Resting in the Storm

Process Journal #4 (Audio)

A wasp’s heart runs the length of her body.

Make of that what you will.

She has no lungs: she breathes through her bones. It’s the atmospheric pressure that makes this possible. There’s an exchange of gasses from the small, fluttering openings called spiracles. The muscles that move her legs and her wings vibrate her thorax. Her abdomen pumps to keep her alive. It’s this reliance on atmospheric pressure that keeps her body relatively small.

This pressure, that surrounds her, determines everything in her life. It’s this fact that forces her to keep moving, or die.

Make of that what you will. I think most of us have been there. Here.

Solitary wasps are at the mercy of a perfect storm to find a mate—and to mate. The stronger the wind, the farther a female’s pheromones will be carried to a male. But the stronger the wind, the less likely a male can fly to find her.

Though now, she’s resting anyway. As a low-pressure system moves in, her breathing slows. There’s no fluttering of the spiracles, no pumping of her abdomen. Carbon dioxide builds and seeps. A slow kind of escape. Like a sigh.

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.

THEODORE ROETHKE

There are orchids that rely on a specific species of wasps for pollination. They release a scent that mimics a female wasp, and the males carry out their insemination ritual—drumming, stroking, grabbing—also grabbing a tiny bit of pollen that he takes into his crop, before heading off to the next imposter. The next extra-curricular seduction.

Pity the wasp her overlooked value. She rubs her legs in stridulations, scraper and file, a tiny violin.

Drink your wine, and toast her.

Zoomorphism. I keep seeing this casually defined as giving humans animal traits. But what are we if not animals? Wikipedia gets it right:

The word zoomorphism derives from Ancient Greek: ζωον, romanized: zōon, lit. 'animal' and Ancient Greek: μορφη, romanized: morphē, lit. 'form; shape'. In the context of art, zoomorphism could describe art that imagines humans as non-human animals.^[1]

I’m always surprised by the lengths we will go to deny other animals their emotional lives. Early on we teach our children which creatures deserve our empathy. I remember a single incident of pouring salt on a slug. I think there was an incident. I remember talking about it with playmates. Anticipating the “science experiment”. This is my public confession. I don’t remember anything more than this, about this. I remain in terror of the potential that was there. At some moment at five? At six? Do we carry those kinds of potentials throughout a lifetime?

I know our stinginess with empathy is apparent in our relationships with other humans. We carefully define “those people”, who mill about like ants taking advantage of our carefully orchestrated picnic. We congratulate ourselves on our generosity of spirit: “We really should let him come to your birthday party, Sweetie.”

Wasps don’t get to have birthday parties. They have that little mercy. Children learn early the power they have over smaller creatures. A phase? A fixation? A terrifying glee that science can’t figure out where to wave a finger at. Tsk. Tsk. Sometimes I believe all of nature is a game of tennis, swatting between extremes.

“It’s okay. I promise. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The Strepsiptera wasp gets its name from its twisted wings. The females have no legs. They have no eyes. They have no wings, twisted or otherwise.

Who counts when things are named? And who is clustered in their shadow? Eighty percent of the people of Ancient Greece’s democracy were enslaved. I didn’t learn that in school.

Maybe the female strepsiptera has no grounds on which to complain. It is what it is.

Scientists won’t agree if their species reproduces by way of “traumatic insemination”. But there is a youtube video of this species, which plays at a reduced speed, and it shows the puncturing of the female’s abdomen.

This isn’t unique to strepsiptera, or even to insects. There are many versions of this kind of violent insemination, from ducks to dolphins. Water striders coerce their “mates” by attracting predators until the female acquiesces.

I’m just going to leave these facts here until I know how to handle them.

Scientists do, however, agree that the female strepsiptera spend their entire lifespan housed within a host body. They are either inseminated through the host’s exoskeleton, or through a piercing of their own chitlin.

Or not—the “traumatic insemination” still being questioned by some scientists.

And this is true (or not true) in all but 1 of 600 subspecies. There are no absolutes, even in uncertainty. Sometimes I wonder what our “knowing” really means.

I do know that there is no such thing as unnatural. Twisted. Terrifying. Yes. Maybe even evil.

I can’t decide if that’s disconcerting, or comforting. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no apologist. But we cannot change what we deny exists. We humans are a single species.

During the Jurassic era, ants, bees, and wasps were one. And, of course, this was before creatures were sorted by humans according to their appeal to humans. Before humans got a taste for honey. Before humans resented the yellow jackets for colonising their colonised spaces. A tree is a tree is a tree, in pieces, a tree in crossing beams under a thatched roof. Under ceramic tiles. Who is the invasive pest?

Beneath the drywall, yellow jackets purr. Like kittens.

I have at least 50 pages of notes now. Maybe as many sources. The hardest thing is to stop the research and move toward poetry. I have no intention of writing a nonfiction book on wasps. There are 30.000 species and it is sometimes difficult for me to see what they have in common, and easier to see what we have in common with particular aspects of their behavior.

It disturbs me that reading about another animal’s behaviors can bring up memories specific to human experience. To a specific human’s experience.

Being disturbed can be a good thing. It makes one step back and put things in a context bigger than oneself.

Metaphors appear like gifts from my inner genius (which, believe me, is no genius). That voice, that the Ancient Greek’s described, puts ideas into my head. Ideas that help me sort the past and the present. That gives me handles on experiences for which I had no words to pass on to my future self. For which words are too dangerous a medium when ordered in declarative sentences, always too narrow a path of communication, always turned-over and overturned on a technicality.

Our memory is a sieve. It has to be. Many years ago, I heard a sound that got me out of bed to look out the window. I remember that sound, though I have no way to replicate it. A man was beaten to death outside my apartment. My husband did CPR until the paramedics arrived with the defibrillator to restart his heart. We saw the men who did the beating, but at the trial a year later, my husband and I remembered differently. I saw a neon orange shirt. My husband, neon green.

It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Maybe we draw conclusions and then go back and fill in the details that are all true from our experience, but swarming like dislocated bees.

There is a species of wasp whose males seek out ants and bees in which to pupate. Females seek out grasshoppers. Maybe. It’s also possible that sex is determined by the host the larvae find themselves within.

Scientists don’t agree.

Nurture or Nature? Nature is Nurture. Maybe our experiences are as arbitrarily defined as are genus and species. We have to be committed, iconoclastic researchers of our own memories.

Exploring form

Social wasps’ nests are formed of hundreds of egg cells, each in the shape of a hexagon. Hexagons provide the most efficient use of space.

Six-sided containers.

When I first began this project, I envisioned it as an installation with an accompanying book. But that was before I lost my studio space, and before I found a need to slow down.

It’s always been about the words for me. So I believe this is for the best: focusing on the words. Never declarative, really. Always questioning, and always leaping before coming anywhere near an actual conclusion.

But no longer working with bell jars, exquisite corpses, and handmade paper, means a completely new approach to form.

The obvious choice is dactylic hexameter, also called epic meter. I imagine the ancient Greeks waltzing in their cloaks, with their staves. This, even though Aristophanes didn’t write his satire The Wasps in epic meter.

I seriously doubt he knew only female wasps could sting. It would give the play an entirely new level of satire really. More feminist than anything Euripides would have dreamt of.

That’s probably not helpfully discursive. But you never know.

I’m off to look at constraint poems, and maybe take a deep dive into expert use of meter. Maybe even have a look at The Wasps. Medea, even? It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole.

When I was small enough to still be in a stroller, my mother took me to the San Diego Zoo, and she held me up so I could peer into a hole where prairie dogs where popping in and out. A gila monster came out of the hole. I remember this. Clearly.

But I also know it can’t be true. And that I must have seen another kind of monster somewhere.

Back to work—

I’m very open to reading suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to shout out.

A word about paid subscriptions. This week, I mentioned to another poet on substack that I’m on a purchasing freeze until I’m out of debt (incurred due to complementary treatments during chemo that weren’t covered by universal health insurance). I’m not claiming poverty, but I do stick to a monthly allowance that covers coffee with friends.

This poet I exchanged emails with was incredibly kind, and offered to comp me a while, so I could take part in the benefits they offer paid subscribers.

But I wondered if it might be a better idea to pledge here that every subscription I get I will use to invest in another literary substack I choose. Up to 100 subscriptions, or until I am out of debt. (I’m hoping neither of those goals are a pipe dream.)

You would essentially be giving three gifts in one. I get confirmation that my writing is valued. I get access to read great, inspiring work. And another writer gets money to support their work.

I hope you’ll think about it.

Spread the love. ❤️

Resources:

https://carlos.emory.edu/exhibition/confronting-slavery-classical-world#:~:text=Neither%20Athens%20nor%20Rome%20enslaved,enslaved%20parents%20were%20also%20enslaved.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/strepsiptera

https://www.wired.com/2015/01/absurd-creature-of-the-week-strepsiptera/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7695422_The_role_of_moisture_in_the_nest_thermoregulation_of_social_wasps

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226932024_Effects_of_Wind_Speed_and_Atmospheric_Pressure_on_Mate_Searching_Behavior_in_the_Aphid_Parasitoid_Aphidius_nigripes_Hymenoptera_Aphidiidae

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination#:~:text=Traumatic%20insemination%2C%20also%20known%20as,her%20abdominal%20cavity%20(hemocoel).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616262/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25005431

https://pestpointers.com/sounds-and-noises-that-wasps-make-how-to-identify-them/

https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/8-aristophanes-wasps-1222-49/