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Through a serendipitous rediscovery of some writing on Thomas De Quincey that I had previously read, I was led back to his fevered obsession with crocodiles:
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Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me not so much in terror as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside — come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent Human natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.
June 1819
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/de_quincey/thomas/opium/chapter5.html
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By chance I am currently re-reading J. G. Ballard's masterpiece, The Drowned World, and it strikes me that his menacingly brooding iguanas, busily reasserting mastery over humanity's sunken cities, serve the same purpose as those crocodiles to De Quincey's fevered mind. So what, then, are the crocodile and the iguana? No doubt the orientalist would have something to squawk about the 'civilisation' of the west Vs the 'barbarity' of the east; no doubt he would invoke the 'fear of the other', but are both creatures perhaps infected with some kind of Jungian significance beyond the fears of the colonialist? I personally think so...
Little Miss Yith regularly refers to crocodiles as dinosaurs, and Peppa Pig and friends similarly classify the chameleon at their school, yet there's scarcely more of a distinction to be gleaned by the adult mind. Crocodiles, iguanas and the like are non-extinct dinosaurs (a troubling notion in itself), and they seem to me to signify a number of other troubling thoughts which modern life allows us to liminally submerge into the unconscious, namely:
___________________________________________________________________________
Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me not so much in terror as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside — come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent Human natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.
June 1819
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/de_quincey/thomas/opium/chapter5.html
___________________________________________________________________________
By chance I am currently re-reading J. G. Ballard's masterpiece, The Drowned World, and it strikes me that his menacingly brooding iguanas, busily reasserting mastery over humanity's sunken cities, serve the same purpose as those crocodiles to De Quincey's fevered mind. So what, then, are the crocodile and the iguana? No doubt the orientalist would have something to squawk about the 'civilisation' of the west Vs the 'barbarity' of the east; no doubt he would invoke the 'fear of the other', but are both creatures perhaps infected with some kind of Jungian significance beyond the fears of the colonialist? I personally think so...
Little Miss Yith regularly refers to crocodiles as dinosaurs, and Peppa Pig and friends similarly classify the chameleon at their school, yet there's scarcely more of a distinction to be gleaned by the adult mind. Crocodiles, iguanas and the like are non-extinct dinosaurs (a troubling notion in itself), and they seem to me to signify a number of other troubling thoughts which modern life allows us to liminally submerge into the unconscious, namely:
- That we are beasts with bestial urges. A crocodile appalls as it looks the part and does not disguise its nature as we do.
- That emotion despite looming large in our lives is in no way required for survival and may, in fact, present an impediment to it.
- That for all our cunning and refinement, we are physically fragile and ill-adapted to any but temperate and tamed habitats.
- That time--deep geological time--is unfathomably long to a short-lived creature like a human, and human history is not even a fragment of the full story. Accordingly, we, as individuals, are rather irrelevant (though our genetic line, perhaps gives hope).
- That as countless species preceded us temporally, so countless more may succeed us in the future.
- That all these facts will be as true to our descendants as they are to us: they are inescapable.
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