Dead… in the middle of the bed
Darren Tofts
Now we checked out this duck, quack.
Brian Eno, “The Fat Lady of Limbourg”
It is one of this things that, after Aristotle, is ineluctable. You know, unavoidable, like finding mice at the back door. Our cats are endlessly generous in their giving and the proud display of their despatch, especially the odd giant rat. This is commonplace and not in any way surprising. What did make me pause recently though was a gift I found when making the bed one morning. Gathering the top sheet into order, I felt the sensation of something caught in it, a gentle weight. It was a dead baby duck. I have no idea who put it there. Occasionally there is an awkwardly placed bone or the odd turd left by a certain canine who shall remain nameless. And this object had been hidden, as if a gift awaiting its reveal. On the verge of thinking about certain kittens in our household, I was caught short by something a little unnerving. None of our immediate neighbours have ducks. Nor do we.
One of the first things it made me think of was Salvador Dalí. The painter once came across a dead bat crawling with ants. His overwhelming response was to pick it up and bite into it. I had no desire to do the same, but I was completely intrigued by the fact of it. It was an attraction to the abject, its perverse surreality, like the thrill of auto-asphyxiation, or electric shock to the genitals. And there’s that guy who swan-dived into space off a roof in Harry Shunk’s photograph of 1960, the year I was born. Perhaps an uncanny anticipation of this piece, it is a portrait of horror and dread, as well as the terrible beauty of the sublime.
As a found object the late duckling was slightly unnerving. A recent hatchling, it fitted tidily into the palm of my hand, with room to spare. It was perfectly formed, showing no sign of any injury or trauma. I had no idea what to do with it as a concept (its mortal remains were quickly assigned to the dustbin of history). This is where Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt come in. I split the deck of Oblique Strategies and turned over a card. “Ask your body” was its instruction. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. I had recently been reading a piece in The Guardian about what happens after death. Considerable research on this phenomenon suggests that you are still technically alive for a time after your heart stops beating and even more chilling, that you are aware that you have died. As one uneasy thought collided with another, a kind of scenario started to take shape. For some time I have had burning and tingling limbs, a sensation known as paraesthesia. It is not in any way painful, just discomforting and a shit to wake up to every morning. So I asked my body what does a dead duckling, post-mortem consciousness and paraesthesia have in common. This is what it told me:
gently cup it close to your ear it’s difficult to pick up a low barely audible murmur like static electricity or the sound of leaves rustling in the breeze is this little body waiting for something what could it be there is no description of where exactly it is, nor what it’s like and it’s really difficult to know what I am actually hearing nor is it dark or gloomy just a foggy grey but not a mist it resembles the white noise of a television screen that has lost transmission I wonder if it senses my presence feels it like an invisible energy or warmth perhaps like the sensation of the uncanny or the feeling of dread for no apparent reason
My body pauses then quietly invokes me to listen very hard. Initially all I can think of is Led Zeppelin. Then it hits. Perhaps paraesthesia is kind of like crypto-mind, an obscure vibration of the fading animus of the genus anas as it crawls into the dark, to the sound of bristling skin.
*
And then, finally, there’s Un-DT. It’s unavoidably churlish to allow the suggestion that this perverse and squeamish phenomenon has something to do with me. It doesn’t, certainly not in the sense that William Burroughs uses the concept in The Soft Machine:
After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell.
Bon appétite
*
The weather is on the improve and it is warm and enticing. The doves are cooing in the sun and showing off their babies, tiny little things who can’t help but look a little dopey. Like their parents really. There are snails crawling among the foliage, obliquely bringing to mind Salvador Dalí’s image of one on a telephone receiver. I notice Charlie is pawing at something in the garden. When I go to check it out I immediately stop short. It is the baby duck. And it was still dead.
apologies to Loudon Wainright III