You can hear them at night, I tell W., when the TV is turned off and there's no music on the stereo. You can hear a kind of background noise, a kind of pattering, as of tiny paws on mud. Scratching, eternal scratching under the floorboards and, it seems, in the walls, within the very walls themselves….
You can hear a kind of scuffling, a continuous rustle, and particularly at night…. It's always there, that scuffling, that rustling…. The eternal streaming of the outside, W. reads from his notebook. That's from Foucault, he says. That's the rats in your flat.
And you can smell them, too, I tell W.: an acrid, pungent smell like ammonia, that comes up from underneath the floorboards. Rats' smell, from their nest.
Sometimes you can hear them playfighting , I tell W. You can hear them thumping, they're rowdy. And sometimes it gets much more quiet, particularly by day, and I imagine them curled up in their nests, grooming one another. And they're sleeping together, rat curled up beside rat …
And they're chewing, above all - chewing, their teeth ever-growing. They're tormented by their teeth, their ever-growing teeth! They'll chew the very world apart, I tell W., it's driving them crazy! … Because it's terribly painful, having perpetually-growing teeth. It drives them to distraction.
What else can they think about? What else can they do? In their sleep, they chew. Sleeping, dreaming of a yet safer nest, yet more companionable rat-brothers and rat-sisters, they're still chewing. In the depths of night, resting companionably one rat on top of another in their nest, they chew and chew.
They've chewed each others ears to rags, in my imagination, I tell W. They've chewed each others tails down to stumps. They chewed great sores on each others bodies. Some had their eyes chewed out. Some a forepaw or a hindpaw. Some lie dead, half their face chewed away. Some lie with their innards chewed away, and maggots already hatching in their rotting flesh.
They're chewing at the mud, burrowing. They're chewing at the walls, the old brick. They're chewing at the floorboards … And they're dreaming of chewing our faces, I tell W. They're dreaming of chewing our fingers to stumps, of chewing off our noses. They're dreaming of the furniture they'll chew, of the plastic they'll strip from the cables.
They're dreaming of wet nooks and crannies where they can curl up after chewing. They're dreaming of tiny spaces in which they shove their tired bodies, to sleep and dream of chewing. The infinite wearing away, W. reads from his notebook. That's from Blanchot, he says.
First of all, there was chewing, that's rat cosmogony, I tell W. First of all, chewing, but what was there to chew? The world, the whole world…. Rats come after the creation of the world, I tell W. They're scavangers, late-comers. They arrive with teeth ready to chew. They're made with little forepaws to pick up things to chew. They have little hindpaws to push themselves along, in the direction of things to chew. And they have their sleek long brown bodies to slide along the tunnels the make by chewing.
In the beginning, chewing, that's their cosmogony. And in the end? But how can they think of an end, when there'll be nothing left to chew? Rats belong to the time inbetween. What sense can they have of creation, real creation, or of the apocalypse? Rats begin with what is already there. And it will always be there for them, they can't conceive of anything else.
After they've chewed through the world, what then? After they've chewed out the moon and the sun? After they've chewed the planets away? After they've chewed away stars and galaxies? After the suns of the universe are chewed out from the core?
They'll chew through the atoms, through all the atoms. They'll chew the particles that make up atoms, and the particles that make up those. Then they'll chew their way through the fields of force from which the particles half-coalesced. Then they'll chew up Space and chew up Time and chew up God himself … And then, with nothing left to chew, they'll chew up themselves, their gnashers flashing in the empty night …
Lars Iyer's Blog 