of the species rattus rattus—more fairly, and all whom they symbolise (employees, immigrants . . . ) It’s a matter of honour to give succour and protection to an invited guest, even where the “invitation” has been misunderstood.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Like water we all seek paths that allow us to flow freely.
There are those who seek to divert us into streams in which we may flow, but our freedom is lost.
We can seek tributaries to escape the uncomfortable path we are on. But it takes great effort to release ourselves from the pull of prevailing currents.
I may be stretching my metaphor too far.
The rat seeks food to survive. When natural food sources dry up and unnatural sources present themselves, is the rat wrong to take advantage of them to survive?
Are there alternatives? Yes, but they don't seem natural because they are not commonly used anymore.
For whatever reason, societies have become accustomed to unnatural ways of living. When we choose to partake in these unnatural sources, and do not embrace the lifestyle of the providers, the providers can sense you efforts to hold back.
Even when you do not verbalize your discomfort, they know.
I have concluded, that whatever the price, it is more healthy to avoid the temptation of embracing that lifestyle.
I don't begrudge those who do, I am fully aware of the dwindling resources and who holds them. As well as the pain and suffering that comes with resistance.
We (all beings on this planet) cannot survive without confronting our circumstances. But we don't have to like it, and we don't have to accept it as inevitable.
I think I understand your mood. And I sympathize with you. But don't lose hope. You are not alone.
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Charles, you have caught, and eloquently glossed upon, my meaning in this piece. I'm honoured and grateful for your input.
I see now that I also wanted to expose the symbiotic relationship between rat and man, which has gone on for so many thousand years that rats are dependent on humans. In the Middle Ages bubonic plague caused the Black Death and the Great Plague, again and again. That was when humans – apart from the Pied Piper of Hamelin – had no solution to dealing with rats.
Factories in China and elsewhere, and fast food outlets everywhere, draw in needy humans and rats respectively from the outlying districts to a degrading existence in both cases.
Everyone has a solution to the ills of society. I don't: only to feel, to be aware, to be sensitive, to wish.
Thanks again for your illuminating thoughts.
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I'm glad I was able to grasp your circumstances.
Many speak of solutions. I don't presume to have one either.
But I have a vision for what could be. I cling to that in the hope that it someday it can be realized.
The obstacles are too great right now to see a way clear to creating that vision in reality.
Perhaps someday a path will be revealed.
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Rat on a stick is a delicacy in some parts of the world. but I wouldn't eat one.
Have you heard of Rat-a-Too- ee ?
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“When primordial fear knocks at the door, we are caught beyond reach of reason. It’s the deepest instinct, to 'keep our head above water': we’re forever at the mercy of life’s tide.”
Now THAT is good stuff, and rings a note of resonance for me, especially right now.
I originally wrote that I was going to refrain from comment on the rat issue, and then had to scroll back up here and modify this because I actually am about to ramble on about the rat more than I could possibly even imagine when I started…..I find myself torn between two responses, the first is an honest gut response that both recoils at the rat itself but also at the variety of dark and disgusting ways mankind has found to eliminate the poor creatures (one such documentary in very graphic detail featured professional rat killers in Chicago who hunt them, pick them up by the tail one by one, raise them overhead, and hurl them to the concrete sidewalk in a sort of slamming splat, claiming 100 dead rats per hour with this method).
The second response is one of just indifference. I do not see myself having affection for the rat, but I can see myself having compassion for one, not wanting any living thing to suffer, and beyond that truly having a desire for each creature to be unto its own life and live out its nature and its purpose. Remembering back to my laboratory days in college and dissecting a freshly killed rat, only to open its chest cavity to find a still beating heart, my own heart broke over the thought that this poor animal had any sense of what was happening to him.
So I've now rambled on here on your blog for a longer period of time about the rat than I think I have ever devoted to consideration of the creature in my entire life.
I hope you are doing well these days, dear friend.
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I would not normally think of rats either but I suppose I saw them that day as a symbol for much of the human condition. Rats are vermin, we say, therefore not worthy of humane treatment. The same argument is used for criminals who are locked up “with the key thrown away” or even executed.
Today I saw the DVD of a South African film, Tsotsi and never have I blubbered more uncontrollably than in the concluding scenes. It's about the slow progress to redemption of a violent young man in the shanty towns of Johannesburg. Brilliantly written and acted.
Enough.
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Vincent Hello
You are the second Vincent I've meet in my lifetime. I don't hear that name very often here where I live.
Nice name.
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Thank you, from another rat.
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