Moldwarp (noun):
- a European mole (Talpa europea)
- a stupid or shiftless person
Talpidae
Contrary to popular belief, moles are not rodents, they are talpids; animals with many features adapted to life underground. Some of these features include a slick coat of fur that can be brushed any which way, a nose that functions as both a sensor of olfactory and tactile stimuli, internal ears that are great at detecting the most minute vibration in the soil, large front paws that splay outwards which allow them to practically swim through the soil, etc. According to The Mole Tunnel,
Most moles, as commonly recognized and known to the general public, are solitary animals that spend most of their life underground… Regardless of habit, all species construct two basic types of tunnel: deep, more permanent tunnels, and shallow surface runways. Differences in the extent and nature of these tunnels occur between most species. However, all mole species prefer moist soils where burrowing is easy… The diet [of moles] is highly variable among species, but in general earthworms, insects, and other invertebrates compose the majority of [it]. However, vegetation is known to comprise a small portion of the diet in most species. Presumably due to the enormous costs of excavating their numerous tunnel galleries, most moles are reported to have a voracious appetite. In fact, one star-nosed mole was noted to consume 1850 earthworms, three mice, one frog and two large grubs in 14 days![1]
All mole food is sought after and caught by digging through, disrupting the soil; so, since moles are always hungry, their presence can be quite alarming to those who claim “rightful” ownership of said soil.
The Moldwarp
In their restless activity of worm consumption and tunnel production, this animal warps the soil they dig through, throwing encountered earth behind them. In this activity, they leave heaps of loose dirt upon clearing out their tunnels and burrowing into the ground. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the ancient dialectical British term used to refer to them is moldwarp[2] (coming from the Old English molde and the Old English weorpan), literally meaning earth-thrower.
The contemptible moldwarp is the Human’s ruin, the digger of Its grave. They are a critter capable of destroying the sacred fixity of Its lawn. To It, the moldwarp is a useless usurper; it is precisely their hills that positions the moldwarp as so, these mounds of mud are sacrilege amid the Human’s greensward. They throw the terrain about as they dig, and in doing so the moldwarp misappropriates the Human’s lawn; this usurpation of the lawn, this dethroning of the Human, takes place because of the moldwarp’s hunger and not because of any spite for the Human. They will proudly play lawn proprietor if they are worm-hungry and are worm-hungry always. The moldwarp digs in search of worms, new territory, or a mate; they dig to conduce to their (gastrointestinal, territorial, sexual, etc.) hunger. No activity exhibited by the moldwarp is done with malice; fuck, the moldwarp is blind to the lawn and its sanctity, blind to the Human – seeing at best ghostly gray forms! All activity exhibited by them occurs with ravenous whimsy, with caprice.
As hungry as the moldwarp is, they are not a glutton. Most other mammals are not entirely fossorial, and so do not deal with the sheer amount of energy spent in the process of burrowing through soil; this energy cost is met by a daily intake of their own body weight in worms. This searching for, and trapping of, worms by tunneling is what ravages the Human’s yard; all the displaced dirt must go somewhere, hence the moldwarp’s hills. The moldwarp ravages, not as an end, but as a means; they ravage only to eat, destroy only to consume. The process of tunneling constructs hills, while it simultaneously destructs the lawn. So, the dirt the moldwarp displaces bares immediate significance to the Human; it taints the grass upon the monster’s arrival. However, all this tainting is done because it is easiest for the moldwarp and within the moldwarp’s interest; because lawn soil is soft and moist. The soil dug up and thrown onto the Human’s (supposedly “private”) property, in the moldwarp’s activity, serves as a reminder to the Human of Its inability to stagnate Its lawn – and therefore of the moldwarp’s ability to disrupt this stagnative process. The moldwarp, unlike many other garden critters, can disrupt this process; most others can unintentionally only do minor damage to the Human’s lawn. This the Human cannot tolerate. It cannot afford to give up any power over Its lawn, any influence over the uniformity of Its green – and is in fact afraid to, as it would be a loss of Itself; so, It decides to confront the power of the moldwarp, directly.
The Human, in all Its frustration, attempts to remove Its lawn from the moldwarp’s bound of interest. Whether by stomping down every new hill, or placing noisy deterrents in the ground, or killing all the worms in the area, etc., the Human ensures the moldwarp does not desire what the lawn promises. However, if this doesn’t do the job the Human ostracizes them from Its yard. It traps them (usually with no regard for their health) and then relocates them far away from anything familiar. Lastly, only if this isn’t resorted to at the sight of the first hill, the Human will simply slaughter them.
How ironic it then is that the moldwarp’s common name – mole – is also the English term for a contemptible skin-spot, a discolored skin-spot. Dark spots serve no functional or aesthetic purpose for the Human’s skin, whereas dirt mounds serve no functional or aesthetic purpose for the Human’s lawn. So, the moldwarp’s hills are to the Human and Its lawn what lentigos are to the Human and Its skin: dark, alien, surface-devouring marks. It should then also come as no surprise that the moldwarp’s common name also refers to a spy, or an intruder, in an organized body – such as a lawn. So, it isn’t just that the moldwarp is an other, as the Human encourages some alien critters to approach Its greensward, but that the moldwarp is dangerously shiftless. They serve no purpose for the lawn or its aesthetic, no lawn purpose, and instead serve only themself; making them not the lawn’s own nor the Human’s own. The moldwarp is as alien to the ruled and ordered lawn as it is to them; the latter because it is fixed against them. The moldwarp’s activity is almost always running – or better, tunneling – counter to the Human’s ideal of the perfect lawn, counter to Its ideal of the good lawn creature. The moldwarp both enters and exits the Human’s lawn counter to it, counter to lawn purpose; they both enter and exit as criminal.
The Human acts empathetically towards many sighted, soulful animals. The Human is kinder to animals that bare more of a resemblance to It, to animals with distinguishable eyes – a result of face pareidolia not Its “good” nature. So, having eyes that are both smaller than their nostrils and only visible from up close, the moldwarp to the Human is a grotesque and faceless creature. To It the moldwarp has no discernible profile; there is nothing the moldwarp is immediately recognized as, aesthetically or functionally. The saying “the eyes are the windows to the soul” corroborates this; it means that many aspects of an individual’s inner character, their mind or spirit, can be perceived more through their eyes than through their other organs. A corollary is then that the moldwarp is soulless to the sighted Human. The moldwarp, to the Human, has no inner character, no mind, no spirit to be profiled and assigned duty; they mindlessly construct and destruct without aspiration towards a lawn purpose, they do so according to their voracious caprice, their ravaging whimsy. So, despite all the effort that devouring worms and building tunnels entails, the moldwarp is considered dumb and lazy, a stupid idler.
This destructive activity performed in blackness, this activity of consumption and production performed by the moldwarp, the Human does not consider work. Activity in darkness, hidden from the Human’s gaze, is not – and does not – work towards the bright and beautiful lawn, is not work for the Human’s shining ideal. Laborious activity for the moldwarp’s own sake is never work for the Human, because it takes from the Human; to It, theft cannot be work. The moldwarp’s activity devours and misappropriates Its yard. But more than that: the product of their activity – the moldwarp’s tunnels – are inherent disruptions of the yard; the tunnels do not exist as present soil but as absent soil, they are the negative space produced by digging. The moldwarp resides within disruption upon disruption of the lawn; but, more than criminal to it, they themself are a negation of the lawn and its fixity. The moldwarp, in being against the glistening lawn ideal, can be nothing but lawn idle; that is, antiwork.
Though the moldwarp proudly negates the lawn, they are seemingly quite a coward too. With eyes highly sensitive to light, and ears to noise, they cower at the first noticed beam, at the first sensed vibration. The Human may cast judgement upon the moldwarp’s timidness; but their might has no shadow cast over it by their cowardice, and vis a versa, as both conduce to the moldwarp’s ownness. The moldwarp cowers at the light because this signals to them that they are visible to birds (or foxes, etc.), they flee at the slightest vibrations only because they signal nearby predators; they cower because being exposed is not in their interest. The moldwarp deals with the lawn according to their egoistic, own interest; not according to the altruistic, other ideal of the Human.
The lawn is entirely defined by its fixity or stagnancy, for if it were not fixed or stagnant, it would be a complex, constantly changing ecosystem with multiple species of grass and higher biodiversity. So, for the moldwarp to at all tunnel counter to this fixity, to displace soil and destroy the Human’s ideally uniform lawn, is to establish itself as a proud and contemptible criminal. Despite their lawn criminality, however, the moldwarp is immensely beneficial to the soil, as they aerate it in the process of tunneling; it is only that the Human does not care for the potential of a healthy biome, and instead solely for Its obsessive desire to stagnate things. The Human cares only to categorize neatly, to fix things according to alien standards, to bask in the “privacy” of Its property as “private” tyrant, to play critter-police.
Again, however, this lawn-worship the Human exhibits, and the associated hatred for moldwarp, is nothing to them. The moldwarp, as with most other things, is no witness to this contempt of the Human; the moldwarp hasn’t a clue that the lawn is a sacred space to the Human, it is nothing to them. The only aspects of the Human that elicit the attention of the moldwarp’s keen nose and ears are Its attempts to banish or annihilate them and the heavy thuds It produces as It passes. The moldwarp – to the Human – is a contemptible idler; a lazy lawn-robber; a mindless surface-devourer; a whimsically ravenous creature; a heap-leaving eater of xenoi; an earth-throwing, gnarly beast of darkness; a usurper. Although seemingly fettering, the moldwarp is proud to be described this way; they find each term quite laudable! Warping Stirner’s words, the moldwarp self-describes as
… an abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos [with no] guiding light or star,[4]
but their nose[5]. The moldwarp’s usurpation of Its lawn enrages the Human; oh, how the Human’s hatred practically froths from Its jowls! There was once a prophecy written around the year 1312 that shows this:
The sixth [English] king after John would be the Mouldwarp or Mole, who would be proud, contemptible and cowardly, having a skin like a goat. He would be attacked by a dragon, a wolf from the west and a lion from Ireland, who would drive him from the land, leaving him only an island in the sea, where he would pass his life in great sorrow and strife and die by drowning.[6]
Does this prophecy not demonstrate what the moldwarp is to the Human? Could it be any more obvious how much the moldwarp ruins the Human? Fuck! There exists this prophecy reifying the moldwarp and even then, it is full of ill speak. The Human wants the moldwarp gone, isolated from It because It cannot appropriate them, fix them for Itself, even if this means killing the moldwarp. After all Its futile attempts to rid Itself of the moldwarp, the Human floods their tunnels and hopes the moldwarp “dies by drowning” or at least lives “in great strife and sorrow”. What the Human does not know, however, is that despite Its attempts to exert power over the moldwarp by means of flood, their enormous front paws and slick coat make them excellent swimmers.
The Human asks the moldwarp, with a pained expression, “Why won’t you leave?”. The Human cannot understand what the moldwarp exists for, what Cause they have based their affair on. No such Cause exists, however, and so the moldwarp responds:
… With all the strength I have, I will create my life and my activities as my own without any regard for authority… or regarding it only as my enemy.[7]
Notes
- Although the term is generally used to describe Talpa europea, in this text it will be employed to refer to any species of talpid. Also, it is usually spelled mouldwarp – but, fuck it.
- The Mole Tunnel, General Biology.
- “Scientists believe moles are [completely] colorblind and nearsighted, but that their eyes are exceptionally good at detecting light.” (National Geographic).
- Stirner, The Unique and Its Property.
- Condylura cristata’s star is both one of the most effective tactile sensory organs and hunting apparatuses in the entire animal kingdom; they can identify and devour food faster than perceptible to the naked eye.
- Wikipedia, Mouldwarp.
- Landstreicher, Willful Disobedience, p. 15
Contribution by Herschell Orror