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Authors: Margaret Atwood
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Because if they can say their own bodies, they could say yours also. Because they could say
skin
as if it meant something, not only to them but to you. Because one night, when the snow is falling and the moon is blotted out, they could put their empty hands, their hands filled with poverty, their beggar’s hands, on your body, and bless it, and tell you it is made of light.
MY LIFE
AS A BAT
1. 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.
2. 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 racket. 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 furiousnoise, 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 demilight 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 sunwill rise like a balloon on fire and I will be blasted with its glare, shriveled to a few small bones.
Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing?
For some of us, the mythologies are different.
3. 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.
There was my preference for the subtleties of dawn and dusk, as opposed to the vulgar blaring hour of high noon. There was my déjà vu experience in the
Because if they can say their own bodies, they could say yours also. Because they could say
skin
as if it meant something, not only to them but to you. Because one night, when the snow is falling and the moon is blotted out, they could put their empty hands, their hands filled with poverty, their beggar’s hands, on your body, and bless it, and tell you it is made of light.
MY LIFE
AS A BAT
1. 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.
2. 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 racket. 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 furiousnoise, 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 demilight 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 sunwill rise like a balloon on fire and I will be blasted with its glare, shriveled to a few small bones.
Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing?
For some of us, the mythologies are different.
3. 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.
There was my preference for the subtleties of dawn and dusk, as opposed to the vulgar blaring hour of high noon. There was my déjà vu experience in the
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