Insectopedia
Page 21
What, in such terms, can we make of the bees’ “spasmodic dance,” which is “more the expression of a dancing mood than an effective signal”? Or of the “trembling dance,” which according to von Frisch “tells the bees nothing” yet manifests in times of stress and appears to mark some kind of “neurosis”? Or of the “jerking dance” that he considers “an expression of joy and contentment”?70 Or, indeed, of the nest dances described by Lindauer, each of which intervenes in a larger social process of decision making?
But these are murky waters. Like von Frisch, I prefer to avoid this treacherous and much-debated question of language and cognition. The terms are too literal. The cards too stacked. The conflation of difference and deficiency too pervasive.
Like so many others, Lacan holds fast to the promise of that boundary between code and language, the promise of escape, a way to leave behind the animal to arrive as a thoroughly human subject. And in the inclusive corner, Griffin’s cognitive ethology, with its principled determination to restore dignity, agency, and consciousness to the animal through methodological and theoretical humility, arrives at a troubling humanism of its own, a “giving speech back,” conferring minority rights on the animal as on the thinking child, an uncanny recapitulation of the history through which colonial hierarchies were made.71
Such is von Frisch’s dilemma. He knows his bees do not speak as humans; he knows their “language” is less but also more than his own. And he knows his new discipline allows space only for the less. Where within the rationality of his science could he find a language to express the profound commonality of life and the irredeemable fact of shared mortality? Where could he find its double, a language to communicate a difference for which no words exist? And where could he find a language in which to understand the absence of language as something other than a lack?
(Pity the animal that lives only as a shadow of the human, the animal forced to react rather than respond, the animal whose task is to give flesh, spirit, and meaning to the human, the animal whose melancholy fate is to be humanity’s other.)
6.
“There is really no reason to suppose,” says W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, “that lesser beings are devoid of sentient life.”72 Remembering childhood nights, he wondered, Do moths dream? Do they know they are lost when, misled by the flame, they enter a house to die?
What was von Frisch’s question: Can the honeybee speak? No, that wasn’t it. First he thought, There is really no reason to suppose that honeybees are devoid of language. And then he asked, My little comrade, what does she say?
Pity the honeybees. Pity and protect them. In this, too, their indifference is of no avail. So trapped in language. The honeybees and us, held together, pushed apart. Even von Frisch, even Lindauer, who loved them so dearly, who found in them redemption from the brutish horrors of their times … Well, do you remember what they’d do to prove their little ones’ capacities?
But enough paradox. To give them language was simultaneously to celebrate their difference and to doom them to impossibility, to condemn them to the merely imitative, at which they could only fail, to (mis)take “linguistic self-referentiality [as] the paradigm for self-referentiality generally.”73 But of course the failure is human (a specific scientific human, perhaps, but human nonetheless), this failure of being able only to imagine sociality and communication through something language-like and to grant ourselves its apogee. What foolishness to judge insects—so ancient, so diverse, so accomplished, so successful, so beautiful, so astonishing, so mysterious, so unknown—by criteria they can never meet and about which they could not care! What silliness to disregard their accomplishments and focus instead on their supposed deficiencies! What pitiful poverty of imagination to see them as resources merely for our self-knowledge! What sad, sad, sad sadness when language fails us.
My Nightmares
The thing most feared in secret always happens.
CESARE PAVESE, August 18, 1950
For a long time I thought only of bees. They crowded out all the others, and this book became just for them. A book of bees in all their bee-ness. All the physical capacities, all the behavioral subtleties, all the organizational mysteries, all the comradeship. All that golden beeswax lighting up the ancient world. All that honey sweetening medieval Europe. All those bees, timeless templates for the most diverse human projects and ideologies. Bees took over.
But then a plague of winged ants invaded my living room, and after they left I began thinking of locusts and then beetles—all those beetles!—and then caddis flies and crane flies and vinegar flies and botflies and dragonflies and mayflies and houseflies and so many other flies. Then one thing led to another, and I came across field crickets and mole crickets and Jerusalem crickets, and then Jessy sent me a weta from New Zealand. And then the seventeen-year cicadas emerged in Ohio, and I discovered the thrips and the katydids, remembered the aphids on California roses and the summer wasps drowning in water-filled jam jars, and then termites and hornets and earwigs and scorpions and ladybugs and praying mantises sold dry in packets in garden-supply stores. And then there were the mosquitoes with long legs and the mosquitoes with short legs and far too many butterflies and moths of all kinds. And I remembered what we all already know: that insects are without number and without end, that in comparison we are no more than dust, and that this is not the worst of it.
There is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude. There is the nightmare of uncontrolled bodies and the nightmare of inside our bodies and all over our bodies. There is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of vulnerable places. There is the nightmare of foreign bodies in our bloodstream and the nightmare of foreign bodies in our ears and our eyes and under the surface of our skin.
There is the nightmare of swarming and the nightmare of crawling. There is the nightmare of burrowing and the nightmare of being seen in the dark. There is the nightmare of turning the overhead light on just as the carpet scatters. There is the nightmare of beings without reason and the nightmare of being unable to communicate. There is the nightmare of their being out to get us.
There is the nightmare of knowing and the nightmare of nonrecognition. There is the nightmare of not seeing the face. There is the nightmare of not having a face. There is the nightmare of too many limbs. There is the nightmare of all this plus invisibility.
There is the nightmare of being submerged and the nightmare of being overrun. There is the nightmare of being invaded and the nightmare of being alone. There is the nightmare of numbers, big and small. There is the nightmare of metamorphosis and the nightmare of persistence. There is the nightmare of wetness and the nightmare of dryness. There is the nightmare of poison and the nightmare of paralysis. There is the nightmare of putting the shoe on and of taking the shoe off. There is the slithering nightmare and the one that walks backward. There is the squirming nightmare and the squishing nightmare. There is the nightmare of the unwelcome surprise.
There is the nightmare of the gigantic and the nightmare of becoming. There is the nightmare of being trapped in the body of another with no way out and no way back. There is the nightmare of abandonment and the nightmare of social death. There is the nightmare of rejection. There is the nightmare of the grotesque.
There is the nightmare of awkward flight and the nightmare of clattering wings. There is the nightmare of entangled hair and the nightmare of the open mouth. There is the nightmare of long, probing antennae emerging from the overflow hole in the bathroom sink or, worse, the rim of the toilet. There is the nightmare of huge blank eyes. There is the nightmare of randomness and the unguarded moment. There is the nightmare of sitting down, the nightmare of rolling over, the nightmare of standing up.
There is the nightmare of the military that funds nearly all basic research in insect science, the nightmare of probes into brains and razors into eyes, the nightmare that should any of this reveal the secrets of locusts swarming, of bees navigating, or of ants foraging, the secrets
will beget other secrets, the nightmares other nightmares, the pupae other pupae, insects born of microimplants; part-machine, part-insect insects; remote-controlled weaponized surveillance insects; moths on a mission; beetles undercover; not to mention robotic insects, mass-produced, mass-deployed, mass-suicide nightmare insects.
These are the nightmares that dream of coming wars, of insect wars without vulnerable central commands, forming and dispersing, congealing and dissolving, decentered, networked; of netwar, of network-centric warfare, of no-casualty wars (at least on our team), dreams of Osama bin Laden somewhere in a cave. These are the nightmares of invisible terrorists, swarming without number, invading intimate places and unguarded moments. The nightmares of our age, nightmares of emergence, of a hive of evil, a brood of bad people, a superorganism beyond individuals, “swarming on their own initiative—homing in from scattered locations on various targets and then dispersing, only to form new swarms.”1 The nightmare of language. The language of bees. Nightmare begets nightmare. Swarm begets swarm. Dreams beget dreams. Terror begets terror.
Where are the bees now? Collapsing in their colonies, gliding through their plastic mazes, sniffing out explosives, sucking up that sugar water, getting fat and weak on corn syrup, locked in little boxes at airports, sticking out their tongues on cue. Who knew the tiny critters were so smart, said the journalist. Fuzzy little sniffers. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Keeping us safe. Helping us sleep easy at night.
Nepal
And then, on waking one morning, as if in a dream, I left London with my friend Greg, headed for north India and Nepal. We planned to travel together for several months, but Greg returned after just a few weeks and I went on to Nepal with another friend, Dan, who, like me, had earned his ticket money as a porter in the local hospital. In all, I was away for six months but am surprised to realize now that I have no photographs from that trip and not many memories. Perhaps this is what happens when you travel without purpose, or at least when the only purpose is a hazy sense of adventure derived from a hazy sense of privilege. I do remember that Dan liked his drugs and that once he arrived, the two of us smoked more or less continually from the time we woke up until bedtime. We lived in a state of sensuous, if not analytic, clarity.
In those days, the town of Pokhara was little more than a main street, at one end of which the breathtaking mass of Annapurna rose vertiginously above all else. When the clouds cleared, it felt as if the mountain would topple over and bury everything. We stayed there in a sort of workers’ dormitory for one or two nights and then decided to go to the hills. Somehow, I’m not sure how, we made a Nepalese friend of about our age who agreed to accompany us, and we set off walking. I have no photographs, letters, or journals of any of this, but if I fix on an object and move from there to another and then to the next, I create memories. A plunging waterfall in the side of a cliff and our bodies afterward covered in black leeches that we burned off with cigarettes. A woman killing a chicken for our dinner and our embarrassment because it was too big a thing and she wouldn’t take payment. A wooden house on a hillside where, after dinner, a young boy tried to sell me his sister for the night. Fried bread and salted buttered tea. Broad stony valleys. Strings of flapping Tibetan prayer flags. When I first saw the breathtaking opening scene of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, I remembered the mule trains we passed picking their way along the sides of the mountains. When I heard on the BBC that the Maoists had finally entered Kathmandu and national government, I remembered the women who pleaded with us for money for their sick babies, who explained that the health post was closed, who showed us their children, listless, pot-bellied, and covered in sores, who made us feel helpless, stupid, ignorant, and out of place, as we were, who made me swear to myself I would never do this again.
Tonight, thirty years later, sitting near the back of the M5 bus on Seventy-second Street in Manhattan as the driver turned onto Riverside Drive and we sped along the darkened road with its grand doorman buildings on our right and the shadows of the park on our left, with the river and the highway below and out of view, I suddenly remembered, I can’t say why, the completely different feeling of rounding a curve on the brightest of mornings, high in the mountains, the three of us striding carelessly along the gravelly path, the valley stretched below us, the peaks rising around us, the snows of the Himalaya so crisply unreal above us, and a group of children tumbling, laughing, along the road toward us, on their way to collect wood, we guessed, and a girl, maybe ten years old, I remember, the biggest of the little group, stopping in front of us, her arm outstretched, holding out her closed fist, palm-side down, telling me to hold out my palm under hers and all the while giggling so hard that we were giggling too without really knowing why, until she opened her hand and dropped into mine a ball, a closed-up living ball, something multicolored and alive that sat there still as stone, hiding in that sharp, sharp light, its segmented shell like a rolled-up sea creature or a special jewel, something very rare, and after I’d looked at it a few moments without comprehending what it was or why it was there in my hand, she plucked it back, still curled tight, and giggling still, swung her arm in the widest arc, and before I could get the words out, she had flung it high and far, causing it to spiral off the side of the mountain into the thin air and down, dizzyingly down into the gray-brown valley below, and had run off laughing, twirling around but staying upright, little friends, carrying their bundles, laughing and not looking back.
On January 8, 2008, Abdou Mahamane Was Driving through Niamey …
1.
On January 8, 2008, Abdou Mahamane, the managing director of Radio et Musique, Niger’s first independent radio station, was driving home through Niamey, the country’s capital. Around 10:30 p.m., as he entered Yantala, a suburb on the western outskirts of the city, his Toyota hit a land mine hidden in the unpaved road. The radio announcement was blunt: “Our colleague was torn to pieces.” A woman passenger survived, but with serious injuries.
Karim and I had just got off the bus in Maradi, 415 miles to the east, and were watching the news report along with three or four other guests in the dimly lit hotel bar. “That’s the road I take home every night,” Karim said, shaken. On the large flat-screen TV, a silent crowd stared down at a floodlit crater and the mangled carcass of the journalist’s car. In the studio, seated in front of what looked like someone’s cell-phone photo of the blazing vehicle, a government spokesman was denouncing the Mouvement des Nigériens pour la justice (MNJ) and calling on loyal citizens to root out the evil in their midst. For its part, the MNJ, the Tuareg movement that has been in armed rebellion in the north of Niger since February 2007, accused President Mamadou Tandja’s regime of setting the mines itself to feed the spiraling insecurity and violence and of further entrenching this latest phase of a decades-long conflict by refusing to negotiate.
In the hotel bar, it was doubt, counterdoubt, and pensive silence. This was the first attack in the capital, but just the previous month two people had been killed by anti-tank mines here in Maradi, and four others had been wounded in the town of Tahoua. The month before that, a bus loaded with passengers had been hit outside Agadez, the major city of the north. There was no uncertainty about government hostility to independent journalists—two Nigerien and two French reporters were being held incommunicado for nosing around in the militarized rebellion zone. But who could say whether Abdou Mahamane had been targeted or was simply a chance victim? And in either case, who could be certain of the killers’ loyalties? People are “walking around on tip-toe,” reported the radio, everyone is “afraid of being blown apart.”
Still, as Nigeriens well know, there are many ways of being blown apart and many sources of insecurity and dread. These mines and this fear were just two of the routes by which the unrest was coming home. The first time we met, Karim had given me a concise introduction to Nigerien politics. Welcome to Niger, he said, a large country with a small population, a poor country rich in resources, a weak country with powerful neighbors.
In a book-filled office on the ground floor of the two-story red-brick Faculty of Science building we met Mahamane Saadou, professor of plant biology. Karim had patiently explained to me how the political instability in the north generated random violence and psychic perturbation, how it held back the national economy by preventing the exploitation of subsurface wealth (uranium and oil), and how it increased the opportunities for geopolitical mischief by France, the colonial power, as well as by Libya and other neighbors. Professor Saadou listened as I described my ideas for this book and Karim explained that we were spending two weeks together talking to people in Niamey, Maradi, and the surrounding countryside about locusts—what these insects do, what is done to them, what they mean, and what they have created here in Niger. When we finished, Professor Saadou told us that one thing created by both land mines and locusts was terror and that they did it not only separately but together.