Violation

by Sallie Tisdale

  Central to Zen Buddhism is a belief in bussho, usually translated from the Japanese as Buddha Nature. (In English we like to capitalize words like buddha and nature, to distinguish subtly different ideas with the same sound. Today, glancing inside the seething billow of life, it seems to me an impotent fist shaking at the greatness of what we try to say with the words. But I will follow the rule.)

  Bussho is shorthand for something that requires quite a few words to explain—or it is already one too many words for what can’t be explained in words. Buddhism is founded on the idea that all things are impermanent, that nothing has a fixed self-nature that passes through time unchanged. Change is not an aspect of the matrix but the matrix itself. It is because no one thing is permanent that we are not separated from anything—not bounded, not contained. All beings are constantly appearing, constantly springing into existence, hurtling out of themselves, of what they were, what preceded. Buddha Nature is—what? Original nature. Perfect nature—the substrate or source of all things. But it is not God, it is not ether, it is not simply a womb that gives birth. It is all things; it is that which manifests as things—as the world—as people, rocks, stars, dewdrops, flies—all beings, all forms, all existent things. All existence.

  What do I know about Buddha Nature, anyway? I can’t even tell you what it is—and Buddha Nature isn’t an it and it isn’t really an is either; not a quality attached to anything or a state of being or a space in which things exist; Buddha Nature as I understand it—there’s that it again—is this, this, this, here, this minuscule and gargantuan and muscular relational and organic now, the luminosity of the sparkling world, the vast inevitability of loss, and not that exactly either. I use that phrase, Buddha Nature, even as it fills my mouth with ash, to mean all those things and more—relation, aspects, moments, qualities, acts, aeons, and bodies—and I use it in a positive way, with pleasure, with outright joy, to mean that all of us—those of us who think we are something unique and those who never think about it, and all those creatures who don’t do what I might call thinking but are yet alive, and all those things we bang up against and assume aren’t alive at all—are in some way kin, in some way both source and effect, eternally and continually and without hesitation, spontaneously and instantaneously and infinitely giving birth to ourselves, spilling out of nothing into nothing, with great vigor—leaping, sliding, appearing, disappearing into and out of a lack of solidness, into and out of the nonexistence of permanent nature, and that because this is the law—the muscle, the hinge—of reality—it’s good. It’s all right. Everything is all right.

  Everything is all right. The female horsefly favors large warm-blooded animals. They see quite well and will fly around their prey just out of reach, finally biting one’s back or leg. (As is true with many other biting flies, including mosquitoes, only the females bite. The males live on plant pollen and juices. It so happens as well that the males live brief lives while the females live the whole long, hot summer. The story is told that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4 because the horseflies in Philadelphia were intolerable that year, and the delegates called for an early vote so they could get out of town.) The Phlebotomus insects, as they are called, have anticoagulant in their saliva; after a bite, the blood continues to run, sometimes dangerously so. (To be precise, the horsefly slices rather than bites; its mouthparts are like tiny knives.) In their turn, horseflies are eaten by robber flies, who capture them on the wing and then find a convenient twig to rest on while sucking them dry. Robber flies are sometimes called bee killers; they prize honeybees and will watch them from the shadows while the bees gather pollen, then suddenly dart out and seize one from behind so it can’t sting. They drain the bee dry and drop its empty shell; below a familiar perch, the bodies slowly pile up.

  The cluster fly lays its children inside an earthworm. If you crush a cluster fly, it smells like honey.

  The female thick-headed fly hangs around flowers, drinking nectar, like a bully at a bar. She waits for a bee or wasp, and when one comes close, she grabs it. The bee seems not to care, does not resist, while she deposits an egg before letting go. The bee flies away, the larva hatches, and burrows within. The larva eats the bee slowly until it dies, then falls to the ground within the bee’s body and burrows underground to pupate. Flies are holometabolous, meaning the young undergoes a complete metamorphosis into the adult form, into a completely different form. The pupa is the quiescent phase between, and may last days or weeks or even longer. The pupae of flies are not protected by cocoons like those of butterflies; they simply harden, or build a shell from soil or spit. Some flies make a puparium from their own skin. Eat the bee, crawl underground, sleep the winter through, and emerge as a fly, seeking bees. That is the cycle, the great web of its life, round and round.

  Pyrgotid flies do the same thing to May beetles, except that instead of burrowing into the ground, they live in the empty beetle shell over the winter. Flesh flies live under the skin of a turtle or in the stomach of a frog. The sheep bot fly—I have described this creature already. But there is also a bot fly that infests rabbits, and a bot fly that lives in horses’ throats, a bot fly that favors horses’ noses, and another bot fly that prefers horses’ tongues. There are bot flies specific to kangaroos, camels, warthogs, zebras, and elephants. The human bot fly, transmitted by mosquitoes, is cosmopolitan in its tastes; besides people, it infects dogs, cats, rabbits, horses, cattle, and sheep.

  One of the drawbacks of a long Buddhist practice is that one sometimes has the urge to present one’s self as more composed than one actually is. (Let’s be clear here; I mean me.) Emotional equanimity is a Buddhist virtue, a reflection of one’s ability to accept reality and a sign that one is not contributing to the heat of suffering in the world by resisting that reality. That this equanimity is a real thing to me, a true tranquility found through steady practice, is beside the point. My tranquility may be real but it is not immune to conditions; it is no more permanent or unchanging than my skin. At times there is a loud voice inside me, complaining indignantly: Explain this!

  Someone please explain this.

  In my dreams, I could not make Apocephalus pergandei. It is named after Theodore Pergande, a renowned entomologist of the latter nineteenth century who was particularly interested in aphids and ants. He was observing carpenter ants one day when he saw the heads of the ants begin to fall off one at a time. When he investigated, he found what has become known colloquially as the ant-decapitating fly. The mature fly lays eggs on an ant’s neck. The larvae hatch, and then bore into the ant’s head, eating it from the inside. Eating, the larva grows, slowly killing the ant, which apparently expires just as its head pops off. But as many of us wish we could do, it does not leave its childhood home behind. Instead, the little vermin remains inside for a while, and if you look closely that is what you will see: ants’ heads, walking around, filled with the children of flies.

  A Buddhist practice requires rigorous self-disclosure—mostly to one’s own self—and a kind of undefended willingness to be present in one’s own crappy life as it is. This means noticing how often we tell lies about ourselves. I lie about many things, to myself and others. I lie about the way that triad on which I balance tilts: sensitivity, logic, love. It limps at times, or I find myself one-legged, just plain falling down. I am not always at home in this world, not always relaxed, not always in love with this great big Buddha-Nature-ridden place.

  The Tachinidae is one of the largest, most selective, and successful fly families. “Ingenious,” says one entomologist, for how they have solved the problems of their peculiar niche—“respiration in particular,” since it is tricky to breathe inside things. Tachinid larvae are pure parasites, infesting virtually every kind of insect. One type lays its eggs on the leaves preferred by a certain caterpillar; the caterpillar eats the eggs, and the larvae hatch inside—born, as it were, at the buffet table. Another chooses crickets and katydids. The female fly can hear the precise frequency of the cricke
t chirp. (She can also hear, though the calls are many times higher, the ultrasound calls of the insectivorous bats she wants to avoid.) She follows the chirp carefully through a mechanism. When she locates the host, she lays her live babies beside or on them. They burrow in and eat selectively to keep the host alive as long as possible.

  Caught in a certain light, tachinid flies glow, their wings like violet veils, ovaline eyes the burnt orange of sunset. I sit in the dark summer night, pleasantly melancholy, listening to crickets and contemplating bussho in a pulsing world.

  I can pretend to have this settled. I can pretend to not mind. Certain midges are parasitic on themselves: the larvae hatch inside the mother and eat her from the inside out. I am appalled, even as I recognize the marvelous efficiency. Then I turn away from my own appalled thoughts. I am practicing acceptance. I bow. I tell myself it is a kind of compassion. It is sacrifice. (As though I understand that in some way.)

  The horsefly bites a horse, and the blood runs, and before the wound even closes the face fly creeps in and settles down to stay. The bot fly captures a bloodsucker, such as a mosquito, and lays eggs on its body—just enough that the mosquito can still move freely. Then the mosquito finds a host and lands. The heat of the host causes the bot fly larvae to hatch; they slide off to the host’s skin, down a follicle of hair, and in, another accidental gift. The larvae live just under the skin. They form a breathing hole with their hooks, keeping it open by digging constantly. This is called myiasis, flies developing in living flesh. (Many fly families indulge; the human bot fly is just one.) The maggots live under the skin until they are about an inch long. One observer of the condition wrote that myiasis causes “intense discomfort or pain,” which is not a surprise. But the maggots are never still; he adds that people also complain of “the disquieting feeling of never being alone.”

  A person with myiasis must be patient; it is damaging to try to remove tiny larvae. One treatment is suffocation: coating the openings with paraffin or nail polish or turpentine, or lathering on chloroform dissolved in vegetable oil. One of the most effective methods for removing them is to lay slices of raw bacon across the wound; the larvae come running. Squirming, rather, in their roiling, systaltic wave.

  Oh, well—parasitism is routine in the insect world. Can we call it cruel, this life governed by instinct? Consider this: two flies glued down by their wings to a table, for convenience. A drop of paraffin is carefully poured on their backs and then scooped out into a crater. Each fly’s thorax is opened into the crater with a tiny scalpel, exposing the muscle. Saline is dropped into the craters for moisture. The flies are then rotated and joined, back to back, the paraffin gently sealed with a hot needle to form a double fly. This new kind of fly can walk, sort of, each taking a turn riding the other piggyback—or it can be neatly glued to a stick. For convenience. Now the scientist has a wonderful thing, a little monster with which to study many things: metabolism, hunger, dehydration, decay.

  Explain that.

  The larva grows, then settles into pupation. After time, after a mountain of time, the maggot disappears, the cask opens, and a fly emerges. It is fully mature; it will grow no more. The larvae of black flies are aquatic; the matured fly secretes a bubble of air and rises in it like an astronaut to its new life in the air, bursting out of the bubble at the surface. One observer said that a sudden hatching of black flies leaves the water “in great numbers with such force and velocity” that it seemed as though they were being “shot out of a gun.” In contrast, the net-winged midge makes a submarine, a stiff case that floats to the surface, where it bursts open; the adults rise from their boats as delicate as mist. At first it is a wrinkled and empty fly bag, without color or strength. The new being takes a great gulp of air and expands, incalculably vast and whole, the actualization of fly.

  So many flies: tabanid flies, green bottle flies, bronze dump flies, stilt-legged flies, bush flies, stable flies, louse flies, fruit flies, dung flies, rust flies, elk flies, seaweed flies, rust flies, scavenger flies, gadflies, skipper flies, soldier flies, Hessian flies, Richard flies, light flies, stone flies, sand flies, grass flies, eye gnats, wood gnats. A myriad mosquitoes.

  There is something so simple and clear about the speech of flies; if I knew fly words, what would be clarified in my own? I study how flies use the world—how they make something of it that wasn’t there before. They liquefy the dead, they slurp up the world, inhaling the bodies of others. They shoot out of lakes and the ground and out of bodies, joyous, filled with air. If I believe—and today, I think I do—that every being is Buddha Nature, that there is no place Buddhas cannot or will not go, then I must give a glance inside.

  I don’t know what a Buddha is.

  ONE FLY, ITS passing hum, this we know—but they mob up, don’t they, into masses of flies, into rivers and mountains of life, crawling and skipping and vibrating without rest, working at disintegration and change. Phantom midges form such enormous swarms they have been mistaken for smoke plumes, humming with such force that, in the words of one observer, they sound “like a distant waterfall.”

  Many fly swarms are birth explosions, others are orgies. Male dance flies join in huge mating swarms, graceful ellipses that flow up and down across meadows and gardens. They make frothy structures called nuptial balloons to carry on their abdomens for attracting females. Some species put seeds or algae in their balloons; others go straight for dead bugs—the bigger, the better, as far as the female is concerned. (Female dance flies routinely eat during sex—maybe from the nuptial balloon they have accepted as part of the bargain, but often, they eat another fly.) One type of dance fly uses only saliva and air, creating a lather of emptiness; as they dance, the empty bubbles glitter like lights.

  Long-legged flies do their mating dance in slow motion, their rhythms complex and mysterious; they wave black and white leg scales back and forth in front of the female like a vaudeville stripper waves her fans. Pomace flies have tufts of dark hair on their legs called sex combs, with which they hold the female still during mating. The male penetrates from behind, the female spasmodically jerking in response. Already mated females are unreceptive; they curl their abdomens under, fly away, or kick at males.

  The impregnated female seeks a nest. A few flies give live birth, and a few incubate their young. The tsetse fly, keds, and bat flies all hatch within their mother and are fed with something akin to a milk gland until they are ready to pupate, at which point they are finally expelled. But most flies lay eggs—a single egg, or hundreds, or thousands. She has a telescoping ovipositor, fine and small, which emerges from her abdomen and gropes its way inside—into the soft spaces, in the dark. Flies lay their eggs in the roots and stems of plants, in fruit, in the algae of a still pond, in shit, in hair and hide, in the bodies of other insects, in the stomachs of cows, in the dirty hunks of wool around the anus of sheep, in the pus of an infected wound. (The preference of many carnivorous species is the corpse.) Blowflies deposit eggs in the eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, vagina, and anus. Female flies are choosy; many have taste buds on the ovipositor to help them pick the best location—each fly to its own place. Insistent and shy, the ovipositor worms its way down: into garbage and wounds, into the rotten flecks of meat on the floor of a slaughterhouse, into stagnant water, between the membranous layers of a corpse, between fibers of living muscle, on the umbilical cord of newborn fawns—into “any convenient cavity,” says the Britannica—and deposits tiny eggs shimmery and damp, masses of them. She is careful not to crowd them, filling first one newly made womb, and then another and another. A day later, she dies.

  Horrible. Most horrible.

  Larvae are the unfinished fly; they are like letters not yet making a word. Maggots are the simplest of larvae; they are the ur-fly, the refined essence of the fly, the marvelously simplified fly—its template, a profoundly primitive thing. Many kinds of maggot have no head, consisting only of a body and a mouth filled with hooks. They move by wavelets of muscular contraction and relaxation
, grasping with the mouth hooks and other hooks along their sides. They can roll and spring and slide.

  After they hatch, they eat and grow. This process may be slow or fast. The chironomid midge larva in West Africa grows in spurts, drying out and reviving through extreme temperature variations and waves of drought and rain. When it is almost completely desiccated, it enters into a condition called cryptobiosis—still alive but with no signs of metabolism. Sprinkled with water, it wakes up, takes a meal, and starts growing again until the next dry spell. Blue bottleflies require an almost totally humid atmosphere—something a corpse can easily provide in most cases—and in good conditions hatch almost as soon as they are laid. They begin to eat, and never stop. I am being literal: they never stop. (Trashmen call maggots “disco rice” for the way they wiggle through the waste.) If undisturbed, a maggot will eat without ceasing until it is grown. There is a distinct advantage to maggots having anal spiracles; there is no need to stop eating in order to breathe.

  Aristotle, like many others for most of history, believed that some flies “are not derived from living parentage, but are generated spontaneously … in decaying mud or dung; others in timber.” They simply appear all at once from manure and corpses, with no sign of having been born. How else to explain this locomotion, this primordial fecundity?