Between The Ink
Reality bleeds for no one.
There’s this story by Katherine Mansfield called, “The Fly.”
It’s about a fly that falls into an inkwell on an aging office manager’s desk while grieving his son. The fly cleans itself off and tries to leave, but the manager has other plans. He wants to keep testing its grit. He drops another blob of ink on the fly, and another, all while giving it pep talks. Then it finally dies.
“Come on!” shouts the manager.
He nudges it with his pen.
It doesn’t move.
I’ve just got to quote this part:
The boss lifted the corpse on the end of the paper-knife and flung it into the wastepaper basket. But such a grinding feeling of wretchedness seized him that he felt positively frightened…
And while the old dog padded away he fell to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before. What was it? It was . . . He took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar.
For the life of him he could not remember.
After engaging in torture, this old manager gets possessed by a nameless terror, so deep and disturbing that he forgets his dead son.
What a moment.
Mansfield wrote that story in 1922, in the wake of the first world war and one of the worst pandemics in history. She ever so subtly suggests that the manager’s son died in the war, and maybe from… the flu.
So, that story has stuck with me over the last couple of decades. Right now, I think we’re all feeling kind of like that fly. We all have one, two, or three torturers in our lives, dropping blobs of ink on us and telling us to get up and clean ourselves off, largely for their amusement.
When will it end?