I was sitting in the garden of a rented cottage in the Cotswolds. It was dark and suddenly there was a bat flitting past my head. For some reason, I thought about Thomas Nagel and his famous essay ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’ It addresses the question of consciousness and the extent to which we can understand the consciousness of other creatures. Rather fittingly, it was also Halloween.
Something like a Bat
There is something that it is like to be
a bat
a flash of dark against the bright lights of the house
a primal fear of wings and teeth
and flapping in my face
a sudden fly past
sharper turn against the hedge
then gone
that
or no longer in my sight
She does not move
in mechanistic space
of speed and distance travelled
from here to over there
but inside minims and the notes
of self-reflected conscious sound
deep thrum of yew
soaring scale of common beech
me a pipsqueak
semi-quaver
hardly heard among
the mighty chords
of insects
far too small
for light to find
She is not moving in our world at all
but in everything that’s being made
from tonal shifts of resonance
too subtle for the human ear
the chaos of great darkness
ordered out of utterance
she is audience composer
orchestra and the symphony it plays
but then I see her
in my other mind
and find her hanging upside down
an academic cap and gown
no more bat
than I am