jaeleslie

I'm not quite sure what it was that started me out thinking about bugs. I had found a number of illustrations for collage, insect imagery, I guess, but when I started looking for examples of insects in western poetry and literature came up empty. There are some nice Japanese poems, but the western associations are mostly pretty nasty. Butterflies crushed in the wheels were about as pleasant as it got.

So as I have mentioned, I just finished reading The Voice of the Infinite in the Small, which discusses how the various bugs are symbolic in different cultures, and in particular how we quite literally demonize them. Lord of the Flies and like that. Yet they are living creatures, with their own distinct characteristics, and even virtues. Bees are proverbially busy, and astonishingly communicative. Flies practice great warriorlike feats of flight. "Go the ant, consider her ways, and be wise." And so on. There is some interesting social and mathematical theory about the size of the colony or hive and its interaction with chaos.

My own encounters with the small creatures have come to mind repeatedly, and it's given me a lot to think about. There was the bite of the radioactive needle last week, like the Spiderman's bite, while I had been reading about how some "uncomplicated" peoples have taken the annoyances of mosquitoes and bees and such as the pain necessary to initiation in mysteries. The day I was reading about spiders, a small harvester synchronistically crawled across the keyboard, and I brushed it away. A few minutes later it was back. I should be so persistent, dancing on the keys. We can take these events as messages from the great unknown world out there, or leave them alone; and ourselves alone and not part of it.

Today I came across another association in a review in the London Review of Books concerning the biographies of a number of anorectic women saints, the kind who were into the mortification of the flesh very big-time, and I was struck particularly with one of them who was instructed to clean her cell with her tongue, but managed to gross out the superior who told her to do it by even swallowing the spiders, and their webs. Now what sort of spiritual instruction was she getting? one has to wonder. (You can find the review at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n05/mant01_.html) These ladies died young, instead of becoming proper wives and mothers, which is one of the apparent motivations for the "greensickness" that has been known since long before medical science had any opinion. And what are we to make of such self-assertion? We have not et spiders, as it were, we have not drunk the Web.