Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Fantasy cocktail - (theoretical) pleasure of pain

Launching an offensive against the roaches that breed in my kitchen, and seeing them flit about shortly thereafter after the poison has entered their system was a defeated satisfaction, because I didn't hate them enough to imagine them dying. What I could imagine was a torture experiment:

Me standing upright, being tied on all my axes. A section of both my arms would be cordoned off from the rest of the body; perhaps a 5-inch strip starting from the elbow and towards the hand. This section on each arm would be exposed to certain species of insects that have a historical notoriety for their assault on anything living. For contextual comfort, let us assume ants (preferably the black or red ones) on the left arm, and wasps on the right. The ants could be incited by some sugar syrup on my arm; the wasps could be teased by a throbbing in my arm, having me clench my fists repeatedly. The whole thing would last for 180 seconds, after which the insects would be sprayed with smoke, so as to merely lose their grip and fall off, without meeting death.

Preparations complete. Let they be let loose.
The ants tear through my flesh; the wasps inject into it. Rapid firings in my head, unbearable pain. This would be those Discovery Channel shows we so curiously watch, taken to the extreme - makes you wonder why we are so curious about it in the first place. First minute would be the most exciting...the insects would learn my existence and communicate of my solitary existence in the otherwise vacuum that they've been put in. They might probably try befriending my arm at first, and playfully caress the skin, before coming to a conclusion that their attempts have failed. This would be the first minute of our rendezvous - the most amusing and least interesting as the insect behavior is quite indecipherable to us humans.

The next minute would start with a swelling dissatisfaction for the wasps as they could neither trace food nor friendship, nothing except this throbbing unfriendly tissue that my arm is; the ants would have discovered sugar centers on my arm by this time, and thanking their gods for the excess. With these facts, the ants bite into me in joy, while the wasps sting me in disgust. If I were spiritual, I would fain accept the ants' actions. If I were of the Rosseau clan, I would be elated at what the wasps were at. Being an educated person who is familiar to both, I would expect myself to be in rapture at my physical annihilation.

The third and final minute would be mine. All mine, as the ants would have reached the soft tissue beneath my flesh while the wasps' poison and pain of the sting would have been announced all across my nervous system. Each individual finger would try a heroic effort to stretch across the divide, but to no effect. Every extremity of my body would be twitching involuntarily. I couldn't possibly be more agreeable to death than at this time. Darwin would probably set sail again to formulate a new theory. By the end of this minute, I would have collapsed entirely into myself.

(to added effect, and to further impress Kafka, we could have these insects etch out my crime, which I am able to decipher at the end of the last minute)