#i hereby declare these posts my daily writing practice that are here to get me to write more

[reginasrandomthoughts]

So when I finished reading chapter 4 (”Survival”) of A History of the World in 10 and a half chapters  I knew that that was pretty much the end of the progress I made today with my reading list. For one, I have stuff to say about and for two, I have other stuff and exams to prepare for. (Hey, ho! Icons on Film essay, I am so not happy to see you)

 So, I usually ramble on for myself and I have no structure to anything at all, so here I will try something different, and just write small reminders for me about each element or theme. Or will try. I know me and I have no illusions left. 

 I think that it is only fitting to start with the reindeer since that is what the story starts with. The reindeer that had premonition on Noah’s Ark and tried to run away from man, who will bring that bad thing on. The reindeer and animal cruelty. 

 Animal cruelty, animals paying for man’s sin is an established theme at this point and here it is very explicit: the Soviets exploded a nuclear bomb over Siberia and the radioactivity poisoned the food the reindeer ate and that poisoned the reindeer. But what humans cared about was that they could not eat its meat anymore. Since it became inedible for humans and they did not want to bury it, they fed it to an animal they thought unpleasant: the mink. This is how the story presents it. The mink of course gets slaughtered for its fur to make coats out of it and it still gets to humans, but the kind who would wear that coat presumably does not care about the radioactivity. 

 Another point of animal cruelty is the cats. Her boyfriend, Greg argues that they need to neuter Paul, the cat because he is too aggressive. Kath (whose name’s similarity to the word cat probably is not a coincidence) wholeheartedly disagrees. She thinks that mutilating an animal is a sin. ( I kinda agree with her on this. As a fellow owner of a male cat). But Greg is not the only one who is cruel to animals to fit his needs: in one version of the story Kath picks up another cat, Linda and keeps them on a boat with her and nearly starves them to death bc she is ignoring reality. 

Now, here is a quote from p87:

“Burying things gives you a proper sense of shame. Look what we’ve done to the reindeer, they’d say as hey dug the pit. Or they might, at least. They might think about it. Why are we always punishing animals? We pretend to like them, keep them as pets and get soppy if we think they’re reacting like us, but we’ve been punishing animals from the beginning, haven’t we? Killing them and torturing them and throwing our guilt at them?”

 For Kath this is purely a reference to the reindeer and what the government did to them. But she also connects to it through bringing in another topic, the inability to face reality and projecting. Out of Kath’s two alternative storylines she is torturing her animals: she disregards reality and does not notice that she is hurting them, argues that she is doing something good for them, feeding them fish (that she has no problem killing) but in reality she is starving them. An argument for this timeline can be made by her first claim that she feeds fish only to the cats while she eats canned food. She does not eat fish, because there is no fish to be eaten and reverts to eating the hallucination when she runs out of real food. In the alternative story, Kath’s reality, she is projecting her guilt on them, regardless of how real that version is. She is saying that she left everything behind to save them, as a modern Noah, she acts like protecting them will make her life better and wash the human sin off of her. And in case she is starving them, she projects her guilt onto them via the illusion: she feels guilty so she pretends they are getting fatter rather than thinner. 

Since both the upper mentioned topics are still very big and interconnected let’s tackle two smaller ones first discrimination and abuse (and Kath).

Discrimination is going to be the easiest to start with, because I already talked about it. It is a major theme of the book. So far we have seen humans discriminating between animal species (ch1), humans discriminating between human nationalities (ch2), humans discriminating between species (human and animal in ch3) and now we see humans discriminate between genders. Kath and Greg, I am sorry to say, are both sexist: Greg thinks Kath is stupid and doesn’t get what the men are talking about because she is a woman. He degrades her by calling her a cow, he figuratively lowers her to the level of an animal, to something less than human. Kath, in turn views all men as irredeemable. All the man must be like Greg because to Kath Greg is the “typical bloke” and since he is an abusive jackass, the antagonist of her life, all men must be villains as well. 

And Greg is abusive. He slaps Kath around, he degrades her, he belittles her. Yet Kath says that this is typical. Ordinary: 

“Greg was an ordinary bloke. Not that I wanted anything different when I met him he went to work, came home, sat down, drank beer, went out with his mates and drank more beer, sometimes slapped me around a bit on pay-night. We got on fair enough.”  

To Kath, him hitting her, a man hitting a woman is ordinary. Just part of the package. She was not looking for anything else. She oddly enough draws a direct connection between him hitting her and them getting on well by putting the two sentences next to each other. And from the hospital storyline (I am calling it that) we learn that that is, indeed, the case: Kath was looking for someone just like Greg, someone abusive, that she has a history with dating men like that, that she has Persistent Victim Syndrome. Now, in one timeline this is bollocks. In the other Kath is ignoring reality, really hard: she ignores that Greg being abusive is not okay, she ignores her dating history, she ignores the break-up. In this timeline there is no war, there is just one big fight, a bad break-up, the fall-out, and a post-Greg timeline, where kath is pushed to the breaking point and reality starts to slip because of all the stress and abuse of her life, and perhaps a natural tendency to ignore reality. 

Kath has a tendency to ignore reality. She believes that reindeer can fly just so she can believe that anything is possible. Her faith in that is unshakable. She is a sensitive, deeply empathetic woman who is easily touche by the suffering of animals and is attuned to the stress and dangers of her time. She has a tendency to cling to the unreal even in the face of evidence to the contrary and she may or may not be going insane. 

As a throwaway, I found it interesting that her name is Ferris. The first associations from that, for me, are ferris wheel, something that is just going round and round in circles, and ferryboat and ferry as in carry something. With these associations Kathleen Ferris fits into the theme about Noah and his animals: she like Noah gets on a boat to carry her animals to safety, but in the hospital timeline she ends up delusional and going in a circle, like a ferris wheel and, as she points out, humanity. In her-reality timeline, she insists that she is starting over again, and if that is the case she is starting again from the beginning, her being the new Noah, but purely for cats. Also in the hospital timeline, she herself becomes the ferryboat, carrying these ideas in her own head taking them away from reality, that has become uninhabitable for her. She says she does not look at the way she came because she does not intend to go back and in the end she makes up her mind to accept the her-reality to be the real reality. 

Now as the finale let’s talk about the two timeline of events and how ignoring reality and projecting comes into play. There are two possible timelines: 

 In the hospital timeline Kath breaks up with Greg and that combined with the stress of a looming nuclear war makes her snap and she becomes delusional, believing that the war did broke out and that she needs to get her cat, and the other cat she randomly picked up, away from the war. She gets stuck on a boat where she goes around in circles while her cats starve. She becomes ill and tears her hair out but gets rescued and has lucid moments in the hospital that she interprets as a hallucination until she finally retreats into her make-believe world.

 The other timeline, the her-reality is where everything is as Kath says: the war breaks out she grabs the cats, gets onto the boat, feeds them fish, gets sick from the whatever poison got into the air, finds an island where her cat Linda gives birth to the kitten of her other cat, Paul. 

Now, me being a born pessimist, I lean towards the hospital timeline. But I guess each to their own? I guess. Anyway, what we are talking about is themes and not definitive answers. The Theme of ignoring reality play a part in both of those and roughly the same way.

In the hospital timeline Kath ignores reality from the point onwards when she broke up with Greg, so everything after that is just her blocking out reality. To her a fictional reality where she can step away from the complicated human society that has so many stress-inducing problems is appealing even at the cost of having the new reality that probably most people are dead now and the air is poison. This post-apocalyptic fantasy is escapism, escape from humanity, its sins, its problems. And Kath can escape from her own life and own choices as well: the choice to date Greg, the break up, everything. And because she retreats from reality she has to project her own into its place: her reality. 

Her reality is that humans are ignoring the signs (we are) and that it has gotten t a point where the nuclear war broke out without anyone noticing. They are ignoring the reality to project a peace and to push the responsibility to solve the problem onto someone else. Now, in this line of events the flashes from the hospital-timeline are the delusions: they are Kath’s struggle to let go of the old world, to fight against escaping into a fantasy land where all of this is just a bad dream and she is just sick but will get better. 

So from the perspective of the themes it really doesn’t matter which timeline is correct. 

#Regina shitposts literature #getting better at it? idk but i hope so #i hereby declare these posts my daily writing practice that are here to get me to write more #next step is to write when i am not dead tired and can actually think #the history of the world in ten and a half chapters