Invisible Beasts

by Sharona Muir

  Why don’t the victimized fireflies change their mating signals? Oh, they do. North American fireflies continuously update their luminous codes, but what can I say—Photuris is an aggressive mimic, by definition, by inclination, and by vocation. She probably gets a kick out of cracking codes before dinner. Reader, look at your evening lawn, how it sparkles, flashes, and glimmers! A lagoon of love crisscrossed by pirates flying false colors, sowing deception, death, and the shipwreck of happiness, and all through the pure medium of light. It’s July, but honestly, aren’t your bare feet getting cold?

  BEACON BUGS ARE THE FIREFLY SPECIES that has taken the most drastic step in self-defense. In each twenty-nine-year period, all generations of Beacon Bugs, except for one, are invisible. They can’t be seen and they don’t glow. Lights extinguished, the first invisible generations show a healthy population bulge, saved from the depredations of Photuris and her jerky boyfriends, as well as a host of other predators. My statistics heave a sigh of relief. But then they puzzle: instead of leveling off, the Beacon Bug population gradually declines. The last invisible generation is so thin on the ground it’s practically decimated. Why should a powerful defensive strategy accompany the decline of the species it protects?

  Some hypotheses come to mind. A firefly’s flash can discourage predators who don’t like a meal that blinds them. With the tactic of lightlessness, Beacon Bugs risk drawing predators that they haven’t faced before. Invisible animals can see one another, and in spring, for example, the world is as full of invisible frogs and toads as it is lacking in charming princes. There’s no free lunch, especially if you are lunch. Another hypothesis might better explain the decline’s gradualness. Like many fireflies, Beacon Bugs spend some two years in larval form, underground. A lot can change in two years: a meadow can be paved, dug up, flooded. When the larvae emerge—well, have you ever driven around an unfamiliar neighborhood in the dark, without headlights, looking for someone? Perhaps the newly adult Beacon Bugs have trouble meeting up, and become gradually separated into smaller, more vulnerable groups. Since, however, fireflies are flying enigmas whose glow tantalizes the laboratories that can’t tame them, let’s forget reasonable hypotheses. Just for the argument, let’s try love. If you were a Beacon Bug, how would you feel about mating with somebody who groped his way toward you, looking—not to put too fine a point on it—like a cockroach? Maybe the Beacon Bugs fail to multiply because they feel increasingly, pardon the expression, turned off?

  With this in mind, let us ponder the scandalous wreck of the luxury sloop Folly, which went aground and burned on Niagara Reef in Lake Erie one cloudy summer night, drowning the magnate Hoagland “Hog” Makemerry and his young wife, Tipple. The family dragged the skipper through a televised trial; long yarn short, he swore under oath that he’d navigated toward the Toledo harbor light. Not the gas buoy in the reef, no, the lighthouse beam, he was certain. The bellies of viewing audiences shook with laughter from Cleveland to Detroit. The prosecutor, vengefully cordial, asked the skipper if he reckoned the distance between the Toledo light and Niagara Reef? He did know the distance? Was the figure he said he knew in miles, or was it in feet? Oh, miles. Then he couldn’t have seen the Toledo light, could he? Harrowed but curt, the defendant stuck to his story about a lighthouse beam, even after the bench’s comment, which was, “Glug, glug.”

  “How shall I spell that, Your Honor?” asked the court recorder, deadpan amidst hilarity.

  “You can spell that G, R, O, G.”

  The Folly’s skipper did see a lighthouse beam where none should have been. Now here is a curious fact about shipwrecks in Lake Erie: a ship goes aground almost exactly every twenty-nine years—the sandsucker Isabella Boyce off East Point Reef, 1917; the teak barquentine Success off Port Clinton, 1946; and so on. I would not be surprised if this pattern were found nationwide, from Maniticus to Point Reyes, along any North American coast where sailors tell of phantom lights that lure ships to their destruction, any coast with meadows and marshes where fireflies are hatched . . .

  IT WAS A CLOUDY, MOONLESS NIGHT when the Folly followed the sweep, sweep, sweep of the beam penetrating the rough darkness. Who thinks twice about following that light unlike any other, a light that speaks our language, cheering us on? Even if a sailor was once a boy who collected fireflies in a jar, released them in a dark closet, and made them flash in synchrony with his flashlight, how could he imagine the swarms of desperate male Beacon Bugs coalescing by the thousands in the utter darkness along the Folly’s heading? How could he—how can any of us—fathom the promptings that compel a generation to break with the wisdom of its shadowy parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and to throw itself ablaze in the midst of darkness, imitating the greatest lamp in its universe? Through the tragic night, the massed cloud of male Beacon Bugs, pressed to the limit, mad for love, threw off concealment and pulsed the brightest signal they could muster. To any passing ship, it looked like the light of harbor, of loving arms and home. Along the shores, female Beacon Bugs gathered in their myriads, what was left of them, and love-signals flashed from earth to sky, from sky to earth. The times had turned, the revolution had begun. And Photuris, eternal predator, surprised, pleased, added a long-missed item to her menu . . .

  Washed up on the killer rocks of Niagara Reef, agape like a dead clam, lies a gold compact last held in the fingers of poor Tipple Makemerry; it used to reflect a human face, an animal face; now it reflects the cold cabal of the Pleiades. Desire for light, betrayal by light—how unholy it seems, yet how fitting and natural it is.

  Epilogue

  1

  As this book began with a remembrance of my predecessor, Granduncle Erasmus, so I will end it with a nod to him, and a bow to his namesake, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, the founder of evolutionary theory. Erasmus Darwin wrote poetry about what was called, in his day, “natural history.” My family is a cultured one, and Granduncle’s parents named him in hopes that he would become equally adept with the microscope and the pen. Instead of turning out major discoveries along with volumes of verse, however, Granduncle turned out to see invisible beasts. But he always liked to quote his namesake’s poetry, especially at Thanksgiving. As we’d sink into the after-dinner glow, Granduncle would suddenly stand up, shake out a pair of imaginary flounced cuffs, take a pinch of imaginary snuff, and intone:

  Glitter, ye Glow-worms, on your mossy beds;

  Descend, ye Spiders, on your lengthen’d threads;

  Slide here, ye horned Snails, with varnish’d shells

  Ye Bee-nymphs, listen in your waxen cells!

  My own nonscientific reading has been less scintillating, but has inspired lifelong thoughts about nature; and in the spirit of Erasmus Darwin, I offer the following essay as an epilogue.

  The Naturalist Reads a Love Letter, with Plato and a Dog

  THERE ARE MANY WAYS for a thoughtful woman to read a love letter. I like to lie in bed while the rain is falling outside, with my knees drawn up under a quilt, my dog beside me, during one of those days that creeps along in crepuscular secrecy through the falling rain, which as it slackens, then resumes, creates a giddy sense of the height from which it falls . . . We float, my big old shepherd and I, in a nest of our making, with dreams atremble through his sleepy paws, those iron-clawed, knobby-toed paws as expressive as diaries; and me with a letter spread over my knees. A letter penned by the same animal hand that wants to touch me. How mysterious, the carnal magic in these lines. Between them, bit by bit, growing gradually more distinct, appear in miniature the figures and scenes of a very old, famous fable, all about love, and as it steals over my mind I am suddenly aware of curtains lifting, revealing what I’ve never seen before. My eyes are on the letter but my mind is following strange paths.

  Do I still believe that there is no spiritual aspect of my life that is not, in some way, animal? It’s the belief of a naturalist, a scientific observer of animals. I’m animal through and through. But how shall I apply my belief to the
spiritual scent of this letter? I want to know (as women do) what love this is, here. And, maybe—what love is. A naturalist has one sort of truth; Cupid’s knowing smile, an immeasurably different sort of truth . . . except, perhaps, in this fable that I grasp on the edge of dream, hopeful that if I follow it, I will understand the letter, and the lover, without diminishing any of the truths I live by.

  THE FABLE WAS TOLD by a comedian at a party in Athens, very long ago. It had three parts and an introduction. The comedian, named Aristophanes, introduced it by burping, most likely with a look of mild gravity, as if he weighed each burp, its pedigree, its character, and its fitness for the job, before sending it out into the world. Then, with all the guests itching for a funny speech, he announced (to horny, vinous groans from some, and wry silence from others) that he would reveal the nature of love.

  Once (he began), every human being was spherical, with two heads, four arms, and four legs. This spherical creature got around by cartwheeling, and was irresistibly powerful. It rolled to the top of the food chain, dominating the other animals, and from there it began threatening the gods, who punished it. They split it in half, “as you cut hard-boiled eggs with hairs,” he said, and ever after, people have yearned to embrace their missing halves. Among the general laughter that greeted this, no one noticed (for science hadn’t been invented) that this tale described the fertilized egg. Isn’t that, now I see it, exactly what the spherical being is? Its double limbs are surely a diploid set of genes? The old fable has begun speaking to me as if it knew I was a naturalist. Let me see . . . in the womb, the egg sits enthroned, potentially the most powerful of beings. Why? Because it has never heard or told a lie. It has never cringed, strutted, or lost sleep. It’s going to roll out of there, into the path of whatever acts like a god, and try gamely to roll right over it. So this is what I think: when lovers yearn to be made whole in each other’s arms, we yearn for our beginnings in that fine egg. Maybe that’s why love rejuvenates, makes us rosy and frisky, feeling all the possibilities of life before us. That’s what’s so tempting . . . and oh, doesn’t my letter-writer know . . .

  But now, remember how Aristophanes, continuing, put a question to the partygoers.

  “Look,” he urged, “look at those couples—we all know them—who have been together for years. They want something from each other. What is it? We know it isn’t just sex. Ask them and they can’t tell you. It’s a mystery.” Heads nodded, glances met, tickled and solemn. The comedian then imagined that the smith-god offered one such loving couple the chance to be welded together into a single being. Of course, they jumped at the offer! Of course they would.

  At this, the listeners smiled. At the notion of two lovers making one entity, like tin and copper in bronze, they smiled—not because the fable was unrealistic (these were sophisticated people) but because it showed love’s power to make us forget our mortal, animal nature, so different from minerals and fire . . . But maybe they missed something, those savvy partygoers for whom science hadn’t been invented. Maybe . . . the smith-god’s offer doesn’t make us forget our nature. What if this were true, instead, now that a chill is waving over my scalp—longtime lovers remember our elder nature, life’s origin in nothing more promising than iron, sulphur, and fire. Yes.

  Over the ocean floor stretches a desert lost in perpetual night, so barren it seems accursed. It’s always in the back of my mind, for better or worse, with its name like a moaning wind, the abyssal benthos. And in it lie oases, places where volcanic cracks in the earth spew water that would be steam if three thousand meters of cold ocean weren’t sitting on it. The water erupts blackly upward, a curdled tower, and all around it trembles a silvery, filmy mass of Pompeii worms, their little rear ends immersed in supercritically hot water, while their scarlet, feathery heads nod in the ambient cold water. The mood, way down there, is a cross between a nightclub and a fairy kingdom where banquets materialize out of nowhere. To the heavy-metal bass thumps of the earth’s inner fires, seven-foot-long tube worms of both sexes, also in scarlet headgear, lounge around sending up shimmying eggs and sperm bundles that find each other upcurrent. Shrimps levitate over beds of juicy clams. Everyone lives it up despite the total darkness that ought to make life impossible. Anywhere else on earth, light means life, energy, photosynthesis, and the absence of the sun’s blessed light means barrenness. Anywhere except here in this dark of darks. Why? Because there lives around the vent an ancient form of bacteria that creates energy solely from inorganic minerals like iron and sulphur. These bacteria take the place of sunlight: they are the vent’s energy source. They live inside the worms and feed them; they carpet the vent and sustain its animals, and what is more, the whole reason I began thinking about this is—they are smith-gods. Sure they are! Because they forge life, animal life, from the minerals and fires of our stony star. And in so doing, they may have been, thousands of millions of years ago, life’s originators, the ones whose skill began it all. Now I’m thinking of how uncanny it is that Venus, goddess of love, was married to Vulcan, god of the forge.

  The abyssal benthos. I whisper that eldritch name to myself. I would give . . . what would I give to see and understand that place, those godlike beings, fully? I would give my heart. And the yearning I feel is exactly like something much more domestic, something at which my letter writer daringly hints . . .

  The yearning of longtime lovers reaches beyond the wholeness of the human egg, our beginnings, to the wholeness of all life’s beginnings. Yes. I remember. Even when you want no more from your mate than a breakfast kiss, a pat on the shoulder, something yanks on you from an unsounded depth and demands the world! From every loving touch and kiss that lasts long enough also spreads, in a widening circle, a yearning to be made whole with all of life.

  Bless him for reminding me, or damn him for it? Which? What sort of love is it? What is love? I believe . . . there is a third part of Aristophanes’s fable, a hidden one, maybe the answer to my questions.

  You have to know about him and those he entertained. The comedian had the most exquisite sense of limits an orderly mind can have. That’s how he knew what was funny. He had a goal in life, and every year it was the same goal: to win first prize at the theater festival. That was enough for him, though not for his listeners, a circle of brilliant intellectuals seeking truth—at this particular gathering, they sought the truth about love. All night long, the guests delivered well-wrought speeches about love, in a spirit of rivalry pitched to high frequencies by the presence among them of a great eminence whose tongue had the power of slicing knees. When Aristophanes burped his introduction, it was a huge relief to those whose speeches had gone underpraised, or damned with faint praise, or had yet to pass their dry, wine-wetted lips. Only one guest noticed, however, that of all the speeches, the comedian’s was the truest and best. That guest was none other than the eminent man himself, whose own speech—far and away the longest of the night—determined with the force of his world-historic intellect that love was a means to the perception of Ideal Beauty, which, whatever it was (and that is still disputed) had absolutely nothing to do with animal life. His speech was immortalized as it left his lungs. Still, he felt irked. By the time the guests had mostly left, the great man, red-eyed, was insisting that the best playwright would be able to write tragedy as successfully as comedy. He flourished that claim through the air like an expert fly-fisher, but the comedian didn’t bite. The funny man knew his limits. And I’d bet he knew that the shape of a comedy outlines the amorphous darkness of a tragedy, as the nerves that convey a tickling sensation are the same pathways responsible for anguished pain. Aristophanes didn’t bother answering the great philosopher, Socrates, because he knew his art.

  Which leaves me with tragedy: the hidden, the untold, the painful part of Aristophanes’s fable . . . As a naturalist I see it coming, because, if the two comic parts smiled at our bodies and our loves, these things are also the stuff of terror. In our bodies, inside our cells, are bits of live . . . things . . . that
our cells once tried to eat when they were small gobbling ameboids, millions of years before they formed our bodies. Our bodies consist of former ameboids with indigestible prey inside them. These little Jonah-bits of gobbled but undigested former critters give my finger muscles the energy to move this page. Then there is sex. What is sex? “Thwarted cannibalism,” says a famous biologist. You can say that again.

  And I do. Thwarted cannibalism, I mutter. I smooth the paper lying across my quilt-covered knees, and as though the action of my palm brought invisible ink to light, it says: I want to eat you up.

  He proposes to consume my time—which is the same thing—in the rites of the jealous domestic god who must be tirelessly satiated. Not that again. I will fail to locate in any of the kitchen cabinets the bottle of the special steak sauce, or the box of the special unsalted biscuits, that he must have, and there will be that catechism beginning, “How many times?” Or “How much intelligence?” Or maybe my misplaced binoculars—that I need when I need them—will be the excuse for his telling me, in detail stretching over an afternoon, how selfish I am. To such uses come the glorious human egg, and the font of life on the ocean floor. Is there a married woman who by the age of sixty hasn’t acquired the stoicism of a gastrolith? To be fair, for every jaw-jutting Jove there’s a jarring Juno. I don’t care. To be frank, it’s terrifying, this state of half-absorption into the gullet of another life.