How to Catch a Mole, by Marc Hamer

CHARLES FOSTER

How to Catch a Mole

When a mole wriggles through a halfbarrel trap, it presses a trigger which makes the base of the trap explode upwards, compressing the mole’s heart and killing it instantly.

At least that’s the idea. But sometimes an unusually fast mole is caught by the abdomen. Its internal organs are crushed. When that happened to a mole in one of Marc Hamer’s traps, he had to beat it to death with a trowel. Hamer had been a molecatcher for decades, but this was the end of his career. ‘I am done with breaking things,’ he said to himself. He threw the body into the hedge as if it had cursed him.

He gave up catching moles, and instead started catching ideas. He has been dazzlingly successful. How to Catch a Mole is a sort of tweedy Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Hamer himself is Alan Watts in gaiters, high on fresh air and cheddar cheese rather than LSD. The tone is pure Zen. This is it; here it is; this is now. But ‘here’ is a wet valley in South Wales, and ‘it’? Well, what ‘it’ is is the subject of Hamer’s enquiry. ‘Change is all there is…’ he tells us.

This is not a book about moles. It is a book about change: about how the world is woven from it, and how to deal with it; about shuttling between modes of being and layers of earth. To kill moles you have to be an amphibian, happy in in-between places, flopping between the domains of light and dark. Being human entails moving between those domains, too, whether or not we like it or recognise it. So this is a book about being human. For one day, after the biggest change of all apart from conception, gestation and birth, we’ll be eaten by the worms, which in turn will be eaten by the moles.

Hamer is a professional killer who has been a vegetarian for 50 years. It’s a contradiction, and the tension created by this contradiction generates an aphoristic electricity. Hamer’s often abrupt sentences are like haikus. The landscape he conjures is sparse, stark and dark, like Japanese trees in black paint on white paper.

The book’s seasons are autumn and winter: when the weather gets colder and the worms go deeper, the moles go further in search of food, making molehills where there were none before. It is then that the molecatcher is called. And autumn is Hamer’s personal season, too. ‘Natural things decay. There is a bitter-sweet state of existence that all natural things go through, a stage where they stop being what they were and start being something else. I think I am at that point.’

Soon, he knows, the trap will close on him – whether mercifully, on his heart, or on his belly.

What can we do with such terrifying knowledge? Hamer prescribes the three main emollients of eastern mysticism.

The first is a thoroughly

sceptical epistemology: it is not possible to know anything with sufficient certainty for there to be grounds for concern. All is illusion. ‘What things actually are,’ writes Hamer, ‘is unknowable… Facts do not set you free; they trap you into a constricted view of reality that is final.’

The second is to live in the moment: ‘The only truth is here, and here, and here, in the three seconds before it becomes a reconstruction. Really I want to forget. Forgetting is freedom and forgiveness… I let things be what they are.’

And the third is to ablate the self. ‘The “self” that I learned through childhood to present to the world was lost, and I have left it behind … it has become impossible to construct any kind of solid, immutable “self”.’

For me, there is more poetical allure than real comfort in these ideas. I cannot argue my case here, but simply observe that the whole of Hamer’s glorious book is about his glorious self. ‘After a week or two [of walking],’ he observes, ‘I become just a movement in the air. The sound of a falling stone on the path.’ Well, no, he doesn’t, as this description demonstrates. Air movements and falling stones don’t write or reflect like that. The book is Hamer’s elegy for himself, and one needs a self for an elegy to be meaningful.

Hamer would no doubt applaud my scepticism about his scepticism, saying beamingly, in the way of Zen masters (for whom paradox is the point), ‘Yes!’

But I am not sceptical about the value of his book. It has the feel of an enduring classic. It is the testament of a man who has learnt to see, who has the nerve to interrogate his own annihilation, and who (despite, or perhaps because of, his doubts about the usefulness of language) handles language superbly – as its master, rather than its servant.