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May 30, 2006
Excerpts from the Wasp Factory
All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The Strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid. The Wasp Factory is part of the pattern because it is part of life and - even more so - part of death. LIke life it is complicated, so all the components are there. The reason it can answer questions is because every question is a start looking for an end, and the factory is about the end - death, no less. Keep your entrails and sticks and dice and books and birds and voices and pendants and all the rest of that crap; I have the factory, and it's about now and the future; not the past.
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The wasp factory covers an area of several square metres in an irregular and slightly ramshackle tangle of metal, wood, glass and plastic. It is all based around the face of the old clock which used to hang over the door of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Porteneil.
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Having made it's way to the edge of the face, though, the wasp can enter one of twelve corridors through little wasp sized doors, one opposite each of those - to the wasp - vast numerals. If the factory so chooses, the weight of the wasp trips a delicate see saw trigger made from thn pieces of tin can, thread and pins, and a tiny door closes behind the insect, confining it to the corridor it has chosen. Despite the fact that I keep all door mechanisms well oiled and balanced, and repair and test them until the slightest tremor sets them off - I have to tread very lightly when the factory is doing its slow and deadly work - sometimes the factory does not want the wasp in its first choice of corridor, and lets it crawl back out onto the face again.
Sometimes the wasp will fly, or crawl upside down on the bottom circle of glass, sometimes they stay a long time by the closed off hole in the centre through which they enter, but sooner or later they all choose a hole and a door which work, and their fate is sealed.
Most of the deaths the factory has to offer are automatic, but some do require my intervention for the coup de grace, and that, of course, has some bearing on what the factory might be trying to tell me....
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Inside this greater machine, things are not quite so cut and dried (or cut and pickled) as they have appeared in my experience. Each of us, in our own personal factory, may believe we have stumbled down one corridor, and that our fate is sealed and certain (dream or nightmare, humdrum or bizarre, good or bad), but a word, a glance, a slip - anything can change that, alter it entirely, and our marble hall becomes a gutter, our rat maze a golden path. Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey - part chosen, part determined - is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow. I thought one door had snicked shut behind me years ago; in fact, I was still crawling about on the face. Now the door closes, and my journey begins.
I look down at Eric again, and smile, nod to myself in the breeze while the waves break and the wind moves spray and grass and a few birds call. I suppose I'll have to tell him what's happened to me.
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Posted by daruma at 10:29 AM | Comments (4)