A post-apocalyptic roach, Pixar-style
I’ve just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s ‘Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth’. It’s a very entertaining and enlivening look at debt, in the very broadest sense. It’s rare to have economic ideas treated with such creativity – and brought out into the world of literature, society (whatever that is) and the imagination. While it is full of onerous and important ideas, it was also very funny at times – you can sneak up so much more on people if they’re chuckling. It’s made me think a great deal about living within one’s means – and to try and do so even more in future. The final section of the book rather deftly flits into a re-telling of ‘A Christmas Carol’, but with a corporate Scrooge (‘Scrooge Nouveau’, rather than the end’s ‘Scrooge Lite’) receiving visits from aptly-manifested ghosts of Earth Day Past, Present and Future.
I was struck by the appearance of the giant cockroach as the Ghost of Earth Day Future (Worst Case Scenario version), as I realised that a piece of my own writing had engaged in some of the themes of debt, desire and covetousness that the book covers (amongst many others). Certainly my piece – the sixth ‘Vermin’ poem I’ll be performing at Green Man and hopefully other events – is intended (as all the poems are) to make us re-think our relationship to ‘roaches and, by extension, to the Earth. After all, as grand Atwood points out – everything we have, even our bodies, are on short or long-term (the Fates or Furies willing) lease. Payback comes, even for the very wealthiest, into the biggest bio-bank, our planet.
I wanted to share the poem with Margaret Atwood – a writer I very much admire and aspire to (it’s OK to have heroines! (but perhaps not heroine)) – but she can’t receive unpublished work in the post (fair enough, I understand these complex legal matters – although I can’t imagine she would want to or think of ‘stealing’ this!)…So I’ve self-published here online – which gets around it – and will Tweet her the link, as I know she is a big Tweeter (that’s a nice thing, not a weird insult).
If you do, per chance, read this Margaret – then I hope you enjoy the poem. (I tried Tweeting Carol Ann Duffy a piece I’d written before – which is one of my earlier posts – but I don’t think she’s as Twitter-savvy as your good self.) It’s part of a sequence of seven first-person narrative poems by ‘Vermin’ (gull, ant, pigeon, rat, bedbug, roach and fox) and based around the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins, as old-school religious notions of our excesses. This one is a cockroach in a post-apocalyptic scenario – as the one you allude to in the last section of Payback – suggesting to the (human) reader that we should perhaps admire the humble ‘roach rather more. There’s plenty to commend ol’ Blattaria, I think: resourceful, hardy, thriving and perfectly adapted to every climate on Earth. If only economics could take some cues from those key words…
Vermin the Sixth:
Cockroach – Blattaria, Gromphadorhina portentosa / Envy
Admiration’s Cloud Dirty looks
dirty protests
dirty fights
dirty bombs,
we wish only our living Earth
be cleansed from
you, the dead:
broken imagos. A niggling, clicking,
sound of necks cricking:
off, you said, with
your own bloated heads.
Running around like
heedless chickens. Then the day came
with the push-button flames:
your cities were toasted
your bodies were crumbed.
Ashes were ashes, and
the dust made you dumb
at last. When did admiration’s cloud
become something more a swarm,
more a spore? More an
Intrusion,
descending from on high?
You’ve every reason
to wonder. You were only ever
a moment, a tick
on the face of the clock.
A flashpoint.
An echo.
A boom. Look for that moment.
Take a deep breath,
stretch your legs,
keep an ear to the ground,
feel your way:
it’s all the same to us.
Have you really no use
for a word
for being like us? Your naming
grabbed at our limbs.
Call us Germanica,
attach derision for your enemies
to our backs. Load your fear
on our wings. We slid through
the tectonic cracks
of your name-calling. But
if you must,
you may call us
Mother Pangaea. There are more segments
in our aerials than
days in your year;
and each is of more note.
For you ran, no antenna,
at a thousand-miles-an-hour
into a bursting wall.
Break-neck. You should covet
thy sub-let neighbour’s
green compound-eye views.
For we will not be treading
in your shaken-out shoes. So there it is. If you do happen to read this, Margaret/Ms. Atwood/Appropriately-deferential-title – there are six others in the series! But having read just one would mean a very great deal to me.
Oh and if you’re into a bit of cultural entomology, I took much inspiration from this Reaktion book on cockroaches – part of a great series about animals, worth checking out: