Metamorphosis

‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning he felt himself transformed into a gigantic dung beetle.’

Rob was the man who stole my girlfriend and he first introduced me to Gregor Samsa. His theft was as deft as that of any pickpocket. Months after they consummated their relationship he solicited my help in ‘springing’ her from Elizabeth Cadbury House, a dormitory for physiotherapy students. Together we drove to Birmingham and watched as Sally climbed out of a downstairs window.

Later she left Rob and ran off with his best friend Graham the Hat. We liked to keep things amongst friends in those days.

Despite the theft I’ve always been grateful to Rob. He cemented within me a love for literature. The seed had been planted in school but until I met him I thought ‘all that stuff’ would be left behind upon getting a job.

Rob put me right about that one evening as he rolled a spliff on the sleeve of a Leonard Cohen record. Several months later he was to complete his novel about a disembodied arm that continued to fire a machine gun long after the body from which it had originated died. Rob was by this time experimenting with L.S.D.

When I went to college to study social work I did my best for a year, with the predictable result that my grades were mediocre. Then, for part of the summer vacation, I helped to design and run a play scheme for 600 children in one of the less advantaged areas of Plymouth. This was a success, and the result was that when I entered into my second year I no longer cared about marks and was therefore prepared to take risks.

It was thus, in the first week of year two, that I shot off my mouth by asserting to the new tutor that literature must be used to help us students better understand people. My tutor agreed wholeheartedly and gave me two weeks in which to prepare something for the seminar group to which I belonged.

I struggled mentally. I spoke to my flatmate, who called me a ‘Daft Git’. I visited the cinema, and the library. In time I came to agree with my chum. But suddenly one morning, shortly before the presentation was due, inspiration arrived in the form of a large package.

When, during the summer break the play scheme concluded, I travelled to London and visited the Camping Exhibition at Olympia. There I ordered a government surplus sleeping bag. On Tuesday, the day before the presentation was to take place, the bag arrived. Naturally I zipped myself into the khaki coloured cocoon at once to ensure that it was intact. After all it was last used by a member of the armed forces!

When I was fully installed I saw that from the outside, with my head hooded, and the toggles fastened so that only the waterproof area was visible, I looked exactly as I had pictured Kafka’s dung beetle.

The rest was simple. I was to précis the story of how Gregor Samsa metamorphosed into a dung beetle overnight, leave copies on the plastic chairs in the seminar room before my fellow students arrived, zip myself into my dung coloured sleeping bag, and refuse to talk.

The trick worked like a charm. My fellow students were nervously bemused. They read the paper I had left about the unfortunate Mr. Samsa. Then they expressed wonder at why I was wearing a sleeping bag in class.

One student saw the parallel right away. ‘Look – Steve’s turned into a sleeping bag’, he exclaimed!

My tutor pointed out when I was being treated like a handicapped person, before in turn becoming irritated when I wouldn’t explain the presentation in any way. Some of the students walked out, only to be brought back by the others. All eventually admitted that it was not my ‘dung beetle’ that disturbed them so much, for they knew that I was just being perverse, it was the feelings they experienced as responses swayed from condescension to ridicule.

Since that day I’ve remained a dung beetle. It’s not that I won’t talk, or communicate, but simply that I won’t let my ego, or any socially constructed identity, get in the way of influencing others to examine their thoughts and reactions. I mentioned this story in a comment over at Birds on the Blog the other day. It also reminds me of Orwell’s advice to be original in Alan Stevens’ excellent post here.

Stephen Bray writes in a stream of consciousness, but sometimes is a good read . . .