Memory, Metaphor, and Facts - Beginning a New Project
Process Journal (Audio)
The female wasp can lay eggs that will produce male wasps without the help of fertilization. It takes sperm to produce a female wasp.
It’s a fact that spins in my head. It’s something my mind refuses to consider and pushes at it with a force like magnetic repulsion.
As a metaphor, I hate it. This fact.
But maybe it’s necessary to define what it is to be a female—for the sake of metaphor. We’ll say what it is to be a woman. A woman, who’s learned how to name her challenges. Whether or not she’s learned to overcome them all—to tame, to ally, or to split them wide open.
This is how I’m re-entering the wasp poems: I have no choice but to see things as I am now. I can’t write from who I was a year ago. It seems like a lifetime ago.
Maybe it was.
One average, a queen wasp lives a year.
Bend your arms, reach your hands forward, palms open, facing each other. Begin pulsing them towards each other and you’ll feel a kind of cushion developing between them. Some people call it Qi, some people call it muscle memory.
Sometimes I close my eyes when I do this, and I wonder in the negative space I’ve made. I don’t care if it’s filled with the universe, or with my own imagination.
Sometimes I do name it: “This.”
“This” is all I need to ground myself.
I remember that it’s likely that wasps, like bees, are positively charged, and interact with the negatively charged flowers.
I feel the hum.
Facts are important. But it’s possible to hold two dissonant facts in one’s mind at the same time—when one of the facts is a metaphor.
We can’t escape them, really.
There’s a versatile word in Norwegian that doesn’t have a satisfying English counterpart. One of the uses for “seig” is to describe a tactile sensation. Maybe the closest one can come in English is “chewy”, or “rubbery”, though both of those adjectives (unless you are actually eating or dealing with rubber) are metaphors on their own.
I want a word that is immediately descriptive. “Bouncy” is close, but bouncy is bright. It’s plosive. Seig can be dark and mortal, like sinews.
Or it can be the tactile resistance between two positively charged magnets.
Like picking up a stitch, this is where I left off a year ago, and where I start again:
“This morning a different kind of message pops up. My brother, awake on the other end, still in yesterday. Our dead mother’s estate isn’t going to let us go without a final dig into our wounds. I watch the three dots blinking while he explains, and hits enter.
That sounds melodramatic, I know.
I was sketching wasps yesterday between classes. Thinking about how there are some species where all of the females lay eggs, but then they kill each other’s offspring until only the queen’s eggs are left. The remaining larvae are fed meat. Then they spin their cocoons and transform. Six legs, two antennae, five eyes.
Last night my head was filled with cracking and popping. The white noise of a fan. Most wasps don’t see well in the dark. And they can’t see the color red.
Some wasps navigate by moonlight.
When the queen wasp dies, the colony continues.
There are, however, species of wasps that are solitary. These females have an average lifespan of six weeks compared to the worker wasps’ three.
And this is my process journal. Processing.
But lately, the white noise here is deafening.”
References: (These notes were taken over a year ago. I have done my best to find the references.)
Larvae eating meat: https://natran.com/what-do-wasps-eat-and-how-to-avoid-attracting-wasps-into-your-home/#:~:text=While%20larvae%20can%20eat%20solid,wasps%20may%20swarm%20around%20it.
Unfertilized eggs become male: https://sj.jst.go.jp/stories/2021/s0810-02p.html
Bees carry a positive charge: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5599473/#:~:text=The%20bee%20carries%20a%20positive,negative%20charge%20through%20electrostatic%20induction.
Female social wasps laying unfertilized eggs eaten by worker wasps: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/worker-wasps-sneak-out-lay-their-eggs-neighboring-nests-180958300/
Wasps navigating by moonlight: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/211/11/1737/9499/Seeing-in-the-dark-vision-and-visual-behaviour-in
Wasps’ lifespans: https://beeswiki.com/how-long-do-wasps-live/#:~:text=The%20Worker%20Wasp's%20Lifespan&text=Their%20lifespan%20is%2012%20to,leads%20to%20their%20shortened%20lives.
Ren,
I love learning more about wasps from you and how you relate then to language and life.
Thank you, David. I appreciate your reading my process journal.