The Mentality of the Culicidae

It's 3am, and I'm awake. Again.

I used to be the type of person who would lie awake at night thinking about things. I have this goal of "understanding", so puzzling things out is a natural instinct. And hey, I used to have things to think about. The MUD, for instance. Why on earth did this player say that? Was that what he thought of me? Why would he think that, did they really think I was so selfish? How could I make them all see the person I really was? Et cetera. Or when I had a crush on a boy when I was fourteen, now, that really gave me something to think about. But that was long ago, and it's not why I'm awake tonight.

No, tonight there's a mosquito in my bedroom. Again.

Now, I like to think of myself as a nature-lover. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of visiting the Botanical Gardens with my family, being taught about the different trees and flowers, feeding the ducks. When I was lonely in primary school, there was a patch of buttercups far across the field from where everyone played, and I would retreat there when the age difference got too intrusive for me, and keep the bees company. And I like cute and cuddly animals as much as the next girl.

Actually, I've probably quite a bit more tolerance for the wildlife than your average person; too much David Attenborough as a teenager, I suppose. (No, you can never watch too much David Attenborough.) So, in accordance with his enthusiastic attitude, I find it all interesting, curious and worth preserving (although I haven't gone vegetarian). This means that I don't mind large spiders, because the big ones we get here are harmless; in a safe environment, I wouldn''t mind handling a snake. To me, ants' nests are a marvel of nature, as you can see in this video, although obviously they're best left alone. I like earthworms, in theory, although I've never bothered digging them up to go look at them. By a weird extension, I like colorectal surgery. (Seeing the patient's innards spread out on view... Pink and wriggly? Happy guts. Ooh, that bit looks sick, poor thing. Let's cut it out. The rest of them still happy? Happy guts.)

But well, mosquitoes are the lone exception. They spread malaria, causing a worldwide disease burden. Not to mention myriad other diseases. They don't support any ecosystem, as far as I know, because they're a pest feeding on humans and animals. They seek me and my mother and sister out preferentially, and we get huge welts that last for days and sting at night. I don't believe in "evil" in the malignant, people-hating sense, but ... mosquitoes are the enemy and must die.

Which brings us to The Hunt.

The door is closed. The lights are on. All wooden surfaces get checked. Then Smith gets covered in blankets up to his face, and my arms and head are free to act as bait ... and to smack them out of the air. I used to be reasonably good at it. When I was on rotation on the North Coast, in a house with broken fly-screens, I'd sit for an hour before bed and get about six or seven of them each night. Then I could sleep knowing that with the door shut, no more would come in.

These days, though ... I don't know what it is. Maybe I'm older and slower. Maybe I'm tired more often. Maybe the mosquitoes are faster, where we live now. But many hours over many nights have been fruitless, and I usually end up just putting a blindfold on and going to sleep with the lights on. I don't think I've caught a mosquito this year, and there have been plenty.

So I've had plenty of time to think about the intelligence of the mosquito. Obviously it's not on a par with the human mind. I must be some kind of animist, because I usually like to think of things as having a personality - trees, germs, guts (as above), supermarket trolleys, you name it. But well, I don't even like to dignify a mosquito by giving it its proper gender (only the female ones bite). No, this is not your average gravid female looking for nourishment for her eggs, and this is not a bitch-slap fest. It is an IT. Kill it.

There used to be a catchy television advertisement for insect spray, that featured an anthropomorphic, singing housefly. I'm Louie the fly, Louie the fly, straight from rubbish tip to you! Spreading disease, with the greatest of ease ... But when you're in a room with a mosquito ... well, it's not exactly a planning genius.

"Right, we go around the bedpost here and between the slats, and they'll be straight ahead. Ignore the golden-haired one, the Asian one has a better blood group, taste that carbon dioxide on her breath ... So we're going to zoom over the face, we don't want her to wake up, focus on the hands, arms, anything but the head, you got me? And do not, I repeat, DO NOT land on the hair - it's a trap. They're not called hair triggers for nothing. Okay, you ready?"

No, I like to think of a mosquito more as a machine. In its nervous system and what counts for a brain, it has, what, ten thousand neurones? A hundred thousand? I don't really have a clue, although I bet it's not in the billions. And there are probably only a few basic impulses - eat, mate, hide. Each one would have excitatory and inhibitory factors, and you can kind of predict what they are.

Anyone who's done neuroscience probably knows what I mean by that, but here's an analogy. Mating aside, let's say that 'hide' and 'feed' are at opposite ends of a dial. What the mosquito does depends on where the dial is at a particular time, and that depends on the environment. The time of day is one factor pushing the dial towards one end or another - feeding at dawn or dusk, and hiding the rest of the day. The presence of food pushes it towards feeding - I've just looked it up, and apparently carbon dioxide and oct-1-en-3-ol in breath and sweat are strong attractants. I used to watch them come up to me, mesmerised, tracking along the trail of my breath - conveniently, right in front of my face so I could smack them between my hands.

Obviously being swatted at is a fast swing towards the "life-preservation" end of the dial, but also, the presence of a good place to hide will attract it. I've learned that mosquitoes like to hide on dark wood-grain surfaces, and I used to be able to go hunt them down on my bedroom door or the bookshelf. (Now my bed is wooden and there's an underneath for them to hide. Grr.) And, to my despair, having the light on (so I can see it!) seems to be a strong push towards the 'go hide' end. Maybe having a 35 watt fluorescent for sewing and reading as the top light (100W incandescent equivalent) wasn't such a good idea.

Other than that, I'm guessing. I suspect that while light is a fast swing to the hiding end, darkness is only a slow push in the other direction. I wonder if the strength of the light is a factor in the speed. Sometimes I wonder if they're tempted to hide on my hair, being a dark, grainy surface. I haven't yet gone as far as digging out my tiny stash of acupuncture pins and opening a vein to attract it despite the light, but tonight I'm tempted. It did come out when I had a nosebleed earlier tonight, after all.

That only accounts for about fifty neurones in total, so obviously a mosquito is more complicated than that. But I've got a hundred billion ... I win, right? Well, that's what I'm hoping...

neeed ... sleeeep.....

The Seven Basic Plots, by Christopher Booker

Have you ever thought of yourself as an 'avid reader'? Are you addicted to stories and narrative? And are you interested in structure and analysis? If so, you must read the book I am (still) reading, The Seven Basic Plots - Why we tell stories, by Christopher Booker.

I grew up on stories. As soon as I could read, I read everything I could get my hands on, especially fiction, and I kept that habit all the way through school. Even during my Uni years it wasn't uncommon for me to become completely engrossed in a series of books (to the detriment of my study, unfortunately.)

This has meant I have become quite a narrative-driven person. Everything is a story, in that it has characters, events, consequences. Even my study of medicine has been story-driven. Why does this happen in the body? What is it used for? Every part of the body has a function, so that the relevant molecules flow from food to flesh to waste. Every microorganism has its own story of survival, invasion or elimination. The textbooks I relate to most easily are the ones that tell me the best stories, so that I can just sit down and read them. (I've never been able to study anatomy, unfortunately. Or spend any amount of time on a reference book.) And I love case presentations.

As soon as I saw the book The Seven Basic Plots and flicked idly through it, I had to have it. A detailed analysis of the structure of stories? (The use of the word 'plots' here is a little arguable.) I was in heaven. I'm now on page 630-ish of 730-odd. And, as is immediately apparent even from a brief flick-through, the book is all it set out to be, and much, much more.

Yes, plots have been recycled, reinvented and reused throughout the history of literature. The author has looked deeper, though, and found seven basic ways in which a story can be structured. They are, in the order that he examines them, "Overcoming the Monster", "Rags to Riches", "The Quest", "Voyage and Return", "Comedy", "Tragedy" and "Rebirth". (Yes, there are exceptions, and he deals with those too in this book, a highly-structured thesis.) These, of course, have been combined and recombined countless times, and he gives many examples to support his ideas. There are 350-odd individual stories referenced in the book, from the oldest known (the Epic of Gilgamesh) to the ultra-modern (Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone), with references to the literature and storytelling culture of every era between then and now. And it's not only the written word that he examines - oral culture, theatre, propaganda, movies and television also fall into the scope of the book.

What he has done, further, is to look at the stories in terms of the archetypal figures who appear in them, and how the plot is shaped around the relation of the hero/heroine to each of these figures. I guess it's not too surprising that he has based these around the Jungian archetypes - the Mother, the Father, the Teacher, the Alter-Ego, the Anima/Animus, the Tempter/Temptress, the Child, the Ego, the Self, the 'masculine' qualities, the 'feminine' qualities. These are supposed to be the figures of our subconscious appearing in our dreams, and it would be natural for them to appear in stories, an outwardly-projected extension of our subconscious. I wasn't that familiar with Jungian psychology myself - all I really knew was that he was a student of Freud, and that Freud was that psychoanalyst preoccupied with sex :P But as these archetypes are explained in this book - as an explanation of the figures who appear and reappear in stories throughout the ages - the author's arguments make a lot of sense.

Now, all of this analysis takes some time. 350-odd pages of quite small print on a largish page. At the same time, it is surprisingly easy to read. Of course, this is in part because he stops so often to tell us the plot of yet another story, before weaving it in to his overall theme. This plethora of stories had me completely engrossed. But it cannot be denied that he is a highly-skilled writer. I was not surprised, when I looked up his biography an hour ago, to find that he has been a lifelong journalist. And, despite his age (more on that later), he writes in very contemporary language - as you'd expect from anyone wanting a book published in 2003.


And then ... And then, at the halfway point of the book, having completed an analysis of all these plots, he embarks on two even greater endeavours. The first is a study of the progress of literature in the past two hundred years, as these plots have gradually changed, been overtaken by fashions, stereotypes, sentimentalism, sex and violence. For me, this was a very difficult section of the book to read, and I believe that many people will instinctively find it so.

Now, this is not to say that I was offended by the content. The stories themselves ranged from the shocking to the bleak and the pointless, and having read the analysis I am actually inspired to read (or in some cases see) the originals; many of the ones he includes have been lauded as great, groundbreaking works of literature, theatre and film. And the author presents all of these items in a very objective, analytical, impartial manner. He examines our reactions to each, and combines them into his analysis and his theme: the disintegration of our relationship with stories. But his main point rang true with every page - that these stories no longer resonate with our sense of the struggle to become one's own Self, and so each story, in its own way, feels somehow wrong and unresolved.

Finally, after a brief interlude in which he tells how stories relate to the 'real world' and history, he presents a gargantuan chapter on what I think is his final topic: the stories of religion. Here, I will not give away his thesis; although his theory is uncontroversial, I know that religion is quite a sensitive topic with many people. Being an atheist myself, I was very much impressed at his absolutely impartial treatment of a near-comprehensive list of religions and cultures. But it will probably be slightly uncomfortable for any person who adheres to a particular religion to see the roots of their own culture analysed so objectively, especially those which the author shows to be varying from his theme.

All the same, I feel this is the most important part of the book; it is the one which finally prompted me to write all this. The level of understanding of the human psyche he demonstrates is awe-inspiring. You would not tell from his tone of writing that he is in his seventies, but his insight in finding these themes, these values, these relationships, shows the true wisdom obtained only by experience. My idols and role-models have always been those who show such insight, and while they have previously been the Galileos, the scientists of the world, or more recently Terry Pratchett ... this is one man I would really want to meet and shake by the hand. (And then he'd wonder who this shy little girl was, who couldn't express herself properly.)

Yes, in my ideal world everyone would read this book and learn something about themselves, their culture, the history of literature. But of course, the book itself is not accessible to everyone. People may be discouraged by its small print and large size (although many who look inside may find it to be surprisingly readable, as I did). There is extensive use of three- and four-syllable words (sample from one paragraph: incognito, disarray, overshadowed, arrogance, dissipation, infesting, miserably, majesty, massacre, reunited, triumphantly) which may unfortunately rule out a proportion of the population, and then of course there are those who simply are not interested in stories, literature or analysis. I even saw a writer's review complaining about typographical errors and excessive use of the word 'little'. But for the rest of us, I implore you to read this book.

Even if you do not start off sympathetic to the points of view he later proposes, you will find his arguments compelling. Even if you read critically with an eye to his omissions, his elisions and biases, his thesis will still be interesting. Because, readable though it may be, this is a finely-constructed essay building on point after point after point, example after example, theory after theory, to a stunning understanding of the way we tell ourselves who we are.