1) Rats – Syd Barrett, from ‘Barrett’ – 1970 http://popup.lala.com/popup/576742248995947025 2) Memories of a Moviegoer. I recall the fine film Willard (1972, Daniel Mann). A “B” movie perhaps, but a fine unpopular film: unpopular because the heroes are rats. My memory of it is not necessarily accurate. I will recount the story in broad outline. Willard lives with his authoritarian mother in the old family house. Dreadful Oedipal atmosphere. His mother orders him to destroy a litter of rats. He spares one (or two or several). After a violent argument, the mother, who “resembles” a dog, dies. The house is coveted by a businessman, and Willard is in danger of losing it. He likes the principal rat he saved, Ben, who proves to be of prodigious intelligence. There is also a white female rat, Ben’s companion. Willard spends all his free time with them. They multiply. Willard takes the rat pack, led by Ben, to the home of the businessman, who is put to a terrible death. But he foolishly takes his two favorites to the office with him and has no choice but to let the employees kill the white rat. Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a long, hard glare. Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his becoming-rat. He tries with all his might to remain among humans. He even responds to the advances of a young woman in the office who bears a strong “resemblance” to a rat–but it is only a resemblance. One day when he has invited the young woman over, all set to be conjugalized, reoedipalized, Ben suddenly reappears, full of hate. Willard tries to drive him away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he then is lured to the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is waiting to tear him to shreds. It is like a tale; it is never disturbing.
(from 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)
3) Corporeal – Broadcast, “Tender Buttons” – 2005 http://popup.lala.com/popup/5836946618128270675
4) The Wisdom of Rats. Laws are passed, uniforms designed, theories float like butterflies over the mountains and valleys and deserts. Things are Mexican or things are American or people are settlers or pioneers or savages or aliens, men are outlaws or lawmen, boundaries are violated or secured, armies sweep through, order is insisted upon, revolutions come and go and succeed or fail and it is all under control at all times whether there is control or not. Havoc is disguised as police, violence parades as an economy, murder described as establishing peace or law and order, and the bugles blow, dust rises from the cavalry, warriors descend with lances and clubs, screams slash the blue sky and it weeps blood, governments tremble, the men gather on the mesa and puzzle out the science of mass murder, and the rains fail, cattle die, villages are put to the sword, entire nations of feathers and tongues fall dead at our feet, the books arrive–those histories–and all this is tidied up and made sense of, history becomes the final suicide where we block ourselves off from the earth, from the ancestors, from ourselves, and from the hungers that feed our dread. I go outside in the night and sit on the ground as it slopes toward the creek and rats appear and move all around me as the music plays in the houses and spills out the French doors, yes, the rats mock the metes and bounds of my world and they have been here since before the beginning, were here when Cortes rocked on a ship off Veracruz dreaming of conquest, back then, even earlier, but certainly back then. The rats came out in the night and moved right here where I sit, a continuous thread of rats reaching far back with love and anger and lust and dreams and reaching past any place my world will ever attain, and the rats know but will not say what they know and so we must find out, experience the fantasy of power and control, and finally we will go under like everyone one of our kind they have ever seen and still they will come out in the night and move around, not making a sound, not a single sound, but move around and thrive as the creek purls along in the black love of the night. We must not play it safe if we wish to share the wisdom of the rats.
We stand on the deck, Cortes is pacing, it is early in the sixteenth century, an empire is in the offing, he paces, and within twenty years, men just like him will cross what we now call the border, as men have been crossing that line on our maps for thousands of years.
Our idea of history is the end of history, of tracking a concentration of power that finally reaches critical mass, and by an explosion of force solves all problems and ends all change forever, amen.
No rat has ever believed our history. (from “Contested Ground” by Charles Bowden, selection in Harpers Magazine Jan 2010)
5) Sad Rat (2009) http://gothamist.com/2009/10/24/sad_rat_in_sidewalk_forever.php