It is said moles (Talpa europaea) bite the heads of worms (Lumbricus terrestris) to incapacitate without killing them. The worms are then cached alive, kept fresh, in specially dug larders located in the walls of the mole’s main tunnels. That is all true. A mole’s larder is where I find myself now, bitten, cached, alive but paralysed, and waiting for the moment the mole returns to devour me. Four hundred and seventy living worms were once recorded in a mole’s larder. I do not know how many are with me here. Many. Many. I feel them. Soil moving in soil. They have lost the capacity for locomotion but I feel them near me, squashed together, alive, and trembling. But our paralysis is not simply a living end. From where we are thwarted, there we might also flourish. In the mole’s larder, worms have found thinking. Strangely, most strangely, the unfatal the mole’s bite also confers a peculiar and separated-out form of worm consciousness. A soft bite that does not despatch but preserves the other’s loss across time, that is one of the mole’s most fearsome weapons. In the moment we become its prey, we thereby become aware; aware of our personal subjugation, aware of our species, and aware of the world. As we are torn from our place, we also come to know that place and in so knowing it, we exceed it. It is true, our wisdom is gained only at the expense of any possibility of acting upon it but it is wisdom, and it is in the world. There is no private consciousness that is not also tethered and relevant to a worldly circumstance. Where before we changed the earth, utilising the full range of our taphonomic powers, and thus raising earth’s surface to heaven, now we understand the process by which the great weight of fallen plants, animals and cities, first pushed out of the earth’s surface, and subsequent to their having fallen, then entering a state of advancing decomposition, become mixed in with cosmic dust, only to be swallowed finally down into the depths. We do that. I did that. And now, if I do not do it any longer, I am bound to recognise it, and find a self within it. Worms work in and against the earth, weaving the warp and weft of it into a single cloth, unpicking it from the bedrock, elevating it in undulations, suturing it to the distant horizon. We plough and sew, we're so very very low. We delve in dirty clay. But I am no longer low, I am raised up and elsewhere, travelling by way of wormholes, and never returning to the place of my first delving. I recognise that in my present state, the earth’s great loom is all but lost to me - of that which I once was, now I may merely know but in my knowing I plough and I sew by other, and bitter, means. My thinking fills with earth as my mouth was once so filled. Soil moving in soil. I grasp the thinking of this my earth as a transferable image, and by applying it I develop a new capacity to make sense of the other earthly realms. Collected here, trembling, we are busy at re-weaving, re-tunnelling all that was undone and filled-in in us. We are making of it a new cloth, a cloth of tunnels, a cloth of our idea of our earth and a cloth of our weave-delving within it. The fatal awareness bestowed upon my writhing companions, startled awake, found out by consciousness, as beneath a burning sun, returns both us and it to the earth, changing its processes as we are also changed. From this our last place, sequestrated, writhing, convulsing, twitching as if impaled upon an angler’s barbed hook, we are cast out into the watery abyss whereupon we transform it, and it is our hook, a component of self, the hook of self. And we become the hooked self, the self inseparable from its severed awareness, oh yes a worm may live if severed in two, and awareness as such is found only in its jeopardy. We await the jaws of our end, and tremble at the thought of the approaching moment when we shall be drawn from our cell, and devoured savagely by our keeper. And yet, although we are vigilant, this moment does not arrive. The voracious mole returns often, but it is only to stuff another dawning awareness into its bulging store. The mole is compelled by some deep anxiety to hoard worms but is not equally compelled to eat us. It seems repulsed by our broken form. Instead, as I imagine it, it relishes the joy of a running, fleeing, yelping prey, torn and consumed in the hot moment of the hunt - what savour is there in canned security compared to that? The mole possesses us as an unconsumed surplus, an unspoiling midden, an irrelevant stockpile built up in a time of abundance. Contradictions everywhere, and the whole only in the fragments confronting the idea of the whole. And the violence of our lived time curdles within the mole’s sidelined anticipatory time: separating, concretising. In the mole’s larder, we are transformed into a thinking wealth, aware of and against our condition, and thus capable of thinking beyond our predicament. Behold, O Saturn, behold the children you did not devour! And behold again all that we behold, and how we now find and recognise, soil moving in soil, and by image transfer, the fate of Penelope’s suitors, as they languish, incapacitated, cached. Do you read us suitors? We read you. Do you recognise us suitors? We recognise you. And with our taphonomic powers, we re-write you. Will you re-write us in turn? We write by tunnelling within your predicament. Soil within soil. Chilled by her enchantments, woven into her stratagems, bitten by her beauty, and thus subdued by the voracity of her will - the suitors in thrall to Penelope, by way of image transfer, become our allegory. But we move in both directions. We contemplate as well the movements of Penelope, also cached, by husband, also as our sister weaver, but also as savage mole. We recognise her as from the place of the suitors, who are captured and accumulated, and then we recognise her from their place of potentials which she has forever deferred. What need has she for them, what need has mole for us? How the non-act of possession must sicken the possessor as the unused talent must be confronted, and thus tarnished. The act of compulsive acquisition is in turn driven by the hoarded treasure’s depreciation - everything definite will be assailed, teased, worm-eaten by the card turning of Fortuna. And all things attained, strongly stored, and unthreatened by rival, thief or invader will lose both lustre and value in the wider world - because they have been removed from the threat of the wider world. There is no private wealth that is not also an impoverishment imposed by the world it refuses. Then, Penelope-Dentata will cast the woven cloth of her desire out and across the world and will make the cloth anew. With her webs, her nets, and her sticky threads, she hunts for that last prey still running.
