Of course…
There was once a venerable lady of my acquaintance, and one day she took it upon herself to ingest a fly. I’m sure she had her reasons, but whatever those reasons were, she took them to her grave.
What struck me most following this event was the sheer ghoulish conjecture over whether or not she would die as a result of simply having swallowed an insect. I have no doubt this contributed to the maddening compulsion that would eventually overtake her. If she’d left it there I’m sure she would still be with us today, but the speculation over her physical disposition clearly had a pervasive effect on her sense of wellbeing.
What drives people to cyclical self-destructive behaviour? I certainly can’t claim to be an expert. The human brain is a wonderful and terrifying construct, fraught with valuable processes that can do great harm in the wrong context. A logical and internally-consistent idea, left unchecked, can rapidly expand beyond our ability to mediate it. I believe this was at the root of the distressing events which overtook her, but for a clearer account you may want to consult a professional in the field of mental health.
Ostensibly, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly, although it must have been clear to her that the fly was long-digested. In reality, I suspect she swallowed the spider in an effort to banish the notion of having swallowed the fly, along with the corresponding aspersions of her possible death. It might not make sense to you or me from our vantage point of comparative sanity, but such is the horror of having one’s faculties compromised. Even a live spider isn’t a particularly hazardous object to swallow, but I for one would certainly find it more of a harrowing prospect than swallowing a fly.
Millions of years of evolution have led our species to an innate fear of crawling creatures with many legs, and in this light it’s hardly surprising that she began reporting feelings of “wriggling” in her stomach, even days after swallowing it. By this point she was certainly not looking in the best of health, but rather than propose a psychological cause, a common reaction was tho chalk it down to what she’d been eating. Please let me remind you, at this point she’d only swallowed a fly and a spider. The public grasp of dietary issues, informed as they are by celebrity magazines and attrocious TV shows, is appaling. The notion she might die from having simply eaten a live fly and a live spider is frankly ridiculous, but this didn’t stop people from feeding her paranoia with such fantasist health advice.
I can’t help but admire the rigor with which she pursued the line of reasoning she did, but I still regret not cottoning on once she bought the canary. Admittedly, it’s small enough to squeeze down a well-lubricated oesophagus, but canaries don’t even eat spiders. I’m sure in the event of a canary having nothing to eat but spiders, it would probably go for one. This presumably still holds for phantasmal canaries with nothing to eat but the ghosts of once-swallowed spiders that haunt your stomach. The neatness of the absurdity is apparent, and is one of the things that make mental illness such a fascinating yet tragic field of study.
I wish at the time I’d have said something, but how do you phrase a request like that? “Stop swallowing a hierarchical menagerie of animals” just doesn’t seem adequate. As things progressed, both social services and the RSPCA got involved, but when someone’s in the grip of an obsession there’s not a great deal you can do. In her desperation, even the internal consistency of her delusions started to break down. After all, dogs don’t actually eat cats, and goats certainly don’t eat dogs. What was she expecting them to do?
I’m guessing the futility of introducing a herbivore as a natural predator in an ecosystem was probably the least of her worries towards the end. Given that we were dealing with a woman with a compulsion to swallow a series of larger and larger live animals, we probably shouldn’t focus on the smaller ridiculous details. Still, you’d think she’d have attempted a pony or something, rather than an adult warmblood; it’s not the biggest she could have gone for, but it’s certainly not the smallest.
She’s dead, of course.
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