My family and I were on holiday in Belgium and we needed petrol. My dad had recently passed his driving test and so my mum, having previously been the sole driver of the family, was able to take the passenger seat for once. My mom was by far the more confident driver, not only as a result of her years of additional driving experience, but also due to her general demeanour. In a tight situation, she was the one more likely to take the bull by the horns, whereas my dad was more flappable and prone to fluster and frustration, a disposition reflected in his blood pressure and the stents implanted in his heart. Huffing and puffing from behind the wheel, as boy racers tailgated and wrong lanes were navigated, was therefore something the rest of the family had to get used to.
Having my dad drive in Europe, on the "wrong" side of the road and with its alien road signs, brought such flappability to a head, and so the atmosphere in the car was already a little tense as we rolled into the petrol station. My dad got out and struggled to pull the pump over the other side of the car, having instinctively parked in the position suited to British cars, eliciting a snigger from my brother as my dad grunted and cursed.
Having eventually got the nozzle into the fuel flap, dad couldn't get any petrol out of the machine and stood there dumbfounded, his eyes darting from fuel flap to pump, relentlessly squeezing the pump lever to no effect. "C'mon..." we could hear him muttering. "C'mon!", but no fuel would flow. The man started to gesticulate with his hands, uplifting them, supine and almost biblical, then letting them drop to his sides with a clap. "What do you want me to do?" he strained, continuing to plead with his hands. He had become a living cartoon.
Inside the car, my brother and I were really enjoying the spectacle of patriarch trying to reason with inanimate object. Even my mom was chortling away. My dad was soon in full meltdown, huffing and puffing, panting, flailing his arms. "What do you want from me!? What do you want me to do!?" he howled. Inside the car we also howled at the surreal dialogue that begged the petrol pump to speak back. Finding a time I've laughed more in my life without strong drugs is a struggle. Not just laughing, but thigh-slapping, hand over the mouth, gleeful, i'm-not-supposed-to-be-laughing, helpless, guffawing.
Someone had to put this man out of his misery before he got an aneurysm. But no one was going to. The pump was never going to answer my dad's call, so on it went. I can't recall how the farce resolved itself, but it's a story our family retells with delight. The pathos was deep, man.
* * * * *
When I was a kid - between the ages of around 8 and 12 - my dad took me fishing. I'm a vegetarian these days but my dad was a bit old school in that respect. He never met his dad, but an avuncular neighbour had taught him to fish as a teenager and it was, in his middle age, still one of his favourite pastimes; one that he was keen to pass on to me.
I had my own little pike rod and I learnt to spool my reel, set up my bait and tackle, plumb my depth, and attach my float such that my hook would hang just a little above the lake floor. This was coarse fishing, rather than fly fishing or game fishing. We weren't particularly trying to catch big fish. I could cast and I could control a fish back to the shore so long as it wasn't above about 5lbs. Later, dad bought me a whip which didn't need the reel and I'd fish in amongst the reeds, which became my favourite. Dad would try out different bait: corn, luncheon meat, his own homebaked fish crack, the recipe of which had been passed on like an esoteric scroll from a guy who swore it was the only bait worth having. Mostly we used maggots though. Sometimes casters but mostly live maggots. I half liked them, half loathed them. They were both cute and creepy in equal measure.
One of the more difficult bits of the operation, other than getting snagged on reeds and dropping split shot, was hooking maggots. There were other options, but for a long time I was convinced
that maggots were the superior bait and the only way to catch fish,
which was, after all, the name of the game. I'd watched TV. I'd seen
the worm on the hook. Everyone used maggots. Maggots were best. That's what I wanted. However, they were tricky to manipulate because they were alive and would writhe with activity when handled. You had to hold them quite firmly so you could hook them appropriately. At one end, they had a sort of rudimentary face, above which hung a small fleshy translucent hood, where it was ideal for the hook to go in. If you missed a bit and went through the face - that was still ok, good to go, chuck em in - but if you hooked them through the middle, they would ooze and quickly die.
While I can't speak for them all, fish are - to make a generalisation - less interested in the shrivelled shell of a maggot. You're not catching any fish that way. It's that they're still alive, wriggling, doing the morbid death dance on the hook that appeals to the fish and gets them interested in the first place. With any luck, the fish isn't going to give it much further thought and will gobble the maggot whole along with the concealed hook, thus embedding it in the lip or throat of the fish and allowing it to be pulled ashore. It was all pretty savage, but it was also pretty cool how there were so many people doing it, and everyone sure was pleased when that guy caught that big one. It was smokes all round.
But it was difficult work. I would sometimes get through several maggots before I had hooked one correctly and could finally cast my line. Sometimes I would talk to them, trying to get them to co-operate, reason with them that it was going to be better for both of us to do it this way or they could end up being hooked through the stomach by accident, and that's a horrible way to go. You'd get maggot juice all over your hands and there'd be nowhere to properly wash them, just reeds and pond water. This was man country, you see. Just wipe them on your trousers, shut up, and eat your cheese and ham sandwiches. I resented having life in my hands. It stank. Sometimes when the wind died down you would hear the maggots dry-rustling in the box next to you as you sat and waited.
I would later avoid maggots and opt for sweetcorn or the homebaked fish crack, but this often repeated struggle with the maggots really stuck with me. The desperate - personal - violence. The perverse sense of frustration. The miserable anger that something would not cooperate under my thumb, even when I had almost total control. The spilling over into madness, humour trying to work its way into the situation. It's nothing. It's funny, actually. I would try to hook their ugly (or was it cute?) little face as neatly as I could, but they would squirm and try to avoid being hooked in the face, so you had to be tough with them. Sometimes they would burst inadvertently under the pressure of my grip and their insides would spurt out in a truly awful manner. I would scold the maggot for being so repulsive and disgusting and getting on my nice shirt. "Come on you little shit. Don't be like that. Just do it." All they had to do was co-operate and we could avoid all of this mess, but no. They had to make it difficult.
* * * * *
My frustration with the maggot was manifold. I didn't really know anything about maggots other than they're like, pre-flies, or something (gross). I perhaps had even less of an idea what went on in a maggot brain than a fly brain. I had no understanding of the thing I was trying to manipulate and it was "all my will", and yet the frustration was projected solely onto the living thing I was controlling. On reflection, of course the maggot only wanted to be left alone. But not only was this maggot not human, but as an insect larvae, it was "barely an animal". It was at the very bottom of the us/them hierarchy, about as "other" as a living thing can be. It was almost as if they were to be conveniently reduced even further, to the role of object.
The odd thing that struck me is that so often, to feel the same level of frustration with an actual object, you have to anthropomorphise it, as per my dad's petrol pump. An inanimate object wrongs you and your desire is to personify it. There doesn't have to be any malice in popping a berry between your fingers for fun, coz, you know, it's just a berry. Until, perhaps, some stray juice goes in your eye, at which point it becomes "you little bastard". You trip over the lip of a carpet and it's suddenly "this motherfucker just tried to trip me up!".When an object hits us like a subject and it stirs out anger, we anthropomorphise it in a desperate attempt to reason with it. Here, the effect can be comical. Classic slapstick: man walks into lamppost, man angrily kicks lamppost thereby stubbing his toe, man shake fist at lamppost.
When the opposite occurs and we treat subjects like objects, it conjures up our most sociopathic tendencies. The way I treated the maggots happened partly coz i was a kid and partly coz it's a maggot, who I cared little about coz I don't really have any affinity with them. I had all the power and no one was going to tell me to do otherwise. It wasn't like I was enjoying being mean to the maggots, although I started to resent them more over time as our relationship soured and i resented the messy work. But mostly it happened coz that was the name of the game. I was more or less conducting myself in a manner that was required of me. I'd already got the lake, rod in hand, what else was going to happen? Some maggot faces were inevitably going to get hooked.
I think this goes some way to explaining how police might feel when they're brutalising a detainee who perhaps doesn't respond in exactly the manner demanded by the brutaliser. Even when they have been granted a monopoly over violence and a license to use force, they dehumanise the squirming detainee who resists subjugation. In fact, precisely because they have a monopoly over violence, a license to use force, and a societal expectation to use it, are they in a position conducive to enacting dehumanisation. They crush the worm that fails to submit to a hook being forced through the face. I think some of the worst behaviour occurs when in attempting to force a subject into the role of object, the object speaks back and defiantly resists sublimation. When a victim squirms, they must be crushed, turned to mush, beyond recognition, or else we would have to face the horror we are inflicting.
