wytchcroft

For thus it was – and of all things, Ludovig was certain of this; that man alone of all the animals was the one that existed in amnesia blissfully ignorant of the fact that an animal is an animal and an animal is man. Knowing this simple fact gave Ludovig a tool of utmost importance – a lever with which he could move even the largest, heaviest and most reluctant of boulders... and send it crashing.
Having started the movement, one rock would sing to another and soon a thousand others would be dancing in delight and dashing themselves headlong in that bachic celebration of matter known as the avalanche. So it was that with the one name revealed, the murderous identity known, it was assured that Ludovig would bring the whole government down.

Ludovig may have been a complex man - how else reconcile the habits and demeanor of a sociable and interested old raconteur with a lifetime spent in monastic hermitage living alone and silent atop the inaccesible ruin of St Saphita's lighthouse? - but he was OF COURSE an animal and he therefore, like a good animal, viewed this with a sense of elation – but also, as might the goldfish, with some regret.

The Name of the Shoes – Ch. 324.6

You must forgive me if I start this review – which I post here as answer to the question, ‘Do Animals Feel Regret?’ – with something of an acerbic tone. If to me, the answer seems obvious and the question itself perhaps now, foolish, anachronistic, it is only because I have laboured for years in study just to be able to approach the subject – only, like my entire academic generation, to have had the answer thrown - like some philosophical custard pie – straight into my face. This event having occurred I must, as I say, be forgiven for expecting everyone else to be covered in the same dripping cream.

The pie of course was thrown, in 1986, by that master of his craft, Alfredo Foxxtrot, academic terrorist and author of both the spiritual minded detective thriller The Name of the Shoes (the first of his novels to grapple with the notion of regretful animals) and a nimble worded, and useful, guide to cake making called simply; ‘How to make cakes’.

It was between these two - not unrelated - treatise that Foxxtrot delivered his masterpiece, a tome so powerful that even it’s title is argued over! For, and to the chagrin of editors worldwide, the book’s identity can be translated as both ‘The regret of Goldfish’ AND ‘the regretful Goldfish’.

This apparently slight difference has caused Borders, Barnes and Noble and others (I have just checked this) to stock either editions with different titles to each other, editions with one title but not the same as the nearest rival bookshop – or, most commonly (Amazon for example) no copy whatsoever. No doubt Alfredo finds this the last and funniest joke to come from his dizzying masterwork.

For just as the protagonists of the novel* fall upon one another in murderous rage while disputing the pronunciation of the mystic words (Hanna , Janna, Spanna, Manna) which are known to contain the very equation that caused the universe to exist. So too, and very recently, Book editors and librarians have been found attacking each other in the press, on the internet and even, (in one extreme case,) in a dream I had last week after eating some especially strong (and possibly regretful) goats cheese.

For myself, with an academic career in semiotics and post-modern cultural theory now rendered outmoded and rather ridiculous by the brilliance of Foxxtrot I can only say (while wishing fervently for his early death) that, as much I passionately love adore and just plain laugh out loud at his works, I also – as a good animal – view them with some regret.

Professor Richard de Lanceabit (retiring)

*i use the term in the sense of no-vel, naturally.