A Self-Assigned Waggle Dance

One Way to Tackle the Blank Page

This feels new. Not new and exciting, but new and thoroughly calm. Like when I brought my first child home from the hospital and, leaving the house for the first time a week later, I wondered if people could see what I’d done. How changed I was.

I’m changed.

Yet still so tender that I can’t bring myself to go back and pick up where I left off last year. Being forced to stop and watch the world go by during illness, also gave me perspective. I’m in a position now to choose what I pick up again. What I leave behind.

It’s a weird privilege I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

So here I sit with a new blank page.
Wool socks and a cup of tea.

I heard on the Global News podcast the other day that Finland was listed as the happiest country in the world–for the seventh year in a row. They interviewed a random Finn to ask them why and they said, wool socks and a hot tea. I get it. It’s part of what keeps me afloat in Norway during the dark winters. Textures.

[…] Oats rise and belch as they cook,
and the whole world goes soft
obligating you to stand here, waiting
in your wool socks,
your flannel robe.

from “Early Spring”, Mixed States (2004)

It’s spring. The lapwings have returned, and the bees are awake in the hives that the city’s community service group set out near “our” orchard last year. I find it odd that they’re up and about before the apple trees have buds. I think about the bees’ short lives; and I wonder how long this stretch of time feels for them, how slowly the hours pass until the blossoms open and they can spend some of their warm afternoons lazing between petals, covered in pollen, sweetness in their crops¹.

I actually know very little about bees. (Wasps, are far more interesting I think.²) But here I am beginning a new project: writing about bees, within the context of intelligence.

People who study these things have made nine little boxes for “types” of intelligence. I normally shrug when people categorize things that aren’t empirical, but it intrigues me that they’ve allowed for bodily kinetic intelligence, and naturalist intelligence among the more familiar categories of linguistic-, mathematic-, etc.

Bees dance their knowledge in order to pass it on. It’s called a waggle dance.

I would score very low on these kinds of intelligence, were there a test. And to play that party game, “Who would you want to be stuck on a deserted island with?”: I’d definitely want someone who knew how to move their body in a way that would allow them to climb a tree without falling, and someone who was sensitive enough to know when a seedling needed shade.

But if we truly believe in these nine types of intelligence, we need to dump our judgements about how intelligent other animals are.

Maybe we are coming full circle—returning to a time when humans didn’t find it necessary to deny their own animal nature?

Poets, though. I don’t think poets ever denied it.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Mary Oliver, from “Wild Geese”

I think poets know there are more than nine kinds of intelligence. What about the intelligence of knowing how to gather the textures necessary to make a house feel like a home? Or knowing how to make a moment lying on the sharp blades of grass so transcendent that the sense of peace gets you through the week?

There is a project called Dance your PhD., (founded by John Bohannon) where academics pair with dancers to illustrate their research. But it doesn’t have to be that one form of intelligence in service to another, does it? Hierarchies are constructed, either intentionally or according to perspective³.

I’m going for a run now. Out to the bees, actually. I’ll get as close as I dare, and ask one of them to be my muse and guide my hand in a waggle dance over my blank page, little yellow footprints for my subconscious to decipher.

1. To those of you who know Norwegian - this is not me suddenly code switching for the word body. The part of the bee that stores nectar is called a crop.

2. I will pick up my wasp project eventually.

3. I was going to bring up Jean Genet again, but think I’ve covered that before.