Violation

by Sallie Tisdale

  What great variety they have! When Augustine argued that the fly is also made by God, he spoke of “such towering magnitude in this tininess.” The family Nycteribiidae, the bat ticks, are true flies but look like spiders without heads. They live only in the fur of bats, sucking bat blood, hanging on with claws. Exposed, the stunted bugs run rapidly across the bat’s fur before disappearing underneath. But the family Tipulidae, the crane flies, fill your palm. They look like giant tapered mosquitoes, with very long, slender, spiderlike legs, three eyes, and big veiny wings that may span three inches. They do not bite. These are the ballerinas of the flies, delicate and graceful. Male crane flies form mating swarms that dance above treetops at sundown, or flow over pastures in a cloud, pushed by the breeze.

  So one fly seeks light and heat; another avoids both. One is a vegetarian—another a terror. They flit like tiny shadows in the night skies, crawl across the windowpane and out of the drain and into the garbage and into our eyes. Sometimes flies migrate out to sea far from anything human, flitting across the white-capped waves of the ever-moving sea for miles, for days. The fly is grotesque and frail and lovely and vigorous, quivering, shivering, lapping, flitting, jerking, sucking, panting: theirs is an exotic genius, a design of brilliant simplicity and bewildering complexity at once.

  I study flies; I am stunned by them. I love them, with a fleeting love—with the triad: love, logic, sensitivity. Did you notice how calmly I noted that there is a fly that lives inside spiders? Another that is parasitic on grasshoppers? This is a humming, buzzing world; we live in the midst of the ceaseless murmur of lives, a world of strange things whispering the poems of old Buddhas. The world’s constant rustling is like the rubbing of velvet between distracted fingers; it can drive one mad. Beside the cherry tree, under that bright sky, lives the sheep bot fly. It enters a sheep’s nostrils, where it gives birth to live young. The maggots crawl up the nasal passages into the sinuses, where they feed until they are grown—a process that lasts nearly a year. The sheep’s nose runs with pus; it shakes its head at this odd itch, shakes and rubs its nose into the ground, grits its teeth, jumps about, growing ever weaker. The condition is sometimes called the blind staggers. One day the sheep gives a great sneeze, and out shoot mature sheep bot flies. They are ready to mate and make more babies.

  It is right here with flies that I face a direct and potent challenge: What do I really believe? What do I believe about beauty and the ultimate goodness of this world?

  Jean-Henri Fabre lays out his corpses by the open window. A few days later, he writes, “Let us overcome our repugnance and give a glance inside.” Then he lifts the bodies, counting the flies that have come, the eggs they lay, the larvae that form “a surging mass of swarming sterns and pointed heads, which emerge, wriggle, and dive in again. It suggests a seething billow.” He adds, as an aside, “It turns one’s stomach.” He examines and measures and counts, and then gently places a few hundred eggs in a test tube with a piece of meat squeezed dry. A few days later, he pours off the liquescent remnants of the once-hard flesh, which “flows in every direction like an icicle placed before the fire.” He measures it, and keeps careful notes.

  “It is horrible,” he adds, “most horrible.”

  I have been a Buddhist for more than twenty-five years, since I was a young woman. My avid urge to understand bodies didn’t stop at the bodies themselves; I sought for a way to think about the fact of life, the deepest query. Buddhism in its heart is an answer to our questions about suffering and loss, a response to the inexplicable; it is a way to live with life. Its explanations, its particular vocabulary and shorthand, its gentle pressures—they have been with me throughout my adult life; they are part of my language, my thought, my view. Buddhism saved my life and controlled it; it has been liberation and censure at once.

  Buddhism is blunt about suffering, its causes and its cures. The Buddha taught that nothing is permanent. He taught this in a great many ways, but most of what he said comes down to this: things change. Change hurts; change cannot be avoided. “All compounded things are subject to dissolution”—this formula is basic Buddhist doctrine, it is pounded into us by the canon, by the masters, by our daily lives. It means all things are compounded and will dissolve, which means I am compounded and I will dissolve. This is not something I readily accept, and yet I am continually bombarded with the evidence. I longed to know this, this fact of life, this answer—that we are put together from other things and will be taken apart and those other things and those things we become will in turn be taken apart and built anew—that there is nothing known that escapes this fate. When one of his disciples struggled with lust or felt pride in his youth or strength, the Buddha recommended that the follower go to the charnel ground and meditate on a corpse—on its blossoming into something new.

  We feel pain because things change. We feel joy for the same reason. But suffering is not simply pain: it is our peculiar punishment that we know things change and we want this to be otherwise. We want to hang on to what is going away, keep our conditions as they are, people as they are, ourselves as we are. In Buddhist terms this is variously called thirst or desire or attachment or clinging. It means that we hold on to the hope that something will remain, even as it all slides away like sand in running water, like water from our hands. Knowing the answer does not stop the question from being asked.

  Desire is not always about holding something close; it has a shadow, the urge to push things away. Buddhists usually call this aversion—the desire for the extinction of something, for separation from it. The original Pali word for aversion, dosa, is various and shaded, translated sometimes as anger or hatred, sometimes as denial, as projection, aggression, repulsion, and now and then as disgust or revulsion or distortion. Aversion has as much force and fascination as the positive desires we know. It may be simply a reflexive flinch, a ducking for cover; it may be much stronger. Like desire, aversion is a many-colored thing, flavored by circumstances. It is a kind of clinging—clinging to the hope of something other than this.

  When I began to study flies, I couldn’t seem to stop. Fabre wrote, “To know their habits long haunted my mind.” I think of the violence with which we describe such prurient obsessions—we say we cannot tear our eyes away. My eyes are glued to flies and it is as though they are stitched open against my will. I feel revulsion, I flinch, I turn away, I duck for cover. I get squeamish, which is a rare feeling for me. But I also feel curiosity and admiration and a kind of awe. The buzz of a fly’s blurred wings is one of the myriad ways the world speaks to us; it is one of the ways speech is freed from our ideas. I feel that if I could listen, if I could just listen without reacting, without judgment or preference or opinion—without reaching for a dream of how things might be otherwise—there is something I would understand that I have yet to know.

  Compassion in all its flavors is woven through the enormous canon of Buddhist thought. Its root meaning is to suffer with. We are able to feel compassion toward those beings who look like us and those who are most familiar. (These are not the same thing; dissimilar creatures can be deeply familiar, as we know from our time spent with dogs, with horses—even with lizards.) At what point do we extend this circle past what is known, past what looks like us? At what point do we suffer with what is completely strange? And how far must that circle extend before it includes the sheep bot fly?

  This mix of push and pull I feel when I look at insects is akin to the way the tongue longs for an acquired taste. The first time one tastes certain complex flavors they are unpleasant, even offensive. But in time it is that very flavor, its complexity—the bitterness or acidity mingling with other layers—that brings you back. Whether it is wine or chili powder or natto—a Japanese delicacy of soybeans bound into a sticky, cobwebbed mold—one returns in part because of the difficulty. We are sharply, pleasantly excited by the nearness of rejection, by skirting along the edge of things, the dank and sour things that instinct reads as dangerous. These shadings of flavor ever so brie
fly evoke poison and rot—the urine scent of beer, the lingering oily bitterness of coffee, the rank tang of certain cheeses (and I will return to cheese; it factors here). There is a brief shrinking away, perhaps very brief, minuscule, but there nonetheless.

  This is a little bit of what I feel toward flies. Let us give a glance inside—a glance, a gasp, a shiver, the briefest reactivity: and then another look, a bit sideways though it may be, and then another. Then there follows the need to look: interest turning into inquiry into passion; the desire to know, to see, and something more, something crucial—the need to bear it, to be able to bear it, to be able to look as closely and thoroughly as I can.

  FLIES HAVE LONG been considered the shells and familiars of gods, witches, and demons. They are associated with reincarnation, immortality, and sorcery. They are so unutterably strange, all swarming and speed and single-mindedness, and they cannot be avoided. I really mean that; we eat flies every day.2 The FDA permits thirty-five fruit fly eggs in every eight ounces of golden raisins, up to twenty maggots “of any size” in a hundred grams of canned mushrooms, and a fair number of both eggs and maggots in tomato products. Last night’s mushroom pizza? A womb of flies.

  Consider the cheese skipper, a kind of black fly found all over the world. They are so called in part because they skip, or leap, when disturbed; they curl up, grabbing the tail with the hooked mouth, tense, and then let go—springing like a coil, fast and hard. Cheese skippers are attracted to meat, cheese, and corpses, which develop a cheesy smell at a certain stage when butyric acid is present. Their family name, Piophilia, means milk-loving. The larvae can be eaten accidentally, and may survive ingestion and burrow into the gut. One imagines the little thing shrugging its nonexistent shoulders and changing course. When the larvae infest a hard cheese like pecorino, they decompose the fats until the cheese turns creamy and pink, at which point the Italians call it casu marzu, “rotten cheese.” Gourmets like it, and will blend casu marzu into a paste to spread on bread. Most people try to remove the maggots first. Selling this cheese is illegal in Italy because even shredded maggot parts are dangerous—all those hooks. But not everyone does this. Some consider the maggots part of the delicacy—an aphrodisiac, or a peculiarly nutritious food.

  Flies sense the world in every way, its faintest textures: minuscule currents of shifting air, the vibration of a bird’s approaching wings, the scent of decaying flowers or a mouse’s corpse a half mile away. Some flies have a complex and unique ear, a flexible tympanal membrane in a structure behind the neck. A few parasitic flies listen for the distinct sound of their selected prey; one imagines a head carefully cocked.

  They taste and smell in ways far more subtle than ours. There is no profound difference between the two senses anyway; both are a way of identifying chemicals, defining them, discriminating. They sense the sex pheromones released so hopefully by their prey, and follow; they smell the prey’s feces, its breath, or the small damage done by other hunting insects. Biting flies are sensitive to stress chemicals, including the higher levels of carbon dioxide emitted when mammals exert themselves. The black flies respond directly to the scent of human sweat. Many flies have taste and smell receptors on their complex mouthparts, their antennae, their delicate legs, and their fine-clawed feet. Walking, they sample the coming meal; instantly, the proboscis unwinds. Flies are sensitive to minute differences in the world’s chemistry, and its surprising similarities: One of the parasitic Lucilia flies is attracted, according to one text, to “wild parsnips and fresh meat.” One molecule attracts the male to the female; another causes the male’s ritual courtship flight; a third causes the female to relax and hold still. Their world is a superdimensional pheromonal architecture, a mingled and vaporous mist multiplied by sight and sound and space.

  Consider the compound eye, common to all insects, variously evolved in flies. A fly’s eyes may be huge: the eyes of horse flies are bulging black caps filling the face. Other flies may have tiny eyes, and some flies have no eyes at all. (The pyrgotid flies have strangely shaped heads that protrude in front of their eyes, an evolutionary development hard to comprehend.) The eye may be flat or bulging, round or triangular in shape, shining like jewels. A deer fly’s eyes are brightly colored, green or gold with patterns and zigzags. Tachinid flies have reddish eyes; dance flies have orange ones. Each facet of a compound eye is held at a unique angle, independent of all the others. They are capable of differentiating between the wavelengths of light and can distinguish the angle at which sunlight falls, allowing them to navigate off the surface of water. A fly has a thousand eyes, four thousand eyes, side by side without gap. The fly cannot focus on a single form, but sees each form from many angles at once. Each single thing is multiplied, the object broken like a mirror into shocks of light, and remade like water into a single lake, a prism, a drop of dew.

  Flies eat blood and meat and feces and other insects and each other, but also pollen, nectar, algae, decaying seaweed, and fungi. Bulb fly maggots are tiny dilettantes, seeking only the inner tissue of hyacinth, tulip, narcissus, and lily bulbs. Fruit fly maggots are picky: one species eats walnut husks, another eats cherries. Pomace flies live on rotting fruit, but they don’t eat the fruit; they eat the yeast that grows on rotting fruit. (This is a brief world indeed; a new generation is born every ten days or so.)

  Flies bite, suck, slice, lap. Bee lice live in the mouths of bees, eating nectar. Stiletto fly larvae sometimes live in wool blankets and decaying wood. Among the black flies, which plague cattle, each species specializes in a cow part—one sucks blood from cows’ bellies, one from cows’ ears, and so on. The flat-footed flies, which run in a zigzag pattern across plants, include a variety called smoke flies; they are attracted to fires and eat the burned wood afterward. Eye gnats are drawn to tears, sweat flies to sweat, face flies to eyes and noses.

  Flies hurt us, but only in passing; sleeping sickness, malaria, yellow fever, river blindness: mere accidents. The sheep bot fly can live in many places, including human eyes if eyes are more convenient than the sheep—but it prefers the sheep. We are simply more food, more warm and meaty beings among endless beings. But what food!—palaces of muscle and blood, rich and fertile fields.

  I read otherwise sober and mechanical descriptions of flies and trip over the anthropomorphic complaint. Both Pliny and Plutarch complained that flies were impossible to train and domesticate. Among modern thinkers, one fly is “good” and the other is “bad,” one is a “pest” and another a “bane” and another a “benefit.” The tachinid flies are parasitic on destructive caterpillars, and snipe flies eat aphids, so they are described with kind words. Their predation does us good, but all predation does something good and not just the predator. Predation makes way. It makes room.

  Even entomologists hate flies, on principle. Edwin Way Teale, who wrote of the natural world his entire life with reverence and cheer, hated the housefly. He obsessed over the number and variety of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites they carried from place to place, and finally seems to have simply flung his hands into the air and given up, declaring the housefly “an insect villain with hardly a drop of redeeming virtue.” Leland Howard, a USDA entomologist, wrote an encyclopedic account of insects in 1904 that is still quoted today. He called the harmless saltwater flies “sordid little flies,” and the wingless bird tick “apparently too lazy to fly.” Of the bluebottle, which sometimes has parasitic mites, he wrote, “It is comforting to think that the house-fly has these parasites which torment him so. Such retribution is just.”

  Humans are a nightmare; we tear the earth apart. We trepan mountains and pour them into rivers, take the soil apart down to its atoms, sully the sea, shred our world like giants rutting after truffles. We poison our nest and each other and ourselves. We eat everything, simply everything, but we turn away from flies.

  The circles of compassion can suddenly expand. Federico Garcia Lorca wrote that he rescued flies caught at a window; they reminded him of “people / in chains.” And of
course I’ve done the same. I often do—catch flies and crickets and spiders and let them go, careful of their frailty. This brief moment of the widening circle; it is easily challenged by the maggot, by the swarm. The larvae of the fungus gnat sometimes travel in great masses, for reasons no one can guess—huge groups called worm snakes piled several deep, squirming along about an inch a minute. I know why Beelzebub is Lord of the Flies; is there any other god who would slouch so towards Bethlehem?

  I long sometimes for a compound eye. It is a tenet of my religious practice, an ever-present thorn, to remember that my point of view, that any point of view, is merely a point. My eyes cannot see a landscape, let alone a world. But how we judge things has everything to do with where we stand. Can I learn to see a form from many angles at once? Can I see other beings, this moment, my mistakes, my words, like this? Can I know multiplicity as a single thing?

  So many flies: Mydas flies, sewage flies, robust bot flies, gout flies, scavenger flies, snipe flies. Big-headed flies, thick-headed flies, picture-winged flies, stilt-legged flies, spear-winged flies, banana-stalk flies, flower-loving flies, stalk-eyed flies, flat-footed flies, pointed-winged flies, hump-backed flies.

  THE LITERATURE OF Zen Buddhism is thick with nature—nature images, metaphors, puzzles, and questions, but mostly the calm and serene inhuman world of clouds, seeds, spring shoots, meadow grasses, and ponds, the moon and the mountain and the wave and the plum blossom. (Kobayashi Issa, an eighteenth-century Buddhist haiku master, wrote: “Where there are humans / there are flies / and Buddhas.” But he is talking, I think, rather more about humans than flies.) Such images are used as metaphors for all kinds of Buddhist concepts, but they are partly an effort to convey how Zen Buddhism describes reality itself, the world. Hongzhi, a great Zen master of China, described it as “sky and water merging in autumn”—a vast, shifting, unbounded world.