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A bat is an animal that comes out at night,
A mammal that somehow mastered flight.
Its wings are webby and its eyes are weak
It maps its echo every time it squeaks
But then if staying up late is where you're at
You may grow up to be a bat.
We should celebrate bats. They did it--the only mammals granted true, unpowered, gravity-defying flight! But how do we define them? Leathery fingerbone wings, a face like a gargoyle, a preference for dark and clammy, and a creepy image somewhere between scorpions and dragons. What's the deal? Jealousy?
We were talking—a phrase that always reminds me of George Harrison's "Within You Without You" and how I vaguely envied the intimacy of that we, but if you're lucky you acquire your own we, in this case a circle of friends conversing around a homey table in upstate New York. We were talking about bats. But it didn't start out with bats...
(segue to the aforementioned conversation and its consequence, as follows:)
I. Prologue
We were talking about the knowledge of computers vs. humans,
using bats as an example—how computers know the facts about bats: the sonar,
the diet, the colonies, the structure of the wing, etc., but they don’t know what
it feels like to be a bat, and they don’t
really want to know. Whereas people—at least some
people—do want to know, and keep
trying to get there.
Why?
Because we know something is happening there but we don’t know
what it is.
Because at some time in myth or history we became separated from
the company of nature and it became mysterious and opaque. And we’re looking
for inklings and messages.
Because we suspect (or hope) that in some way bats R us and what
we really want to know is what it feels like to be a person, by way of a bat.
Because we like battering closed doors.
So...
II. Approaching the Bat
Half-truths:
They nest in your hair.
They suck your blood.
They hang upside down by the millions in dark, dank, clammy
caves.
Sometimes they get in your attic and then in your house,
flying round and round your room and you have to open a window and hope it
finds its way out or else throw a towel over it but watch out it doesn’t bite
you because those things carry rabies and if you get it you foam at the mouth
and die horribly or have to get seven shots in your stomach with a gigantic
needle.
Secret Identity:
“I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible…a…a…. A
bat! That’s it! It’s an omen…I shall become a bat!”
— Bruce Wayne, 1939
Flying Mammals:
When pigs fly *
The cow jumped over the moon.*
Pegasus*
Rocky the Flying Squirrel *
Real flying squirrels and certain lemurs *
Flying Tigers *
Winged Monkeys *
Icarus *
astronauts, pilots, plane passengers *
bats
Selected facts:
The Congress St. Bridge in Austin, TX has become a major
tourist attraction because of an estimated one million Mexican free-tailed bats
that take to the air at sunset each day from spring to fall.
 |
| Congress St. Bridge |
One little brown bat can eat 1000 mosquitoes per hour.
Six million bats have died due to the fungal scourge known as white nose syndrome.
Other associations:
Bats in your belfry
Bat out of hell
Bat-shit
The old bat
Batwing saloon doors
Vampires
“Twinkle, twinkle, little bat” (Lewis Carroll)
Die Fledermaus (Johann Strauss)
“The Bat-Poet” (Randall Jarrell)
“The Bat” (Theodore Roethke)
By day the bat is
cousin to the mouse.
He likes the
attic of an aging house.
His fingers make
a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is
so slow we think him dead.
He loops in crazy
figures half the night
Among the trees
that face the corner light.
But when he
brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of
what our eyes have seen:
For something is
amiss or out of place
When mice with
wings can wear a human face.
III. First attempt to
feel what it’s like to be a bat
It’s like holding a dual citizenship. It’s channeling Merlin or Ovid or Carlos
Castaneda. Maybe even Kafka. Close your
eyes, metamorphose, and hope for the best.
From the bat’s point of view, it’s a home invasion. It’s
John Cusack inhabiting John Malkovich.
Used to more or less vacating the premises in hibernation,
the bat lets the human tenant assume its identity while it goes out of body
like a bored Annie Hall having sex with Alvie Singer.
Occupant: So, what do I do?
Voice: Feel what it’s
like to be a bat.
O: I’m hanging upside down. Except, no! It’s right side up,
just gravity-friendly. Hey, this must be the bat’s idiosyncratic perspective!
Far out!
V: Try to let go of your
human predilection for labeling.
O: Right. No labeling. I am one with the bat.
I am completely batty.
Just kidding….
V: Okay, that’s enough
for today.
O: But I didn’t get to fly!
IV. Another attempt
Bat
world in motion,
balanced on
the fulcrum of
falling and not falling, moving
in tangents, caroms,
shooting sounds
that come back as pictures:
tree (avoid)
skeeter (eat)
owl (shit!)
bat in mad motion
a blacker blot in the big dark
sky
radar-eared,
night-sighted,
skintight wings
a gift from the
pterodactyls
skedaddling
back to a hole in a roof,
folding in
like a leather hanky.
V. Final attempt
We share DNA and mammalian ancestry, our common granny
probably some kind of giant arboreal shrew. But empathy can only go so far. We
have left our lower brethren behind. Computers may already feel that way about
us.
Maybe I’m overthinking.
Imagine a kid, age four or five. Point out a bat flittering
in the smoky twilight. Ask: What does it feel like to be a bat?
The kid runs around, arms outstretched, dashing this way and
that, making peek peek peek sounds
and loopy polygons in the yard, gets dizzy, and falls down laughing.
Close enough.
*
Conclusion:
Anthropomorphic virtual-reality fantasy tourism notwithstanding, it's undeniably fun to climb into the identity of a critter, be it a mule, pig, fish, bat, trilobite, or mastodon. Computers may yet learn to play.
