Meaning
Into the layers and depths.
I came as ice, I came as a whore
I came as advice that came too sure
I came as gold, I came as crap
I came clean and I came as a rat
It takes a long time but God dies too
But not before he'll stick it to you
—Modest Mouse, I Came as a Rat𓃠
This story begins with a telepathic cat.
I’m standing in the backyard of the suburban family home of my adolescent years. The family cat, long since dead, is sitting before me. His eyes dig into my mind and I start to cry, the kind of cry loosed by dread.
Wordlessly my cat tells me that he has to show me something. Not as voice in my head, but as a knowing beyond words. A silent part of me does not want to see. It knows what awaits.
Trembling and with tears falling down my face, I shake my head no. The cat’s face shows no emotion. He just sits, stares, waits. Fear creeps up my throat and I bend down and pick up my cat. I know where to go without knowing.
Every step further into the backyard intensifies my fear. The grass is green and freshly cut. The bushes and trees manicured, the flowerbeds weedless. I start to panic. Begging the grey bundle of fur in my arms to stop, we relentlessly move towards the far corner of the yard.
And there, in the middle of the perfectly groomed lawn is a yawning hole. We stop at it’s edge. My legs scream to run, to keep running and never stop. I try to look away but my eyes are pulled into the depths.
The hole opens into an even larger void. The darkness is thick but slowly evaporates to a dimness as fear swallows me. A deep cavern is revealed and black rats, countless rats, roil over each other in stormy waves. Every surface is bathed in them. They claw and fight each other, the dark flame of their mass licking at the edge of the hole. A thick chain hangs down from the ceiling of the cavern, a writhing ball of rats at its end.
My body jerks violently as I awake, chest heaving, heart pounding.
After the shock wanes, I wonder about the nightmare. The bizarre intensity holds a sense of importance. Spectral truths. But it remains mysterious despite its graphic transmission.
Life rolls on.
♾️
I remember picking up my great-aunt for Thanksgiving one year. She was a tiny, frail woman. She had been taller once, but osteoporosis had taken her spine and turned it into a permanent question mark. She couldn’t drive anymore and I think she was a bit worried about my 18 years old driving prowess. I stuck to the surface streets and drove slow. I didn’t want her to die from fright. Forever after, Thanksgiving would have been an awkward holiday tragedy.
Pilgrims and Indians. Turkey. Football. Dead aunt.
We weren’t close, the Irish side had notable issues with intimacy. She lived alone, had never married and had no children. I saw her on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but even that tradition had become irregular. We didn’t have much to talk about. She broke the uncomfortable silence with a question:
“What do you want to do?”
“As in a job?”
“Yes.”
“I think I want to be a writer.”
“Oh. Well, you are awfully young to be a writer. You have to live a while before you can write.”
It didn’t matter if she was right or wrong, it remained a calling that I would never explore. I’d barely graduated high school, barely survived a grievous motorcycle accident. College just seemed like more school, which had been more of a required burden than inspiration. I was busy being lost.
And so it went—people would enquire what I’d like to “do” and I would inevitably answer with the same words: “I think I want to be a writer.”
It got to a point where I’d snicker after speaking those words. It was a joke. A lie.
The inevitable follow-up would be: “Have you written anything?”
Then I’d have to answer that I hadn’t, that it was more of a dream, and their expression would screw up in confusion. It was a lovely contradiction. Part of me would hurt when I would admit that. The part of me that wanted to write, needed to write.
🗡
Half a life later at 40, after ghostly emotional pain became unbearable, after the wounds of dismantling an inauthentic life, I began to heed the call. I began to write.
I didn’t have a scheme. I didn’t try to write fiction or screenplays, which I imagined where desire would lead. I went where the words led, surrendering even as I fought myself to write them. Usually in a trickle, sometimes a flood, they led to my struggles, my suffering. I bled. I began a blog and named it Wordletting.
The words were raw. Naked. The catharsis obvious. But they were also rebellious. A middle finger in defiance of a world fake and shallow and destructive. There was too much make-believe being sold as reality. I wanted blood and guts. I wanted real, even if it was ugly. Even if it was amateurishly messy. I wanted the fucking truth.
I wanted a story. My story. A new story.
Eventually my words led to the vivid rat dream I had somewhere in my early twenties. I’m nearly 54 now. The dream is still fresh, as if I had it yesterday.
The title came to me first: Rat King. From those two words the meaning of the family home, the perfectly tended backyard, the hole, my dread, and the rats began to unfold.
I described the dream and then wrote these words:
I’ve packed away so much pain. It swarms inside, it’s infection total. So much shame. So much sadness. So much anger and resentment. So much ingrown hate. So much abandonment and loneliness. Worthlessness. Frustration. Confusion. Doubt. Cynicism. Depression.
Smothering darkness.
I’m a cursed land inside. I don’t want to dig up the monstrous abscess and drain it. It will spew ugliness and poison. Black tentacles will burst forth and rip apart my thin veneer. I want to keep running, lose myself by any means necessary.
Like heroin, all warmth and sleepy bliss… It has a seductive appeal that I must never know. I would surely use it as an exit. Self destruction is a means I know well.
Like relationships, other people’s stories. Let me be what you want. Let me fix you. I’ll be your moon, waxing and waning for you alone.
Anything but my story. Anything but the vulnerability of ripping myself wide with words and exposing the horror, the weaknesses, the glaring faults.
Because I can’t possibly have anything beautiful inside.
After I finished writing, I did a search for an image to add. I typed “rat king” and hit enter. The first image listed was a heap of dead desiccated rats, their bodies and tails entangled. It lay on a white background and looked old and fragile, like a museum exhibit.
Clicking the image took me to a Wikipedia page. It’s title? Rat king.
The first sentence read, “A rat king involves a number of rats intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with, for instance, blood, dirt, ice, horse-hair, or feces—or simply knotted.”
I’d never heard of such a thing. But nothing could have been more appropriate. It sent a shiver down my spine.
Was I the Rat King? Part of me identified with the interpretation, but it felt incomplete.
Life rolls on.
⏮ ⏯ ⏭
We’re always in such a hurry to understand. To decipher. To define. We disrespect the wisdom of time.
In the interim, so much unthinkable has transpired. Unexpected pauses and eventualities. Accelerated dawnings. Undead retrogrades.
The rat nightmare isn’t the only vivid dream that lives eternal in my memory despite the passage of time. There are others that have marked themselves indelibly. These initially were bound tight in lucid mystery but as I age, they have bloomed into metaphoric synchronicities. I loathe to say prophetic, because it’s never literal, but it feels like something akin to it. It’s deeper than the surface waters of observer/subject.
It’s more like enmeshed dimensionality.
Whatever that means.
I now view the rat dream as communal. A terrifying metaphoric revelation of shadow truths I, and us, struggle to acknowledge, let alone comprehend.
It’s weird, man. It’s even weirder now that I’m embracing it.
☾𖤓
"Some would have it that the rat waxes mighty in its old age and is fed by its young: this is called the rat king."
—Conrad Gesner, Historia animalium (1551–58)
Yes.
Lovely meditation.