Essay
AI
Culture
14 min read

Dethroning creativity: why does AI art make us feel so icky inside?

Creative Artificial Intelligence generates a disquiet within. Daniel Kim explores why it confronts our humanity.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

An AI-created painting of a scene comprising a lap top user holding their face, with candles in the foreground
AI confronts the creative.
Daniel Kim.

Some of you are going to hate this article.  

I want to start off by saying that a human wrote this article.  

That’s an important caveat nowadays because every month there’s yet another AI churning out music, images, videos, and essays that could go toe-to-toe with most humans in quality and originality. Making the news in the last few months has been the remarkable Chat GPT3 from OpenAI. A chatbot on steroids, Chat GPT3 is trained to produce conversational and competent language. You can ask it to write a children’s story, a trigonometry lesson plan, a 2-year strategy for a startup or even an inspiring Christmas sermon written in the style of a World War II speech. Here’s the thing… it won’t just do a ‘passable’ job, but it will do a pretty damn good job. 

Now, I am painfully aware that ‘AI vs human creativity’ is a topic more worn out than a marathon runner’s shorts - I certainly don’t want to unnecessarily add to the 117 million search results for ‘AI and creativity’. It’s the  sensation of our decade with equally sensational headlines, like Elon Musk saying that the use of AI is like “summoning a demon”. There are quite literally tens of thousands of articles about whether AI will surpass and replace us or whether they are simply another tool in our techno-creative arsenal. And rightly so! There are important discussions to be had about the economic implications in the creative industry as it increasingly looks as though junior copywriter and art director jobs could be fully automated. There are also pertinent legal questions being asked by the artists whose blood, sweat and carpel-tunnel syndrome have been scraped from massive public image databases to train these AI, rendering their hard-won technical skill into an effortless toy for the masses with no recognition or recompense. People far more qualified and more intelligent than me have written on these topics

'There’s a moment of confrontation that challenges our notion of human superiority over the machines.'

However, there’s one particular feeling that I don’t think has been addressed as much. It’s the feeling of ‘uncomfortable ickiness or angst many of us experience when confronted by these AI. Almost every person I’ve shown Chat GPT3 to have gawped at it - almost as if they couldn’t believe how good it really was. There’s a moment of confrontation that challenges our notion of human superiority over the machines. I certainly felt this even as the techno-optimist that I am. Playing with Chat GPT3 did something to me as a writer. My first reaction was, “Flip… I need to up my game”. My second reaction was the disquiet realisation that everything I thought was unique to human creative writing - rhetoric, rhyme and rhythm - were in fact sophisticated patterns that could be reproduced and even re-imagined by a soulless computer.  

What’s interesting about this reaction is that we’re generally fine with computers being better than us. Computer vs Human is not a new debate. After the world chess champion Kasparov “lost his fighting spirit” in 1997 against IBM’s’s Deep Blue Chess computer, it’s become an uncontested fact that humans will never beat a computer at chess. A quarter of a century later, it’s not uncommon to hear professional players or commentators saying ‘run it through the engine’, when they want to analyse the latest world-championship game. Despite this status quo, very few of us feel profoundly threatened by this. Nothing about the fact that a computer can do mass-calculations and pattern recognition better than humans feels threatening. That’s just what a computer is - a brute-force machine.

'Rarely have new technologies caused existential anxiety about our human value.' 

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But when it comes to poetry, music, creative writing, design, imagery, composition, originality; nothing can replace that unique human spark! We desperately fight to maintain human superiority. Artist Steven Zapata critiques AI tools like Chat GPT3 saying that their creative offerings are ‘bland and mediocre’ devoid of originality and zest. That may be true, but if we’re really honest with ourselves, and spend enough time scrolling Instagram, most of our human offerings turn out to be bland and mediocre devoid of originality and zest. New technologies have always created anxiety about job security and unforeseen negative social consequences. Rarely have new technologies caused existential anxiety about our human value. 

For many of us, we intuitively feel that creativity and artistic expression are some of the most unique and sacred of human faculties. We probably couldn’t give a rational reason for it, but we feel it to be true. Here’s the thing though, there’s a reason why we feel this way. Our convictions about what makes humanity unique and valuable are not universal intuitions. They are shaped by our social and historic location. 

Throughout history, we’ve always tried to identify what makes us so special as humans, and in that pursuit, we’ve held different traits as sacrosanct. For a long time, it was the capacity to Reason - our rational mind. That’s Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas for you - the bedrock thinkers of the classical and medieval Western world. In his Summa Theological, Aquinas wrote that ‘the human species is distinguished from all others by the fact that man alone has reason’. This reign of Reason continued as the status quo reaching its pinnacle in the 18th century with the so-called Enlightenment. This was when Descartes identified our ‘thinking’ as the core our humanity existence - “I think therefore I am”. The elevation of Reason even got slightly out of hand. Following the French Revolution in 1789, the revolutionary government even set up the ‘cult of Reason’ and converted churches into temples where the teenage daughters of rich patricians were worshipped as goddesses of Reason. The 1790s were a weird time in France.  

'2023’s sensibilities are not with the Enlightenment Rationalists, instead, I’d argue that we are more in line with the Romantics.'

We look back at this period of hyper-Reason and scoff. Silly us forever thinking that our Reason gave us ultimate value. What an archaic idea! We certainly don’t think or feel that problem-solving, logic, and reasoning is integral to our humanity. In fact, we can farm those out to computers now and really get to work in expressing our humanity in more meaningful ways. We no longer live in the Age of Reason, and we haven’t done for quite some time. In fact, 2023’s sensibilities are not with the Enlightenment Rationalists, instead, I’d argue that we are more in line with the Romantics.  

In the 19th century, whilst the Age of Reason was still trundling on, there was a community of thinkers reacting against the spirit of the age - these were the Romantics. The Romantics looked at the Modern world and were disgusted by the banal capitalist industrialism of it all. They lamented the loss of beauty in the world and a sense of spiritual unity. The Romantics described the people of their time as being ‘triply divided’ by ‘three alienations’. The first was within the individual between our thinking and our feeling being at odds with each other. Second was between the individual and other people due to the decline of traditional communities and the rise of the capitalist marketplace. Third was between the individual and Nature due to the rise of modern technology turning the natural world into something to be mastered rather than something we are a part of. We had lost who we were and needed to go on a journey to discover who we truly are. Sound familiar?  

The Romantics understood that the one thing that had previously remedied these alienations was the Christian religion and its God. A benevolent creator who provided morality, meaning, and value to the individual and her society. But ultimately, the Romantics were still people of their time and assumed that religion was on its way out and was an ancient superstitious system that needed to be done away with.  And so the Romantics had to find something else to hang everything on, a new centre of ultimate meaning. Religion is out, Reason was too narrow. What we need is a way for the individual to integrate and express the whole of their identity. Set the stage for the enthronement of Creativity.  

The sociologist Charles Taylor calls this the birth of the ‘Age of Authenticity’, where the most important task for the individual is to discover and express her most authentic self. In this way, artistic creation became an integral way in which a person could come to define themselves. So Schlegel, a 18th century Romantic, was fond of saying that the individual should make ‘his life into a novel, a beautiful whole’ aiming for 'the ideal of self-realisation and beauty’. This vision was so compelling that it spread outside Romantic circles. So 100 years later, the not-so-Romantic Nietzsche said that the most important task of the individual was to ‘give style to one’s character’. To make sense of all the incoherent combination of loves, desires, hatreds, and motives in our heart and make something beautiful out of it.  

Since then, we’ve continued to elevate the role of Creative expression as an essential part of our human identity. Taylor made this observation: 'The artist [has become] the paradigm case of the human being, as an agent of original self-definition. Since about 1800, there has been a tendency to heroise the artist, to see his or her life as the essence of the human condition, and to venerate him or her as a seer, the creator of cultural values.'  

'There is a magic to creative self-expression - it’s joyful, it’s play, it’s thrilling.'

He’s absolutely right. The heroes of our time are not kings or queens, nor war generals or religious messiahs. The heroes of our time are the Bob Dylans, the Virginia Woolfs, the Picassos, Beyoncés, the Jacob Colliers - the Artists. Our heroes reveal our aspirations. Today, the artist has become for us the “very paragon of humanity” and has taken on a pseudo-messianic role in Western culture. People who show us what we could be. They are the luminaries who have expressed the whole of their authentic self in a way that is beautiful and understood by other people. Those people who stood against cookie-cutter convention and carved a unique way of being themselves in a disenchanted world. Don’t we also want this? Isn’t this the longing of our hearts as 21st century individuals? Don’t we want to be understood and to create something with our lives? Don’t we want to self-actualise? It’s certainly a sticky idea and there’s good reason for it. There is a magic to creative self-expression - it’s joyful, it’s play, it’s thrilling when you make something out of nothing, and that thrill is even more electrifying when you take the terrifying step of sharing it with someone and they understand it. You feel known in a way that’s different to someone reading your CV or even having a conversation. 'I create therefore I am’ is the new dogma of the day.  

This is why I think we find Chat GPT3, or other art generating AI like Dall-E or Midjourney, so icky and disconcerting.  It’s hard to shake a deep conviction that has been encoded into us through 200 years of cultural indoctrination. We’re okay with AI and computers encroaching on technical tasks and labour efficiencies. We can even just about live with the fact that technology might make huge swathes of people jobless. But God forbid that the machines devalue or take away the ability of creative self-expression! That’s ours, we need it, it’s our source of ultimate meaning and human joy. I just don’t want to face the fact that a soulless, unloving, unsuffering machine can spit out something more compelling, emotive, and eloquent than most of us ever could. This is felt keenly by the creative community. Amidst the very serious economic and legal questions about being made redundant, or their work being sucked into the algorithm, there is an angst that taps into a deep belief about what makes our humanity beautiful and valuable.  

Here’s Zapata again.

“This is art making, for God’s sake, not some agitating manual process people hate. This is one of the things people enjoy doing… We should reserve art making for those who stand to gain something from it, for whom it can bring joy and reward, rather than dumbly bestow it on an unfeeling non-being”  

A YouTube comment under a video about the hopelessness many creatives feel in the face of these AI express it thus.

“I feel like we forget that expression, emotion is what makes us uniquely human, and when we deprive ourselves [of them] we’re just hollow… . I’m more or less saying that if there are no outlets that enable expression, then things WILL likely get darker within ourselves”  

Finally, here's Hayao Miyazaki, one of the most inspired and celebrated filmmakers in the last century with his work at Studio Ghibli. In a 2016 documentary he unequivocally called AI art an “insult to life itself” saying:

“I feel like we nearing the end of the times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves”.   

If you resonate with these statements, you’re probably a 21st Century Romantic. I certainly feel like one. We have elevated Creativity and artistic self-expression to a high pinnacle on which our hopes and fulfillments hang on. We have enthroned Creativity as the thing what constitutes the most essential and important part of our humanity. We thought it was the one thing that couldn’t be taken from us. Perhaps these AIs are forcing us to face the music that our dependence on Creativity as a source of ultimate value may be just as fragile as our dependence on Reason.

'Maybe it’s no bad thing for humans to lose faith in ourselves once in a while.'

Here’s a controversial and very unpopular statement - maybe it’s no bad thing for humans to lose faith in ourselves once in a while. It can be helpful for us to be confronted by our weakness and experience a sense of lack. It shows us that perhaps the foundations we’ve been standing on are not as solid as we presumed them to be and motivates us to go on a journey to discover something more solid. When push comes to shove, I would certainly rather have someone to point out to me that I’m standing on shaky ground than live in blissful ignorance. 

Reason was thoroughly dethroned as the centre of human experience. That has been a very good thing because it meant that we now take the heart more seriously. It’s also revealed the ways in which we have devalued and marginalised those with lower cognitive ability. By dethroning Reason, we’ve become more reflective about what makes us special and valuable. We put Reason in its proper place, as an important, beautiful, yet ultimately non-essential part of living a fulfilled life on planet Earth. We came to a better, fuller, and more inclusive understanding of human value.  

For the same reasons, maybe it’s high time Creativity needs a good dethroning. Your fulfilment and value does not lie in what you have written, sung, painted, or drawn. Your authentic and unique self is not intrinsically tied to how well you can express yourself. Your creative hobby does not need to be the thing that makes your life feel worthwhile. Artists, like scientists, are beautiful gifts to our society. They reveal insights about our universe and our psyche, providing beauty and meaning to what can feel like a very banal existence. But let’s not fall into the trap of elevating them as pseudo-messianic figures - dangerous things can happen when we hang our hopes and dreams on a certain class of humans.  

I don’t think this will have a thawing effect on our creative industry. Dethroning Reason certainly didn’t slow scientific research, I certainly don’t think putting Creativity in its proper place will slow down our innate desire to create and express ourselves. 

The idea of ‘dethroning Creativity’ will sound utterly impossible or even immoral to some. I get that. Ultimately, we are products of our times, and it might be the case that we can no sooner dethrone Creativity than imagine a world without electricity. We can’t imagine a sense of self without putting this premium on Creative self-expression. We can’t un-essentialise it. However, I certainly think that being aware of the historic forces that led us to become the people we are is a useful step towards a better understanding of ourselves.  

In Christian Theology, the ultimate source of human value is the concept of Imago Dei - The idea that every human is created in the ‘Image of God’. There have been times in history when Theologians have also made the mistake of trying to tie certain traits like Reason and Creativity to the ‘Imago Dei’ - making our value contingent on things that we do. That was a mistake because the most beautiful thing about the concept of Imago Dei is that there is nothing we can do or be or become that will diminish our value before God. Our level of Reason or Creativity cannot add or take away anything from our worth to God or make us any less ourselves. That’s something that I’d be more willing to hang everything on.  

I promised a human wrote this article. Well, let me end with a sonnet written by Chat GPT3. 

 

Prompt: Write me a sonnet about dethroning creativity and the need for the 21st century to find a better foundation for human value. 

In this age of technology and speed,
Creativity’s throne is overthrown, it seems.
For value, we no longer plant a seed
But rather chase the fleeting and extreme.

We worship at the altar of the new
And scorn the wisdom of the ages past, 
Forgetting that it is roots that make us true
and not the leaves that fade and never last.

But as the world keeps changing and evolving,
Perhaps its time to find a firmer ground
To build upon and find a way of solving, 
the problems that today’s world has found. 

For though creativity has its place, 
It cannot be the only source of grace.

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Short story
Culture
16 min read

The Rat: a new short story

Climbing from containment

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A barred window sits in a dark brick wall.
Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash.

Every day he wakes up, he feels something is wrong. 

Is it this place? Or is it him? 

He cannot say. Only that this sensation of wrongness feels a lot like… fear. Like a kind of haunting.  

Who am I?  

Memories with the answer to this question visit his mind like ghosts in the night, but by morning time - if you can call it morning - they have slipped away. Instead the Voice answers for him.  

He calls it morning, but it is only the time when he wakes. The light around him changes little with the passing of time. Always he is cocooned in a soupy gloom. The air is stale and still, a little damp, and yet a trace of sweetness is mixed in with the miasma which has, at times, persuaded him this is comfortable, even pleasant. At least tolerable. The walls around him are the only constant. No, there is also a door - he has seen its hinges but he knows it is locked fast because the Voice has told him so. Apart from these, there is little else to look upon except what the Voice sometimes shows him through an opening which it calls the Window. It opens only when there is something to see, otherwise it too is shut fast.  

The chains of course are another constant, he remembers. He feels their weight when he moves about. And for this reason, he doesn’t trouble himself to move far. Some days, not at all. They make him feel weary almost before he has begun. It is useless anyway; the Voice has told him. It is his lot to exist in this place, so he can only make the best of it for whatever time he has left. It is the lot of the Voice to look after him. 

He lifts his head, sniffs the stale air, scratches at an ear. 

At once, the Voice sounds from its aperture high on the cell wall. ’Good morning, Rat! How are we today?’ 

‘Same,’ he mumbles into his paws. 

‘Why, that is excellent! The same is good. The same is the best one can ever expect. The same is life.’ 

‘So you have told me.’ 

‘Because it is the truth. And however ugly or grim, the truth is never to be shunned. Have I not always told you this?’ 

For a longish moment, the Rat does not answer. 

‘I said: have I not always told you this?’ 

  

‘You have,’ the Rat murmurs. 

‘Honestly, sometimes I wonder whether you actually listen to all that I have to say. Else I wouldn’t have to repeat myself. But at least one of us must do their duty. So, to be sure, Rat, I had better remind you once more, just as I do with all those under my care.’ 

The Voice begins to speak in that quick, forceful manner the Rat has come to accept. As if nothing it says is above the mundane and therefore worth dwelling upon, and yet all is also irrefutably and obviously true.   

The Rat knows the litany well.  

First, and above all, he is a rat. And as a rat, he belongs in this dank, dark place. It is where rats of his kind have always dwelled. Everyone knows rats carry disease. Everyone knows rats have no useful value. No purpose, no meaning, and therefore they should have no voice, above a nasty little squeaking, because after all, no one wants to hear what a rat has to say. The Maker has ordered it so.   

‘Thus is the verdict,’ the Voice concludes. ‘And yet, in his mercy, the Maker tolerates your continued existence. That is why he created this place and appointed me guardian over you. To care for you, even though it is more than you deserve. To feed you enough to keep your belly full, even though such provision comes at great expense. And to keep you entertained, even though, Maker knows, such effort is a downright extravagance.’ 

The Voice comes to the end of its discourse. And as always, the moment it is finished, a small shutter opens in the most foetid corner of the place and a platter of food is shoved through. The shutter closes at once with a snap. 

Bracing himself to the weight of his chains, the Rat crawls over to the platter and has a sniff. It is the same as every day. A bolus of food which in the dim shadows forms no distinct shape or colour. Its texture is neither hard nor soft. It gives off no smell that could appeal or repel. He eats it down, as he does every day. The first taste of it upon his tongue is sweet - the promise of something good. But by the time he swallows it down, the sweetness is gone and what remains is a solid feeling in his belly, at once heavy and bitter. The Voice has told him this is Nourishment. This keeps him alive - which is his only principle, his only goal. And so he knows tomorrow he will eat again. 

The platter lies empty for a while; it will be taken when he sleeps. Next will come the Window. Each day he has not long to wait. The Voice tells him this is so that his mind is not inert. ‘For an empty mind is a dangerous thing,’ the Voice has said, ‘into which all kind of falsities are wont to slip. It is for me to protect you from such hazards. By filling it.’ 

The Rat moves over towards the Window. He cannot see the Window; he cannot see very much at all. But by instinct now, he knows where it will appear. He almost knows what it will show. Each day is different - yes, the only difference in his drab world - but there is a kind of regularity to what it shows, too. And in any case, it leaves him with the same feeling whatever he sees within its frame. Some things draw from him the flickers of excitement, others might make him laugh if only the voice the Maker gave him were capable of forming that sound. Still others evoke in him something like desire, and yet even this only swells to a blunt sort of prurience, an itch barely worth scratching. Mostly though, he feels a kind of frustration which almost rises to anger. But not anger that demands action. Just enough to feel a slight twist in his heart which never fully unwinds. And so his heart is by now quite contorted. And this frustration is the feeling he is left with each day. This frustration is at least a feeling. And as the Voice has told him: ‘Feeling is important. Feeling means you are alive.’ 

But the Rat is mistaken. Because this day is not the same as all the others after all: 

Before the Window appears, all at once he hears another sound. A faint scratching coming from the door. He looks over - although of course, in the gloom, he cannot expect to see much. But to his surprise, he does see, quite clearly, a small creature squeezing itself, with some considerable effort, under the foot of the door. The outlines of it are distinct. As if it carries its own light with it, since nothing else within the Rat’s cell could illumine it so well. It is a mouse. 

Bold as you like, the mouse comes right up to where he lies. And after regarding him with bright, blinking eyes for a moment or two, it says: ‘Wake up.’  

‘I am awake,’ replies the Rat. 

‘No, indeed, you are not, my friend. I say again, awake!’ This time the mouse speaks with real force, in a voice that belies his little size. 

The Rat is now confused as well as surprised by this intrusion. ’Who are you? What are you doing here?’ 

‘I have been sent to help you. Who I am is of no import when laid against who you are.’ 

‘What can you mean? I am of no importance. I am a rat and this is where I belong. It is you, Mouse, who needs explaining.’ 

‘No, no. I say again, no!’ 

‘No?’ 

‘You are no rat. That is why I am sent to you.’ 

‘What folly is this? I am no rat?’ And for the first time, he experiences the undoubted pleasure of real indignation. ‘Are you mad? Have you lost your senses? See, here are my paws. There is my tail.’ 

And yet, even as he proffers them, he is surprised to see the shadow of his smooth little hands seem now not quite so smooth and altogether swollen, nor is the length or girth of his hairless tail quite as he remembers it. But he dismisses these as mere tricks of the gloom and his own agitation at so abrupt and strange an interruption. 

‘If I told you what you truly are,’ answers the mouse, ‘you would neither understand nor believe me. Only this must you accept: you do not belong here. And where you do belong desperately needs you. So I have come to wake you up.’ 

‘Again this idea that I am asleep,’ returns the Rat, scratching confusedly at his nose. ‘As if you are some apparition in a dream—‘ 

‘Not asleep, but enchanted,’ interrupts the mouse. ‘Enthralled and silenced. It is your voice that is needed, and your heart.’ 

‘My voice?’ squeaks the Rat. ‘What possible use can anyone have for my voice? And anyway I am not silenced. I could speak as much as I wish. I just have nothing much to say.’ 

The mouse seems distracted then. His little ears twitch and turn. ‘Quickly, we have not time to bandy words. Only rise and follow me.’ 

‘Follow you where?’ scoffs the Rat. ‘See, I’m thrice the size of you and cannot go by the way you came in. This cell is sealed to me. Besides which, these chains—’ 

‘You will see,’ urges the mouse, impatient with his protestations. ‘The door is not truly barred. Those chains do not truly hold you. Indeed there is no prison. I say again, rise. Come and you will see all that you are meant for and all that is meant for you.’ 

But before any more can be said or done, a sound suddenly fills the dingy place: ‘Is that you, Mouse, you troublesome little beast?’ It is the Voice - and far sharper and angrier than the Rat has ever heard it.  

The Rat shrinks back against the wall. But the mouse lifts his nose defiantly. ‘It is not I who is trouble-maker here, but you, Spell-Spinner. Truth-Twister. Usurper.’ 

‘Usurper?’ The Voice chuckles, a languorous, malevolent sound. ‘Is not this my kingdom? Are not you the intruder here?’ 

‘You have no kingdom and no authority but which you have stolen through your lies and deception.’ 

  

‘Lies? Deception? I tell no lies. I offer no deception. It is you and your…your vermin kind who stir up trouble inviting people to believe that which is not. You conjure pretty dreams to lure weak minds into your thrall out of the mere imaginings of a diseased brain.’ 

‘You lie as easily as you breathe,’ returns the mouse, glaring about him.  

‘Come now, where is the lie?’ soothes the Voice from its aperture. 

‘All around us. This very place.’ 

‘Nonsense. This is real. I only show those who dwell here what is true, the better for them to accept their reality. I - we - who are given charge of this place know that the first sign of a mind turning to disease is the thought that there must be something else. That this is not exactly where they belong and who they are—’ 

The mouse appears to lose patience then and turns back to the Rat. ‘Listen not to this voice a moment longer, but harken only to me. Awake, arise. Follow me. Come, we must away.’ 

And so surprised at the steady authority in the mouse’s words, the Rat find himself uncoiling from his cringing corner and indeed getting to his feet, so that he begins to follow the mouse towards the door, despite the weight of his chains, and though he knows it is bolted and barred. They are nearly at it when another voice, much closer, cries out of the shadows: ‘Stop where you are, Rat!’ 

Terrified, for an instant, the Rat obeys. He looks back and see a far larger shadow moving in the gloom now. And before he can even wonder whence it has appeared, the shadow leaps and in two quick bounds overtakes the two little rodents and stands between them and the door.  

The Rat sees now it is a cat. An especially large and especially black cat, with long silvered whiskers and a coat that is soft and shining as velvet. 

‘I warned you what would happen if you came back, little beast,’ the cat says, addressing the mouse. ‘There is none more dangerous nor more harmful in all my kingdom than you.’ 

The mouse, brave little creature, stands back upon its hind legs, drawing itself up to its fullest height, which is by no means saying much against the overbearing presence of the cat. ‘It is not your kingdom,’ hisses the mouse in defiance. ‘And even though you strike me down, others will come in my place.’ 

‘Oh, I hope so,’ says the cat, an insidious smile in his voice. ‘For I do so enjoy a little nap on a full belly.’ 

And with that, the cat pounces. There is a brief scuffle in the gloom, a solitary squeal, then the cat is sitting back on its haunches. For a moment he paws at a shapeless lump on the ground before him. Then with sudden relish, he falls upon the wretched mouse, gobbling it up from nose to tail until there is no sign that it has ever been there. But for the flicker of the cat’s pink tongue, licking the last of its blood from his lips. 

Sated, he turns back to the Rat.  

‘Sometimes, Rat, it becomes necessary for you to see me as I really am,’ he says, his tone languid now. ‘But that is not altogether regrettable. Now you can see I am telling the truth. Now you can have no doubt. You see that I, at least, am real. Real enough to rid us both of that meddlesome brute.’ 

‘But…but what he said,’ the Rat dares to whisper, though still gripped with shock, and not a little terror, at the strange turn of events. ‘Can there be nothing to them? A madman may see a distortion. But only a distortion of something that is there—’ 

‘Listen to me,’ the cat quickly hissed, standing over the Rat. ‘And heed me well. Have I not thought only of your good, Rat? Do I not give you food to ease your hunger? Do you not live secure and well in this place? By the stars, I even keep you entertained! Is all this not enough for you? How would a rat like you fare in any other place, even if such a place did exist?’  

To this, the Rat has no answer. The cat gives a little chuckle. ‘Quite so. Now, the little mouse is done with. And with him, his mad imaginings. We must stop them from infecting any others, for it will only lead to distress and dissatisfaction. This is not my wish for you,’ the cat purrs silkily, and as he does, a sort of drowsiness starts to creep over the Rat. ‘Be happy with your lot. He who can master this can master all. Even you, Rat, can be master of this life, if you do.’ 

The cat drops to its paws, its yellow eyes now level with the Rat’s, set in a glare as hard as stone. His nose so close, the Rat can smell the mouse’s blood upon his breath. ‘Forget the mouse. When all is said, he was nothing but a dainty little morsel for me to eat.’ 

Something in the cruelty of the purring voice just then, in the way the cat licks its lips lasciviously once more - something in the memory of the little mouse who, for all his strange urgings, clearly meant kindness towards him - stirs in the Rat’s heart more than regret, more even than fear. A sudden, white hot rage grips him dispelling in an instant the drowsiness that has come over him. And before he knows quite what he is doing, the Rat raises his little paw and swipes the cat smack across his pink nose with all the force he can muster.  

He knows it can be but a futile gesture which will only bring him trouble, but to his amazement, the cat is flung across the cell, hitting the wall with such force that he falls limp and unmoving to the floor. For a moment, bewildered, the Rat thinks the cat is dead, or else he himself is dreaming. But then slowly the cat picks itself up, shakes itself, casts him a final look of slavish terror, then flees, disappearing through some unseen hatch as quickly as he had come. 

The Rat looks down in wonder at his paw, mystified at the strength in it. 

And yet, what he sees now is not the familiar pink pads of a rat’s paw, with the fragile little nails that he is used to, but something altogether bigger, stronger, fiercer. Covered in hair, with black claws long as his tail. Astonished, he gets to his feet. And so doing, his whole body feels heavier, and yet holds within itself a new strength to move. The weight of his chains, he notices not at all. 

He turns now to the door, suddenly determined to discover what lies beyond its bolts and bars. But when he goes to it and raises his paw to push against it and test its resistance, his paw goes right through it. There is no resistance. There is nothing there. And all at once, the walls and floor and low cramped ceiling of his cell melt away until he finds himself standing in a new sort of darkness. One that feels expansive, that has no limits.  

No, not quite darkness. There is a source of dim light now giving some shape to the things around him. It seems far off though, and high. He wants to go to it. He takes a step forward, and as he does, he is suddenly overcome with a violent choking. He drops his head, gasping for breath, his great back heaving with strain as something jagged and hard rises in his gorge. And next moment, he is vomiting up something into the soft ground at his feet. At once he feels lighter, he feels his breath coming more freely in thick rasping pants. There at his feet lies an ugly object indeed. It is a kind of misshapen metal ball covered in a multitude of sharp spikes, and he wonders in disgust that such a thing could be lodged unknown in his throat for so long. 

But it is out now, and he feels all the better for it. 

Now he walks towards the faint glow above and beyond him. The ground is soft beneath his paws.  He seems to be climbing through a landscape which he can see but dimly at first. There is a great openness above him. In the growing light, shapes take form and with them the memory of things long, long forgotten. Maybe things he never really knew but only dreamed of once. Alien and yet at once familiar. Trees and rocks and other forms stirring in the gloom. There is much he cannot see, but he is not afraid. Indeed he feels no fear at all now, only a kind of growing expectation, a growing certainty of what he must do.  

And so he climbs and climbs. 

At last he sees the line of a ridge above him. He sets himself to the task of scaling this last, highest hill. And though he walks in shadow still, the sky above him is filling with light. It turns in colour from grey to white to coral pink. And as he pads the last few paces to the summit, a feeling swells inside of him, a long hidden explosion of sound and emotion. The very cry of his heart. 

He is there now. He looks out across an endless landscape below him. 

And as the first rays of a mighty dawn race over the distant purple hills, the lion’s roar rings out across the land. At the sound of it, all the sleeping animals awake and prick up their ears. 

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