Echolocation

I used to think highly of the timeless problems: mind, body, self, other, is, ought. For years, I devoted myself to them. Now I have less interest, because I am a bat.

You have seen one, I assume? Perhaps she was stuck in the attic, darting back and forth in the rafters, squeaking to locate herself in spacetime. You pitied her as she sought escape, or withdrew in horror at her grotesque anatomy, her elongations and angles. Perhaps on a summer evening she flickered, half-thought across the dusk, snatching insignificant gnats from emptiness, and you enjoyed her presence as long as she remained at a distance. Perhaps while you were spelunking, the thousand eyes of her colony glittered in the humid dank and your feet squelched in her vast, wet cathedrals of guano. (The activities of the bat are not so unlike your own.)

What is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagel built an entire philosophical career by declaring the question unanswerable. No matter how much knowledge we have about a bat, Nagel argues, we cannot know the subjective experience of being a bat. You might know, for instance, that with their membranous patagium, bats are the only mammals capable of sustained flight—yet you cannot know how it feels to drop silently from the bough of an oak, then touch the keen night’s tautness between your fingerwings. You might know that there are heated debates on how to properly classify species (fruit eaters versus echolocators, Yinpterochiroptera versus Yangochiroptera)—yet this gives you no access to the quivering clickback, airthrum in the dim, buzzing target and warm swoopmeat into the gullet.

If we accept Nagel’s proposition, then we can never access the subjectivity of the bat. Batness eludes us. Our attempts are merely language that dances, sprangle-legged, against the window pane.

Why all this about bats? you may be wondering. Bats do nothing for me. In this case, imagine I am any other being you wish to understand. I could be a toad, a mustang mare, or a sword-billed hummingbird. I could be your mother, your ex-lover, or a stranger in Tibet with a sprained ankle. I could be the philosopher Thomas Nagel, sitting on the stoop of his bungalow in Albany, fearing he is a hack with no new intellectual territory to cover. The essential logic of the problem is the same. Can we ever know not just about the other, but what it’s like to be the other?

In answer, I can only assert that I am a bat. Maybe you don’t believe me, and think I am only a voice bouncing back in solipsistic illusion, a voice that can’t escape itself. I do understand this concern. Keep your skepticism if you need it. Meanwhile, beyond this lonely I of being, I’ll stretch my knowing endlessly in the attempt. Shrieking of soft spine piliation, doomflight, and huddle, I’ll suckle at stamens. I’ll fling my senses cloudward to wake darkness and cow the sun. Aloft, with quickening heart and surging guts, I’ll lick papergreen fireflies from my fangs.