Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  “Oh,” Seu Benedito laughed, “the borboletas de verão, the butterflies of summer. They’re back. You’ve never seen them?”

  That day they were everywhere. An explosion exploding the world, dressing it in strange new color, tripping it out with unexpected beauty. As we chugged along the river, we saw that each house we passed had surrendered to the transformation. Thousands of yellow butterflies had settled on roofs and walls, occupied wooden porches, finally turned Amazonia into El Dorado, encrusted this quiet village in layers of gold.

  When we reached home, there were golden-yellow summer butterflies dancing around our house too. High in the eaves, all around the porch, low in the muddy yard where the pigs rooted under the floorboards. They floated and soared, and I took a picture to hold on to that day and the few that followed before the insects left.

  This is the kitchen at the back of Seu Benedito’s house, near the mouth of the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Amapá. I lived here for fifteen months in 1995 and 1996, and this is what it looked like in the late-afternoon sun on the day the butterflies arrived. Sometimes now it seems like a dream, someone else’s story, so I take out this picture and think back to that day. See the sleepy hunting dog in the foreground? See the açaí palms, with their heavy bunches of black fruit? See the two giant tires that little Helton and Rosiane filled every morning with water from the creek, just out of view to the right? See the fenced-off vegetable patch? The thick wire clothesline? See the borboletas de verão caught in time and space like mini UFOs, just visiting, just stopping by, entering our lives, transforming everything just for a moment, showing us a glimmer of a different world, then passing on?

  Chernobyl

  1.

  I look at this photo of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger in her apartment in Zürich and try to imagine what she sees through her microscope. Beneath the lens is a tiny golden-green insect, one of the leaf bugs of the suborder Heteroptera that she has been painting for more than thirty years.1 The binocular microscope magnifies to eighty times. The centimeter scale in the left eyepiece allows her to map every detail of the insect’s body with precision.

  Cornelia collected this animal close to the Gundremmingen nuclear power plant in southern Germany. Like most of the insects she paints, it is deformed. In this case, its abdomen is irregularly shaped, a little crinkled on its right side. To me, even under the microscope the deformity is all but imperceptible. But just think, she says, how such an anomaly must feel if you are only two tenths of an inch long!

  What does Cornelia see when she focuses so intently on this creature? She tells me that when she’s outside, collecting in fields, at roadsides, and on the edges of forests, she “loses herself in the animal.” At these moments, she says, she feels “very connected, extremely connected”; she feels a deep bond, as if, perhaps, she herself had once been such a creature—a leaf bug—“and had a body remembering.”

  But her painting practice, as she explains it, is almost the opposite of this. When she sits down with her microscope, she no longer experiences the insect as a coevolved being but as form and color, shape and texture, quantity and volume, plane and aspect. Her work becomes as mechanical as possible. (“I want to be like a laser that goes from one square centimeter to the next. I see it, I show it; I see it, I show it,” she tells me.) At times, as in the painting below, she introduces a principle of formal randomness, selecting specimens from her collection by chance and abstracting a single structure, which she repeatedly positions at designated points on the graph paper, creating an image with no preconceived final arrangement, an image whose aesthetic origins lie squarely in the tradition of concrete art, in which she was raised.

  The painting shows a series of eyes from fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, that had been irradiated by geneticists at the University of Zürich’s Institute of Zoology. Although she has chosen not to show the animals’ heads, Cornelia uses them as her points of reference, centering each one on corresponding squares of graph paper so that they are situated precisely in relation to the absent bodies to which they belong. But radiation has left the eyes irregularly positioned on the flies’ heads, and as a result, despite the orderliness of the arrangement, the horizontal and vertical lines in the paintings are uneven. Cornelia’s systematic randomness produces regularity but not uniformity, a graphic expression of an insight central to her understanding of nature, aesthetics, and science: the world, her paintings say, is governed simultaneously by stability and randomness, by principles of both order and chance. The flies’ eyes are bizarre. Their size and shape vary dramatically. Several are sprouting wing parts, aberrations that allow researchers to investigate cell behavior—“like someone who studies a train by systematically letting it derail,” as Cornelia puts it.2 One fly, represented by empty space, has an eye missing entirely. Because she detests naturalism in painting (naturalism, she tells me, encourages the viewer to focus on the “reality” of the image, on the skill of the artist, on the artist’s “vision”) and because she wants us to pay attention to form, she painted the eyes black rather than a realistic red.

  Cornelia painted that picture in 1987. But she first drew mutated Drosophila twenty years earlier, as a scientific illustrator at the Institute of Zoology.3 In a standard mutagenic protocol, those flies had been fed food laced with ethyl methanesulfonate. The resulting mutations fascinated her so much that she began painting the damaged insects in her own time, experimenting with angle and color, even casting some large heads as plastic sculpture, struggling to make sense of the disturbing world she was being pulled into. At the institute, her job was to draw the varied appearance of the so-called Quasimodo mutants. The animals were crippled and pitifully monstrous, “chaotically” deformed. In preparation for the illustrators, the inner organs of each fly’s head were dissolved with a chemical agent that left the disturbed face as a mask. “The mutants were not to leave me,” she wrote. And, indeed, from that point on her activities are shadowed by the victims, actual and potential, of induced mutation.4

  The image opposite is among the last that Cornelia painted before making a collecting trip in July 1987 to Österfärnebo, in Sweden, the site she identified as the place in western Europe most heavily polluted by fallout from the disaster at Chernobyl. That journey signaled the beginning of a new phase in her life, one marked by controversy and not always welcome attention. In their unsettling combination of blank abstraction and bleak outrage, the disembodied eyes are a premonition, an anticipation.

  When the reactor exploded at Chernobyl, Cornelia was ready. “Chernobyl was just the answer to the question, What is going on here?” she told me recently. She was already a witness. She had seen the diminishing numbers of leaf bugs in her garden. She had seen the monstrous fruit flies. The laboratory and the world were one. What now stood between them? She already recognized the emerging aesthetic. There was no nature immune to its effect. “We cling to images that do not correspond to changing reality,” she wrote.5 Chernobyl was merely the nightmare exposed to the light of day, the invisible made evident.

  2.

  In 1976, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger was living quietly in the countryside outside Zürich with two young children, a self-absorbed, neglectful husband, and a passion for leaf bugs. It wasn’t simply the beauty of the insects that attracted her. There was something about their character. (“They have a kind of being aware of certain situations that I find extremely amazing,” she says.) Their idiosyncrasies turned collecting into an obsession (“a kind of addiction”; “to find a leaf bug is fantastic … it’s heaven on earth!”). She rapidly grew familiar with the ones that lived nearby and started to recognize individual differences (“the individual differences are in fact astonishing”) as well as the more acknowledged distinctions among families and species. Summer vacations were spent at her husband’s family’s house in the southern canton of Ticino, rising early while the mist still clung to the landscape, roaming the wetlands, collecting her insects, becoming closer and closer to the local plant an
d animal life.

  Collecting created one kind of intimacy. Discovering the habits of the insects and uncovering their hiding places (“I know exactly where they will be”) cultivated her sensitivity to their senses (“They’re lazy people!” she told me, laughing), her feeling that they know when she is near, that they feel when her eyes touch them. Through collecting she came to understand their ecology and their character. How could she not? And through the intense attention of painting, she developed another type of intimacy, becoming expert in their morphology and their variety.

  Painting, she insists—reaching back to the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner; to her inspiration, the painter-explorer Maria Sibylla Merian; to the autodidact fossil hunter Mary Anning—is research, not merely documentation.6 It is a way of achieving multidimensional knowledge of the subject, a way to see it in its biological, phenomenological, and political fullness. Not simply a way to express what we see, painting is a discipline through which we learn to see—to see, that is, in the broad sense of gaining insight. Through painting, she is able to map anomaly, to recognize patterns and relationships across her archive of collecting sites, to realize that she has encountered this deformity somewhere before: Österfärnebo, Chernobyl, Sellafield, Gundremmingen, La Hague. “It’s a discovery of a new world,” she says. “The more I look, the more I dive into this world, the more I can connect.” If only life would allow her to spend six months painting just one leaf bug. If only … “I would like to go deep, deep, deep, deep…”

  It is late in the evening. We have finished dinner and are admiring Galileo’s famous ink washes of the moon, a series of paintings she loves (“This is art!”). Galileo made these images in 1610, sketching what he saw through his recently constructed telescope, a novelty that brought an entirely new world into focus. The sense of discovery in these pictures is claustrophobic. They have an urgency about them, as if he drew in disbelief (“what causes even greater wonder …” he marveled), racing to capture the unimagined textures before they rotated into shadow, perhaps never to be seen again.7 Cornelia tells me how Galileo’s colleagues examined these drawings of what he’d seen in the night sky but were unable to recognize the objects he showed them. This was not the moon they knew. How could they trust the view through an instrument they did not understand? They were “seeing-blind,” Cornelia says. So set in their thinking, so at home in their world, they looked but they didn’t see, looked but made no sense of what they saw.

  After she left her husband and her country garden, after she moved back to Zürich with her children, after Chernobyl, Cornelia published the first of two cover stories in the Sunday magazine of the leading Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Under the headline “When Flies and Bugs Don’t Look the Way They Should,” she presented paintings of leaf bugs, fruit flies, and ivy leaves she had collected around Österfärnebo and Ticino.8

  Her account of the trip to Sweden is engrossing. Part detective story, part conversion narrative, part conspiracy, it begins with her struggle to track down information about the radioactive cloud that spread west across Europe from Chernobyl in the days after the explosion. She finds maps (“miserably inexact”) and identifies the most contaminated places to which she can gain access (“In the evenings, when the children were in bed, I pored over maps and brooded over data at the kitchen table”). Her calculations reveal that the greatest fallout in western Europe was in eastern Sweden (“and that, I decided, was where I wanted to go”).

  When she arrives, people tell her—as they will years later at Three Mile Island—about the strange feelings, the inexplicable foreboding they experienced the night the rain cloud broke and radioactive particles poured down on their town. A local veterinary surgeon shows her clover growing red leaves and yellow flowers instead of the green leaves and pink flowers of earlier years. She finds odd-looking plants everywhere. She collects insects, and the next day, July 30, 1987, she examines them under her microscope. She already knew that leaf bugs were exceptional biological indicators. She had observed in her garden how the precision of their anatomy made irregularities highly evident, how normal variation was generally restricted to their markings, how one bug could live its entire life on a single plant, and how its descendants might remain there too. She realized that by ingesting fluids directly from leaves and shoots, leaf bugs made themselves vulnerable to contaminants taken up by the plant. But in seventeen years of painting them, she had never seen anything like this. “I felt sick. One bug had a particularly shortened left leg, while others had feelers like shapeless sausages, and something black grew out of the eye of another.” She sees everything as if for the first time.

  Although I was theoretically convinced that radioactivity affects nature, I still could not imagine what it would actually look like. Now these poor creatures were lying there under my microscope. I was shocked. It was as if someone had drawn back the curtain. Every day I discovered more damaged plants and bugs. Sometimes I could hardly remember what the normal plant shapes looked like. I was confused and afraid I might be losing my mind.

  I realized that I had to free myself from all my prior assumptions and be completely open to what was in front of me, even at the risk of being considered mad. The horror of what I had found tortured me in my sleep and gave me nightmares. I began to collect and paint feverishly.9

  She had planned it as a temporary detour.

  [Chernobyl] happened and I thought I’d do this quickly. A year, two, maybe three—and then I’d go back to my mutated fly eyes or something. This was actually the kind of work that I liked. I didn’t like to leave this work. I only did because I thought it was necessary. All those paintings [in the magazines] are on cheap paper, the cheapest paper, just from my sketching pad. It wasn’t serious artwork. I was convinced that after I painted the first ones, the scientists would say, “Yes, that’s really interesting. Let’s run to those places and collect.”

  She traveled back to Ticino, to the area near her ex-husband’s family’s home and to the insects she knew so well. Although fallout from Chernobyl had been less concentrated here than in Sweden, the climate was milder. As the contamination rained down, insects in Ticino were already feeding on vegetation that had not yet sprouted further north. She collected bugs and leaves, and she found three pairs of Drosophila, which she brought back to Zürich and bred in the kitchen of her apartment. “I sat in front of the microscope night after night trying to keep up with the rapid propagation,” she wrote. It was a full-time job, but she was “possessed by the need to see and discover,” and I don’t think she really thought about the difficulties. She prepared special food, cleaned out the jars, accustomed herself to the stench, and tended to the exploding population. The prize, her terrible reward, was quickly apparent. “I was horrified by what I saw,” she wrote.10 And again and again, in counterpoint to the refusals of the scientists, this horror is the root of compulsion.

  3.

  In outline, it’s quite simple. The international nuclear regulatory agencies—principally the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation—calculate the dangers of radioactivity to human health using a threshold. Although many scientists admit that the mechanisms of radiation damage to cells are poorly understood, that the composition of emissions from nuclear installations vary substantially, and that different bodies (not to mention different organs and different cells at different points in their development) respond to contamination in quite distinct ways, the threshold establishes a universal tolerance level below which emissions are considered safe. In the tense days following the disaster at Chernobyl, it was the logic of a fixed threshold that allowed government experts to reassure their nervous publics that the dangers were negligible.

  The ICRP derives its threshold from a linear curve extrapolated from rates of genetic (reproductive) irregularities, cancer, and leukemia among the survivors of large-scale nuclear events. Since those calculations began, the prim
e data set has been drawn from survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initial radiation dosage at those sites was extremely large and distributed in a short period. The resulting curve emphasizes the effects of exposure to artificial radioactivity at high values. Low-level radiation, such as that emitted over long time periods by normally operating nuclear power plants, appears relatively, if not entirely, insignificant, its effects falling within the range of the “natural” background radiation emitted from elements present in the earth’s crust. The assumption is that large doses produce large effects; small doses, small effects.

  A number of scientists unaffiliated with the nuclear industry and frequently in alliance with citizens’ groups from areas close to nuclear plants describe an alternative curve. Following work carried out in the 1970s by the Canadian physicist Abram Petkau, they argue that the effects of radiation are best captured not by the official linear curve, in which a double quantity produces a double effect, but by a “supralinear” curve, which registers far higher effects at low doses. In the supralinear curve, there is no safe minimum dose above zero.11

  These researchers often begin with epidemiology, carrying out their own population surveys downwind or downstream of nuclear installations, looking for statistically significant correlations between localized clusters of disease and sites of low-level radiation emissions. Working from the assumption of a causal relationship between emissions and sickness—an assumption reinforced not only by the epidemic proportions of some of these clusters but also by the secrecy of the industry—their focus is on the identification of the mechanisms by which low dosage disrupts biological function.