The Restraint of Insects

Most people in the U.S., I would guess, have heard of the cartoonist Charles Schulz, creator of "Peanuts."  A fair number of people have heard of Pogo's creator Walt Kelly.  Few people, however, know the name Don Marquis, who, in the first part of the 20th century, created the serialized humor of "Archy and Mehitabel."  In its time, that series provided witty comment on the human condition, usually through the eyes of an otherwise harmless cockroach named Archy.  I was struck by the perceptiveness of one of Archy's observations I recently came across in an anthology:

"if all the bugs

in all the worlds...

should sharpen up

their little stings

and turn their feelings loose

they soon would show

all human beans...

their relative significance

among the spinning stars."

green damselfly

Indeed, if human beings ("beans," as Archy pronounces it) could actually experience firsthand the bottled-up energy of every single insect in the world, we would quickly know we are outnumbered.  The best calculations are that insects outnumber the human population a million to one, and in total body mass outweigh the human population twelve times over. Moreover, what an enduring as well as versatile form evolution found when it developed the insect structure. We human beings walking upright are only one species; but the basic insect structure (3-sectioned body & 6 legs) comes in a fantastic array of a million species.  Some are as delicate as a damselfly.  Others, such as Goliath beetles, look like army tanks in comparison. Still others, such as walking sticks, are camouflaged as twigs.

ladybug

Given the incomprehensible number of insects worldwide, and the versatility of the class Insecta to evolve in almost any condition, the "if" that introduces Archy's poem is significant: Archy's scenario is imaginary. Insects are, for the greater part, much more concerned with leading their own lives than they are with harassing humans. Moreover, a mindless desire on our part to indiscriminately rid our planet of insects would mean the loss of bees and other insects that pollinate fruit and nut trees, and help pollinate other crops. Their roles as pollinators only hint at the vital links insects serve overall, being food for birds, some fishes, and many mammals.  Those animals in turn nurture the many cycles of air and soil. Not to mention the delight many children can get as they discover the animated wonders of usually harmless insects.

Archy, in his own restraint, merely implied another point.  Namely that, on the whole, the class Insecta has demonstrated more restraint in its behavior than has Homo sapiens.  Although we do need to find better ways to regulate the dangerous effects of certain insects, maybe we can add to our more restrained behavior a greater appreciation of the benefits of insects.

~~~

Have you every imagined what it would be like to be a certain insect?  Which one?

(The poem of Archy is from

  The Lives and Times of Arch & Mehitabel by Don Marquis, © 1935.)
(The photo of the damselfly by JDP90 [Joydeep] used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

A Kitchen with a View

One feature of many U.S. kitchens built in the 1950's is the placement of a window above the kitchen sink.  I recognize that such an arrangement could have been prompted in part by ergonomics, that science of designing workplace objects to fit the size and movements of a person's body:   Because we need to lean forward slightly to reach down into the bottom of a sink, we could hit our heads on a cupboard if it had been placed above the sink.  I am inclined to think, however, that another reason for that window is our general dislike of washing dishes by hand, contrasted with the soothing possibilities a view of Nature can provide when we look out the kitchen window.

Kitchens in middle-class houses built back in the '50's did not usually have automatic dishwashers as part of the original construction.  And in most families I knew, washing dishes was, let us say, not a beloved task.  (When, in the early 1960's my family briefly hired a maid to assist my mother with household work, my sister and I found the otherwise nice woman a bit peculiar when she explained that she would not cook but that she did love to wash dishes!)

I do not have many happy memories revolving around my washing dishes.  But I do have good memories about people enjoying that view out the window above the sink.  When I was a child and my parents were house-hunting , one thing that attracted them to the house they settled on was a graceful, flowering mimosa tree just outside the kitchen window.  And in our previous house, I lost count of the number of times my mother, at the sink, would remark upon a cardinal or other bird she noticed outside.  What my mother saw and commented upon expanded my own childhood knowledge and awareness of the world.  Today, in my own house, my wife and I have a low cherry laurel to gaze upon, delighting ourselves with the antics of the squirrels that clamor upon it.

I know an architect who says he just cannot imagine designing a kitchen without a window above the sink -- it just would not be the courteous thing to do.

In E. M. Forster's 1908 novel A Room with a View, a window-view becomes both the source of the book's title and a symbol for the book's theme of the struggle between social insularity and openness.  The upper-class heroine, not yet married, and on vacation in Italy, finds that the hotel room she is assigned to lacks a good view.  A gracious middle-class man offers to switch rooms so that she might have a window with a beautiful view.  Who will she marry? That generous man's son, or a man who is of her own class but who is shallow? Those social questions are Forster's primary concern, but the relationship with Nature is a sub-theme.  The cinematographer's who made the 1985 movie version took advantage of that sub-theme:  When the young woman, vacationing away from cold England, opens the shutters on that new window she agreed to accept, the beautiful and warm Italian sunshine floods into the room.  And more than light floods into her as well.

~~~

Do you have a view of some aspects of Nature through a window where you live?  Is there a favorite thing you like to see?

Stranger and Truer than Science Fiction

Sometimes after watching an episode of the Star Trek TV series, I think that the designers of the space aliens' costumes and makeup need to go back to school, so to speak.  Not to a costuming course in drama school.  And not to a makeup academy.  Instead, they need to return to fiction-writing school to give more thought to what an alien that developed on another planet might even be like.

I tend to think this way not after reading an astronomer's analysis of conditions on other planets.  Instead, my thoughts incline this way after seeing pictures or reading about forms of life in the ocean on our very own planet Earth.  Evolution has come up with some "costumes" and "makeup" far beyond the imagination of any science-fiction writer or director.  And the strangest ways of being a living being can be found in our oceans.

Just take the matter of virtually all space aliens on Star Trek having two symmetrical sides, right and left (just as do humans and all other vertebrates).  A simple exception in the ocean to such symmetry are male fiddler crabs, which have a claw on one side of their bodies much larger than the claw on the opposite side.  (Thus the whimsical appellation "fiddler" we have given them.)

Nature had already gone a step even further away from requiring animals to have two sides when the invertebrates previously evolved.  Sea anemones, sponges, and jellyfish are all circular in design.  Imagine a Star Trek director instructing a person in a spherical costume to "face the camera."  Evolution had an even greater imagination when it came up with the starfish's "costume," giving it five arms -- an odd number, of all things.

Another area in which I think science-fiction writers have been outdone by Nature has been in that of eyes.  I have seen a TV space alien made up with one additional eye on its forehead, or even with an extra pair.  (It would take more work to mask over the actor's real eyes and give them a single, centered eye, like the Cyclops in the ancient Greek epic Homer's Odyssey.)

Contrast that prosaic eye-on-forehead thinking with the idea of a whole ring of small eyes around a circular cookie-shaped body.  To make that many-eyed circular costume even stranger, don't space the tiny eyes at even intervals, but place some a little closer together and others a little farther apart.  That is the approach actually taken by the blue-eyed scallop of Australia. Moreover, what a colorful touch in the pinhead eyes being blue!

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I am not really trying to criticize science-fiction writers.  I do recognize that science fiction is really more about our human societies than it is about what exists on other planets.  (I also recognize the limitation of trying to make an alien costume that allows a person to fit inside.)  My aim is not criticism but amazement.  I am amazed at the immense variety of "costumes" of the beings in our oceans, demonstrating again that life's possibilities are even greater than our own human imaginations.

~~~

Do you think we might draw a lesson from the strange variety of species?  Or would that be carrying our imaginations too far?

One Sun and One Moon

The reading of a poem by a designated poet has now become a regular part of U.S. presidential inauguration ceremonies. The first reading was at the inauguration of JFK in 1961.  The already well-known and highly esteemed poet Robert Frost brought a copy of his new poem "Dedication" to read.  No inaugural poet has had to face the elements and imperfect technology the way Frost did.  I remember watching on TV. Frost stood at a podium where an electrical fire had been put out; a bitterly cold wind rattled the sheets of paper he held; and the intense sun blinded his eyes.  The sun won out.  And so, unable to read further, Frost finished by reciting from memory an older poem, "The Gift Outright."

Over the past decade or so, inaugural poets have been less known, but that has not meant that their poems, usually written for the occasion, have been forgotten.  I remember in particular there having been quite of bit of favorable comment about the poem "One Today" read by Richard Blanco at the Obama inauguration in 2013.  The comments about the poem afterwards on radio and TV showed how it had been especially accessible and meaningful to many.  In his poem, Blanco employed the opening image of "one sun" rising in the eastern U.S. and moving across the continent to depict and tie together the varied lives of people as they awoke and arose to their day's regular activities.  Occasionally, a specific detail added depth to the more general descriptions:

"My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors,

...on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives --

to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did...."

The poem continued the theme of unity by using the phrases "one sky" and "one moon."

That modern poem came back to my mind when I recently read, of all things, an 8th-century Buddhist stanza.  It was by Yung-chia Ta-shih, and goes like this:

"One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures,

One Reality, all comprehensive, contains within itself all realities.

The one Moon reflects itself whenever there is a sheet of water,

And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one Moon."

Even when I was in early elementary school, and read introductory books about astronomy, scientists knew that the planets of our own solar system varied in whether they had one moon, no moon, or more than one.  Astronomers' inventory of our universe is now so vast that we have numerous examples of the variety of moons that orbit about each planet in many planetary systems.  We also now know that other planetary systems sometimes have not a single star but a star system at their center.

If our own solar system did have more than one sun, or if our Earth had more than one moon, I would hope we would still have poets to remind us that we are all ultimately one people.  And also have poets to at times stretch our minds a little farther, by reminding us that all Life on this planet is ultimately One Life.

~~~

Is there some way you try to come back to an awareness of our unity amidst differences?

(The Japanese print is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

(The Buddhist verse is taken from The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, © 1945, p. 8.)
(The 2013 poem "One Today" by Richard Blanco can be read at this external link:  "One Today".)

Big Skies

My wife grew up in a moderately hilly landscape in Michigan.  When she first moved to a city on a flat, coastal plain, she missed the open vantage points that had been provided back home by the tops of hills.  And so, she found herself appreciating the freeway overpasses as substitutes. Nevertheless, the shortcomings she experienced in a flat terrain were offset by a payoff:  Being on a flat landscape made the sky seem exponentially larger.  And so, my wife immediately recognized the experience the 20th-century American author Willa Cather had described in one of her novels.  Of flat New Mexico, Cather wrote:  "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.... [T]he world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky."

Seeing the vaulting sky above a flat terrain is like viewing a movie on a wide screen in a movie theater, as contrasted with watching it on an old-fashioned, confined TV screen.  Although experts on movie history tell us that in the 1950's it was the need to compete with television that prompted the creation of CinemaScope and Panavision, I wonder if it was not also the popularity of westerns at that time.  Those wide-screen formats were perfect for depicting the grand open plains during U.S. frontier history.  Even though one 1952 western could not escape critics' pointing out its mediocre content, the movie's title recognized the power of the majestic ceiling above that open land on which the humans traveled.  The movie's title was simply "The Big Sky."

Not that a wide view of the sky is always delightful.  I remember as a kid road trips in the family car when a wide view of the sky revealed the vastness of storms developing on the horizon -- no way to steer around them!  As I remember that image of threatening skies, I also recall a part of U.S. history that most of those movie westerns barely mentioned.  Namely, that as European-Americans expanded outward and westward under a big sky, they confined native Americans to smaller and smaller pieces of land.

Our American love for wide, open spaces continued from frontier times even into the 20th century.  That love paralleled those 1950's westerns, as post-World War II suburbs sprawled out from cities more heavily on their western sides.  People still moving westward, still hungry for something.

Beneath the saga of U.S. history -- as told through the lens of our relationship to a big sky and a wide horizon -- lies, I think, a broader human desire.  It is the desire to feel that our lives are not constrained.  It is the desire to feel that the possibilities for life are so wide that they reach out to an unconfining horizon.  If that is so, what we might really need is not simply to look out across a greater distance, but to pause and look up more deeply into the sky, and into ourselves as we do so.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The sky is the daily bread of the eyes." If that is so, maybe what we need is not just a larger portion of sky but the habit of savoring it more deeply and more thoughtfully.

~~~

Whether your physical vantage point is confined or more open, are there any occasions during the day when you look at the sky?

(The Cather quote is from Death Comes for The Archbishop

 by Willa Cather, © 1927.  Book VII, Ch. 4.)

(The Emerson quote is from his Journals entry May 25, 1843, as quoted in

 A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, et al., ©1992.  68.44.)

(Stormy-sky photo by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos used under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Unported 3.0 license.)