Stinking Blatta
Flat and blotty, the stinking blatta, seems, like the eucara, more glyph than bug [Figure One] It is pictured just as Moffett describes it, “of a pure black glissening colour,” and “it hath thighs sharp with prickles” (note 1). Excepting those nicks to the abdomen, the cutter has made no effort at volume, so the hind-legs seem less to cover the middle than to blend with them. Blattae, reports Moffett, are “either krickets, or some new kinde of Moth, or some creature mixt and made of both” (note 2). New blattae may arise not from copulation but by chance from hot filth. The blatta, “a shamefac’t creature,” avoids the human “not so much for its ill favouredness, but guiltiness of its consciousness in regard of the stinck it leaves behind it” (note 3). The paper blatta’s level blackness duplicates in-the-flesh seeing. Because the bug scurries with “the least glimpse of light, and whisper of talk,” the human view is always fleeting: we do no more than note the blatta as it passes (note 4). This cut was inked unusually heavily. With time, the folio’s leaves pressed tightly together, the blatta’s ink ghosted onto the facing leaf’s verso [Figure Two]. The second blatta grew, as it were, in the closed codex’s vital ordure. The first blatta’s ink is not confined to the facing page but bleeds through the verso as well [Figure Three]. These nasty bugs make partial recompense, Moffett observes, with their visceral sap: “take off its shell,” he asks, and “what doth the belly contain but the ornament to dye withall, and to delight the eyes with their colour” (note 5)? Indeed, the word, blatta, is Latin for bloodclot. Its guts’ damps are “a most curious colour, ... a bright purple or scarlet” (note 6). And the pretty fluid “beaten with with oyl of Roses ... is very good for the ears” (note 7). This very juiciness, salutary, decorative, and now generative, manifests in the blatta’s doubles, rubbed to the facing page and leaking to the verso. The original, almost lineless, glissening in its ink, leaves copies that are more phantom than substance. The book opened—light striking the leaf—the blattae seem to scatter before the eye can take their figures in full.
note 1. Thomas Moffett, trans. John Rowland, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: Ellen Cotes for George Sawbridge, Thomas Williams, and Thomas Johnson, 1658), 999.
note 2. Ibid.
note 3. Ibid.
note 4. Ibid.
note 5. Ibid.
note 6. Ibid, 998.
note 7. Ibid, 999.