Where do they come from, these mad ideas of ours? All those capricious cravings, phantasmagorical follies, fugitive fancies, inspired lunacies and brilliant brain flashes?
What makes us stare into an empty cupboard only to make something out of nothing and dine like a gourmand? What brings the vision of a beloved hobby turned viable enterprise? And where exactly do all our paintings, novels and musical compositions actually come from? Do we really create them in our minds, or is it more like we tap the right frequency and pull them out of the sky?
It’s as if ideas come to us like bats in the night. That’s how this story came to me one evening in Santa Rosa cemetery. In the twilight time between the sun and moon, the two luminaries fecundated each other and sent fluttering bats across my field of vision, whose eccentric flight stimulated my imagination, which lit up like a jack-o-lantern.
A moment later, it was as if one had landed on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, in a thick Transylvanian accent, “How about a bat story for Halloween?”
Then life’s soundtrack cued up amid the chorus of frogs and crickets, playing that bewitching chord progression—E minor to A-flat minor—made famous in Gustav Holst’s 1911 piece, “Neptune,” and employed ever since in horror films to convey that goose-pimply eeriness best described as “supernatural presence.”
And so, on this Hallow’s Eve of 2024, let us get a brief introduction to our local bat population, which comes out every evening at dusk to swirl about. Many probably don’t even notice, any more than they notice where their creative inspiration comes from.
So perhaps bats can teach us something about listening to the inner rhythms vibrating below our awareness, so we can start snatching more inspiration from the mysterious realm from which they come.
* * *
All it takes is a small gap near a chimney for one to get “bats in the belfry,” my grandparents’ expression for idiosyncratic behavior. North Bay bats will gladly make a home in rafters and attics, especially during the long, hot summer when they’re birthing baby bats. There are about a dozen species in our area, with Mexican free-tail bats the most common to invite themselves into a home, followed by the pallid bat, which is California’s new state bat (that’s right, we have one).
Their nocturnal behavior is just one of the reasons bats cemented themselves into folklore, says Austin Robinson, an exclusion technician—which means he’ll humanely rid a property of skunks, raccoons and bats—with Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue.
“Evolutionarily, bats are based on nocturnal hunting for safety, when owls are really their only main flying prey. Their position in folklore is probably due to the mystery about them. They come out at night and are difficult to catch, so they’re hard to look at closely. In the past, people would see them flying around, but nobody knew anything about them, which just made them dark and interesting,” notes Robinson.
Bats use echolocation for hunting, snatching moths and mosquitoes out of the air, turning their wings into a kind of net. They even have a touch of eternity about them, making them the ideal animal for Halloween, when spirits wander. “Their lifespan was the most surprising thing to me,” says Robinson. “One of the oldest ever recorded was a bat caught and tagged and then found 41 years later two states away.”
Robinson employs a variety of ingenious methods for encouraging house-squatting bats to move out. But as some homeowners come to develop a fondness for the creatures, save for the creepy rustling in the walls and foul smell, he has set up a side gig building bat houses.
“It’s the same concept as barn owl boxes,” he says, “so there’s no guarantee bats will come and make a home in them. But while some people are pretty much just done with bats after I’ve finished, a few have no real problem with them, aside from their pooping in the walls.”
* * *
Amid the Industrial Revolution, the Anglosphere developed a counter-balancing fascination with the otherworldly. In America, Edgar Allan Poe gave us “The Raven,” whose dolorous protagonist slips into a state of mind in which a black bird seems to taunt him over the death of his beloved, while England piled every manner of ghost story into the prevalent penny periodicals.
In the early stage of the Rise of the Machines, these popular stories assuaged the longing for contact with the supernatural dimension that looms invisibly over us.
The word for this otherworldly presence, now all but forgotten, is numinous.
This word comes from the Latin numen, which expresses the Roman conception of the spiritual dimension. The numen is simply the background energy powering our reality, divine presence beyond any particular god, archetype or tradition. It is something like the screen in a movie theater, with each of us so caught up in the story of life as it unfolds that we fail to see how the whole thing works.
But the numen is active and intelligent, which is why the term in Latin means “to nod,” and is surely the origin of the expression, “a wink and a nod,” to indicate awareness of another level of reality beyond the one perceived.
Those able to access the frequency of the nume—snatching glimpses of it in action like bats fluttering by—come to understand that all the unexplainable serendipities and synchronicities in the lives of the acutely aware are winks and nods from numina, the plural form of the intelligent energies guiding those who wish to be guided, which we call angels when their polarity is benevolent, demons when malevolent and spirits when neutral.
Hallow’s Eve has always been the night in which the veil separating the numinous from the material becomes opaque. It occurs when the sun is in the sign of Scorpio, which rules dark, hidden and mysterious knowledge beyond the earthly conception of life and death.
Bats seem to fly through the numen, guided by their strange power of sonar, coming out to surprise us—tangling in our hair, at least in a horror movie—at the intersection between day and night. Likewise, our creative ideas come from the same sphere, whether for higher good or selfish evil.
And the more closely we watch for it, seeking to unravel how inspiration operates, the more deeply we find ourselves drawn into the twilight zone between heaven and Earth, the realm of the great Mystery.
Fabulous & fascinating!