“The death of all symbols, the retreat of all guarantees”
—Nadia Bou Ali
TWO PHOTOS
After talking about bats over dim sum last summer, an artist I met texts me two viral photographs. In one of the photographs, a woman holds a bat by its feet. It’s the size of a small dog. She is barefoot in a denim skirt, smiling down at the bat pup in her hands. Sun pools in her blond hair, over her high forehead, and around her sunglasses. Light glows through the membrane of the bat’s wings, revealing what look like veins stretching between the bones. Its wingspan is about three feet. That’s a juvenile, the artist wrote. Its face is in shadow, but fox-like ears are distinguishable in the silhouette. It’s unusual to see a creature that looks like it is swaddled in membrane, wrapped in skin, its skeleton trapped in leather, its wing like an encased hand.
In the second photograph, a man stands stiffly in a white button-up and suit pants. Next to him, a bat hangs by its feet from a wooden beam, pieces of banana in its mouth. The two subjects are on a highway or a bridge. If you look over the railing into the valley below, everything is lush and green, fertile. The hanging bat looks disorientingly like a human wrapped in thin black fabric. Its similarity to the man is unsettling. This is an adult, the artist wrote. The frame of the photo has cut the man’s head off at the nose, so it’s impossible to see what emotions he might be trying to repress as he stands next to it: Joy? Fear? Disgust? Curiosity? Reverence? The man is only meant to serve as a metre stick to measure the bat by, but the photograph is still a game of surreal perspective. It is difficult to tell the actual size of anything.
The bat in these photos is the golden-crowned flying fox, a megabat, with an adult wingspan of five feet. It forages alone for figs at dusk. It disperses seeds as it shits, a crucial act for the ecosystem, and returns at dawn to its community of many hundreds, all hanging upside down together in the trees. The population of flying foxes has declined by 50% from 1986–2016 due to deforestation and poaching. They are considered endangered or likely to become extinct in the near future.
I couldn’t confirm where these photos were taken. Or who took them. A tourist? A local? Photographs are perverse holes in time. They are less fact and more testimony, a square framed by an unseen witness, a still captured and offered up like it’s somehow alive and not just a copy of a version of a moment. Susan Sontag writes that “photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” A photo is an artifact to decipher. Like all documentation, it can get tangled up in our collective psyche. I show these two photos to a friend. He pauses, with my phone in his hand, while eating octopus, and says he has seen these somewhere. Bats are terrifying, he inserts, but he has seen these photographs before; he just can’t remember where.
WHAT IT’S LIKE?
A famous piece of writing about bats is a philosophical essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagal. The essay asks if it is possible to understand what it’s like to be someone else, if we can ever really know the consciousness of another without projecting ourselves onto what we imagine they might be. “Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon,” Nagal writes. “No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe.” Nagel makes bats the vessel for these questions because their sensory experiences are so unlike our own. There are 1,400 different species of bats. Nearly 70% of them use echolocation to map nearby objects as they fly, shrieking in rapid, high-frequency bursts and then listening for the sounds to bounce back, to echo, in order to detect objects around them—trees, shrubs, walls, prey. Bat vocalizations are mostly at a frequency outside what the human ear can hear. If we could hear them, the tiny whispering bat would sound as loud as a chainsaw, and the large brown bat, at 138 decibels, would be louder than a jackhammer or a siren.
After sending out the call, a bat will clench muscles attached to bones in its inner ear to soften the sounds as they return, so as not to deafen themselves as they navigate. Their call rate shifts as they get closer to prey, at first five to ten calls per second, but as they circle and swoop and the insect moves into their reach—a moth, maybe, darting in the air above a street light—a bat will send out two hundred calls per second, in what’s referred to as a terminal buzz, to find the precise location of its prey. As they chirp over an entire octave or two, the different frequencies map the moth’s body as it moves. Some moths are furry or have scales, an acoustic defence that muffles a bat’s sonar, making it more difficult to locate. Luna moths have long tails that spin and flutter and beat, creating sounds that confuse echolocation. Bats and moths are tied to each other in the strange syntax of evolution, the relationship between predator and prey turning into co-creation. But if none of these defences work, the bat will find the moth in the air and eat it in seconds, leaving behind only its wings.
Nagel’s point is that our own personal experiences can give us a framework to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, but we are limited by what we know and how we know. If we try to envision ourselves in the skin of a bat, webbing around our arm bones, flapping our hand-like wings with hundreds of other bats through the blue twilight, we are missing the point. “It tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves,” he writes. “But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”
PHOTOGRAPHS VS ESSAYS
I wrote that I had dim sum with an artist who texted me two photographs, but I didn’t say we were eating upstairs in Chinatown on a hot August day. The lights were off in the restaurant and the room felt like it was full of blue clouds. I arrived early. I was wearing black. I had gone out the night before. Part of me wants to try to tell the whole story, which is impossible. Associational memory constantly runs along my periphery, as if the past is a TV always on in another room. It sings on the sidelines, buzzes, crackles. Sometimes you listen, sometimes you ignore it, sometimes you feel an emotional swell, sometimes you carefully watch a version of yourself in another time, or sometimes you’re hog-tied on the floor, forced to relive a moment you’d rather forget. The past is persistent. And maybe the feelings are muted, but you still enter your other self like a spirit taking possession of a body.
I am reading an essay by Aisha Sabitini Sloan in which she quotes the photographer Lorna Simpson. “There is a layering you don’t want to reveal,” Simpson writes. “Private memories emerge while you are trying to pretend it is something new.” As I describe the two photographs of megabats, all these layers swirl around in the background, an archive of private memories. If I criticized the photo for pretending it isn’t framed and controlled, shouldn’t I criticize writing in the same way? How do I tell the story? All that I said and didn’t say?
I didn’t say that at dim sum I was the only one who wanted shrimp dumplings. I love them because they glow through their skins and come steamed in a bamboo box. I didn’t say we ordered from a menu and not a cart. I didn’t say that whenever I have dim sum, I think about an old friend. We don’t speak anymore. So I have to hide my waves of grief as I eat taro root with plastic chopsticks, knowing that my friend would have ordered perfectly in Mandarin and carefully in Cantonese; remembering the red restaurant in Montreal where we would go on special occasions, where we looked at each other across the round table knowing what the other was thinking. They would thoughtfully request chicken feet for my boyfriend at the time, who sucked them dry and has now transformed into an unrecognizable person. Food is its own vortex. The taste of a steamed bun. Black bean ribs, turnip cake, fish balls, dessert tofu. I didn’t say that I felt shy because I didn’t know anyone at the table besides the person who invited me. I didn’t say I was worried that I might disappear, that at some point I realized I hadn’t said much—this is why I started to awkwardly talk about bats.
The artist’s daughter winces when her mother tells us that the giant bats in Sri Lanka probably scared off Portuguese colonizers, mythical beasts like guardians waiting on the shore for dangerous strangers on boats. The friend who invited me touches my inner thigh under the table. Whatever is happening between us is secret, but not so secret, because afterwards he kisses me on a Saturday in Kensington Market when the streets are full of people we might know. It feels good. We never kiss again. I don’t want to tell this part of the story, but if I point out that a photograph is contained and controlled, I have to point out that writing is, too. Maybe what’s behind this vignette is important. The way it might be important to say that today the streets are covered in snow, the plows have pushed the snow into walls on the sidewalk, and I came across an article about the little Mariana flying fox, native to Guam, that has gone extinct, and teared up.
UMWELT
In 1909, Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt, which translates directly from German to English as “environment.” Umwelt is the perceptual surroundings or sensory bubble of a living thing. Von Uexküll was trying to describe how different minds perceive, process, and understand their world through their senses. Arguing that animals aren’t machines, he meant to show how the same environment is experienced differently by different species through unique sense organs. There are as many different worlds as there are living organisms.
Von Uexküll writes about the journey of a tick to illustrate this. The tick climbs up a blade of grass. Because she cannot see or hear, she is oriented by a sensitivity to light, following the feel of sun on her body upwards. At the top of the grass, she waits for the smell of butyric acid, and if she picks up the smell, she will propel herself at it, hoping to land on anything warm blooded. When she lands, she uses an organ that senses temperature before finding a good spot to embed her head and start sucking blood. Only once she’s full does she drop off. Leaving her head behind in the skin of the animal, she falls to the ground, lays eggs, and dies. The tick’s whole world is smell and temperature.
The colour of a flower changes depending on who’s seeing it. Microbats have ultraviolet vision, for dusk, dawn, and moonlight. Their world is shades of neon. Megabats can’t see red-light wavelengths. Vampire bats have infrared sensors in the folds around their noses to detect heat. Each species lives in a different sensory reality. Beyond even what a flower looks like or smells like, it is perceived based on how it factors into life. The sap from the stem could be the perfect material for a cicada nymph to build a foamy nest and go dormant underground. For a sheep, the stem is food to chew on, cud to slowly digest through its four stomachs. For a honeybee, the stem holds blossoms and nectar. For a human, a flower might be picked, placed in a vase, painted as it wilts on a table, gifted to a sick friend. Each inner world creates its own Umwelt.
Animals, humans, insects, all living organisms are in constant relation to each other in ways that can be imperceptible to us—that we cannot perceive them does not mean these relationships don’t exist. “We cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can,” Ed Yong writes in the introduction to his book An Immense World. “We are not privy to the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect. We can’t trace the invisible trail of a swimming fish the way a seal can.” This idea of Umwelt helps us consider these simultaneous worlds, the spectrum of overlapping realities.
Yong writes that one of the dangers of anthropomorphism is “to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs.” Interpreting what is not human as having human qualities does the opposite of what von Uexküll proposes. It projects a human version of the world onto something that isn’t. One of the consequences is that our infrastructure can confuse animal senses, putting them in danger. For instance, aquatic mammals also use echolocation to map out the murky depths of the ocean. Underwater sound pollution and ambient noise in the Pacific Northwest makes it difficult for whales already struggling with diminishing salmon reserves to communicate and hunt and navigate. Coral reefs use moonlight as a trigger for reproduction. So coastal light pollution, which unintentionally mimics the moon, tricks coral into releasing eggs outside of a fertile window. Our inability to see animals as animals is slowly killing them, and us.
BAT CAVE
The first time I saw a living bat was in a cave in the Selkirk Mountains. In the memory, my grandfather guides me with an old flashlight that is so heavy it could be used as a weapon. He’s wearing a T-shirt tucked into jeans, rubber boots, a straw hat. If caves have mouths, then when we enter the cave, we walk along its wet slate tongue. I am around eight years old, and I follow him down the throat carved from stone, into the body. It feels like what I imagine being inside a whale would feel like, an experience I have pieced together from a sculpture of a whale in West Edmonton Mall you can step into and Aretha Franklin singing a gospel song about Jonah living inside of a whale, which I imagined furnished with a brass bed, quilt, rug, and bookshelf.
As we enter the cave, I look over my shoulder at the exit, to note how to escape if I need to. I remember this image perfectly, the colour of the rock, a slate black, the opening of the cave, like a door to the sky, thin clouds over cyan blue. I don’t know why. Sometimes I remember things that feel unimportant, this image, and forget things that are important, like whether my mom was with us or not.
Inside the cave everything is indecipherable without a flashlight. We need light to translate this eyeless world of total darkness. Ten bats are hanging upside down from the ceiling. Their wings shelter their bodies like built-in tents. At first maybe I am afraid, then fear turns to excitement. What is there to see inside a cave? Stalactites? Stalagmites? Rock worn into soft shapes? Darkness, lichen, time detached from circadian rhythms? Albino salamanders with translucent organs and translucent skin, so see-through you can actually watch a cricket move from the lizard’s thorax into its stomach? A floor of guano writhing, alive with centipedes, cockroaches, larvae? Spiders crawling like tiny hands over the decomposing piles? Everything is alien. But none of this remains. In the memory, there are only bats.
I call my mom to ask her if she was with us. She says caves run underneath the golf course, that they are actually old mines, people hide from the cops in the tunnels when the RCMP raids grow-ops. She has photographs somewhere of the cave, she says, she will try to find them. I know this is impossible because she doesn’t have any photographs, but I don’t say anything.
BAT DEATH
White-nose syndrome is caused by a powdery fungus that affects hibernating cave bats. Spores of the fungus can live on shoes for months and were probably transferred to North American caves by people. What irony: we have given them the disease that could kill them, and we think they have given us our pandemic. The fungus spreads, colonizing the bats’ skin, muzzles, ears, scarring or leaving wounds, even holes in their wings. It causes them to wake prematurely from hibernation, which means they use up crucial fat reserves and die of starvation. Or after invading deep tissues, the fungus can make it impossible to fly. Some estimates of bat deaths as a result of the fungus are over six million. Bats only have one pup per year. So, repopulation will be slow and difficult. In certain caves in New York State, where the fungus was first documented, almost all the bats that were living there are dead.
Most microbats eat insects. Little brown bats eat around 1,000 insects an hour; a colony of 100 bats will eat 1.5 million mosquitoes each month, not including other insects. When a mosquito feeds, it sucks up any viruses or parasites in the blood of its prey, and can transfer malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, Zika, to its next victim. If anything can easily transfer disease and should be kept in check, it’s a mosquito. Because of this, bats help reduce the risk of disease. If the entire population were struck down, the effects would be catastrophic on the ecosystem. Economic studies suggest that walnut farmers in California alone could lose up to 60% of their crop without bats eating moths. Knowing this, farmers have begun to install bat houses along the perimeters of their property.
More than two hundred bat species are endangered or threatened. The answer to why bats matter, why we should care, should be because they are alive. Someone shouldn’t have to be useful to deserve to live, but bats are. They pollinate guava, banana, cacao, mangos, dates, figs, cashews, agave, saguaro, durian, mangrove, eucalyptus. Over five hundred different species of plants need bats to pollinate them.
PHOTO OF A BAT CAVE
I find a photo of the cave mouth in a small album in a drawer with discarded drawings and letters. Now I know why this image is fixed in my mind. I must have seen the photo hundreds of times. I’ve altered it so much that the cave mouth became a door to the sky, but the actual image is overexposed and all you can see outside the cave is a wall of trees. On the same page, there is a tightly framed photo of storm clouds. Vertigo swirls of light gild the edges. Grey moves like paint through water. The third photo is of a birch stand next to a gnarled piece of dead wood. My mom took these photos with her manual Nikon in her short shorts and racerback tank. She must have been twenty-eight and was obsessed with landscapes.
On the adjacent page there are three more photos: sandwiched between two landscapes is me, at five, in a bathtub, wearing a pink-and-orange tartan swimsuit, holding a plastic frog. If I was surprised to find myself at dim sum when I meant to write about bats, I am even more surprised to find myself here. This album holds the only photos of my childhood. “There is a layering you don’t want to reveal,” writes Simpson. “Private memories emerge while you are trying to pretend it is something new.”
When I was a teenager, my mom dated a man who moved all his stuff into our house, even though he didn’t live with us. One day I came home from school, and everything had been replaced. A wall had been painted oxblood red. A five-by-five-foot hyperrealist painting of his two Doberman attack dogs had been hung in our living room. There were vintage leather couches and drum lampshades from the ’50s. Our home had been transformed into a postwar diorama, with us inside like dolls. He had taken most of our things and put them into a storage locker and kept the key. Before I moved to Montreal, at eighteen, he told me I needed to pay him to get my stuff before I left. I stood on the porch with two friends and the money in hand, lent to me by my boyfriend’s parents, as my mom hid behind the screen door and he shouted slurs, his body cruel, precise, readied to spit on my face, readied to hit me, readied for attack. This is why I have this small photo album now, why I remember the bat cave so well.
A few years ago, my mom was able to get some of her stuff back, but no photographs. I tell people this when I feel able to expose the fact that I am an outsider. They don’t usually understand. In a memorializing culture, having so little documentation of my life makes me a trace of a person, a thin envelope. Without evidence of myself I could never be quite as real as others. If a person isn’t witnessed, don’t they slowly disintegrate? Is this photo of a cave mouth more real than the child inside the cave? More real than the sleeping bats hanging from the cave ceiling?
BAT KILLER
Since I have started writing this, everyone I know has been sending me memes or headlines about bats. Videos of hanging bats filmed so they look right side up with a soundtrack of dark techno. Roofers ripping up rotting shingles only to discover a colony of wriggling grey bats. Two children who allegedly died after eating a bat. A photo of a blurry bat at twilight. Baby bats swaddled like humans, drinking from a bottle. Someone asks me on a date and sends me images of bats from the Midwest where they live. Over dinner, Marjorie tells me her husband is a bat killer. Years before, they spent a weekend at a friend’s cottage in Muskoka and found a bat trapped in their bedroom. When it landed on the windowsill, her husband, a very gentle man who is writing a book about jazz, dropped the window on it. Like a guillotine, she says. I realize, the more people I talk to, how many are afraid. Of course we kill what we fear.
SYMBOLS AND FEAR
D. H. Lawrence describes bats as “swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.” Dante describes Satan in the ninth circle of hell waving his featherless bat wings as the damned arrive. In Disney’s Fantasia, a devil unfurls his bat wings and resurrects parades of glowing skeletons. Bats live in almost all ecosystems besides the Arctic and Antarctic. They populate folklore. “Between me and the moonlight flitted a great bat coming and going in great whirling circles,” wrote Johnathan Harker to Mina in the epistolary novel Dracula. We understand that Dracula has transformed and is flying outside his guest’s window through the inky Romanian darkness.
In folk tales, humans turn into bats. Bats turn into humans. In a version of the crane wife, a man marries a bat that has disguised herself as human. Years before, the man rescued a bat with a broken wing and nursed it back to health. After his wedding, his new wife tells him that at dusk she must go out and warns him not to follow her. Every night at dusk, she leaves and brings back food for the family. The man grows increasingly curious. He becomes obsessed with knowing where she goes and decides to follow her, only to discover her true form. Midflight, she sees that he sees her, and in shame tries to fly away, but in her haste she accidentally hits a wall and dies. In northern Colombia, a Yupa man drinks and flirts with a bat on his way home from hunting. His jealous wife sets fire to the forest, killing her husband and all the bats in the area. In Argentina, a woman sees that her husband has a bat tail caught in his jeans. In her shock, she drops dinner on the floor. Seeing the alarm in her eyes, the bat-husband kills his wife and disposes of her body at the base of a tree with all the bones of all his other wives. A woman in Bolivia kills a bat only to realize it is her husband.
Symbolism runs through nomenclature. The etymology of the English word bat, an alteration from Middle English bakke, traces its way from leather-flapper to flitter-mouse, like the German fledermaus. To flutter. To strike. To beat. To flap. To fly. The words are constructions of motion. Bats are boundary crossers, flying between night and day, between the underworld and sky. Murciélago. Chauve-souris. Yarasa. Apahkwâcîs. Pipistrello. The Mandarin word for bat has two characters, 蝙蝠 or biānfú. The second character is a homophone that sounds like the word for “good fortune.” In Chinese culture, bats are considered a blessing. In Farsi, the word for bat is خفاش or khofāsh. The root indicates concealment, secrecy, hiding. Djaaʼabani in Diné means “leather ears.” In Yoruba, ẹyẹ-òjò means “bird of the rain.” Bapakwaanaajiinh in Ojibwe is “flying mouse-like animal.”
Bats are the only mammals that fly rather than glide. Their wings are covered in touch-sensitive hairs that help them note airflow changes. They can hover, back flip, fly within inches of other objects. They can complete hairpin turns. They can trawl water to pluck insects off the surface, or glean, or capture prey midflight like a hawk. They are often described as flying erratically, but this is only because they fly so differently from a bird; in fact, they have more precision.
Is this the beginning of our fear: Discomfort with how they fly? How do we learn to fear? From our culture? From our families? From experience? In the body, fear is an unconscious response to a stimulus that starts a chain reaction. After contact with something that you fear like a bat, the amygdala alerts the nervous system, cortisol and adrenaline are released, your heart rate goes up, you start to breathe heavily, you sweat, blood flow shifts to your legs and arms to help with fight or flight, pupils dilate, non-essential systems like digestion slow. How do we approach that which terrifies us? The trouble is that whether the stimulus is an actual threat doesn’t matter. If someone perceives a threat, their body will react as if it is one.
In 2020, a chiropterologist named Merlin D. Tuttle published an article called “The Viral Witch Hunt.” In it he describes investigating cases where “fearful humans had burned, poisoned, or sealed caves, killing millions of bats at a time.” Patient zero of COVID-19 hasn’t been identified and how they became infected is still unknown, but the narrative web of accusation stains. People still blame bats and people who eat bats, even though the two most likely causes of COVID-19, cited by scientists today, are that the virus infected a pangolin and jumped to humans, or that the virus evolved in humans over time to become virulent. For anyone who doesn’t handle bats, the risk of disease transmission is extremely low. Statistically, it is much more likely to die in a car accident than from being infected with rabies by a bat.
THE PHOTOS
I have been reading and thinking about bats so much that they are the ligature that holds the last six months together. People think I am a bat person, but I am actually more curious about fear. I only dream about them once. I am in a cabin in the wilderness, and a bat is trapped inside with me, desperately flapping and fluttering. I need to free the creature, to save it, and return it to a cave underneath the cabin. In the process I am scratched, and for the rest of the dream I wander through different rooms, through hallways of doors, into a meadow, a burnt pine forest, there are people everywhere in all the rooms, in the meadow, and I keep showing them the scratches that run along my arms, asking if they think I should go to the doctor, if they think I have rabies.
I haven’t looked at the two viral photos for months, and they have transformed, as everything does with time. The blonde woman holding the bat pup has become a tourist, American because of how she’s dressed, her tight ponytail, and if I feel judgemental about whatever power dynamic is happening behind the scenes, or outside of the framing, at least something about her smile seems authentic. But who is behind the camera? The photo of the cave mouth too looms, as if it has always been a portal, and the joy of being taken underground, introduced to another world, introduced to the family of bats, becomes linked to learning the ethics of empathy. But it is all just interpretation; like the swirling context behind dim sum, these photos have unseen backgrounds.
I have been playing with the idea of translation, though I am not sure I know what it means. In an interview, Renee Gladman says, “This is why translation has been so important for me in my work and in my living: it’s a way of being present with that sense of knowing that not everything you’re feeling or experiencing is visible or legible.” We are so often illegible. We are so often not seen as a whole, instead turned into an object, a part, a limb. This is sometimes called soul blindness and makes it possible to devalue another life so much that we don’t care if a human or an animal lives or die. It makes us willing to kill. But soul blindness is also when we lose the ability to perceive other selves. How can we be whole if we can’t see others as whole. I watch Jamille Pinheiro Dias give a Zoom talk. She sits at a desk, her face moon-like and open, describing nature as an intricate ecology of selves and how our commitment to the worth of each self in this ecology is crucial. Halfway through the talk Dias stops and says, “Translation is a way to dream beyond yourself.” Maybe translation can act as a bridge between worlds—maybe it is an imperfect antidote to soul blindness. If it is so difficult to do this with humans, how do we begin with animals?
I searched the bat subreddit to see what photos are being shared today. The top hit is of a bat hotel on fire in a backyard in the UK. “Apparently this is a teenager’s idea of fun,” mytimeisnow wrote. The trees surrounding the bat hotel are orange, lit by the glow of the flames, as the wooden structure burns with bats inside it. For some reason, I can’t help but imagine them screaming, even though I wouldn’t be able to hear it.
