Wilting

I don’t know whether it was a bumble bee or a bluebottle, but whatever it was that just buzzed past the window, it was the size of a sparrow.*

It’s so hot here today I’m wilting on the sofa. Maybe it will be cooler on the seafront. J., who is in the UK this week is missing all the good weather. It was cloudy at the start of the week and then there was a thunderstorm the other morning, and it’s been roasting ever since.

I was watching a baby bang a couple of plastic balls together a few weeks ago and it got me thinking about instinct. Babies love rock-banging. We have been rock-banging for millions of years (two to three million to be more precise). There was a time in our history when rock banging was very important for our survival. I think if we have any innate instincts as a species, they must take a form similar to this – appearing in childhood and disappearing as we grow, uncultivated, ephemeral things not required by modernity. The baby already has cravings for sugar. In nature this would be for fruits or honey to fatten her up to survive the hard times. Of course, the rock-banging could have all been a coincidence of human physics. Two arms, two plastic balls, what else do you do but bang them together?

I was thinking about Jung and other psychoanalytic theories. Having come across so many references to archetypes during my researching of plots it has been playing on my mind. I don’t believe these things are ingrained in our genetic psyche – (they got there how, exactly?) but maybe our social and cultural psyche. We have been eating meat for four million years, but there are vegetarians around today. We have been using fire for two million years. These things are ingrained in our genes, have shaped our bodies. Yet we can still free ourselves of the instincts surrounding them, and that, I think is what has given us a genetic advantage over other animals – our lack of hard-coding.

* It was actually an enormous beetle, and beetles like these regularly startled us for the rest of the summer.