Maggots can reduce the weight of a human body by 50 percent in a few weeks. In the decomposing of a body, there are several waves of insects, each colonizing in its turn in a strict sequence. The first wave is blowflies and houseflies of a certain species; they begin to arrive within minutes of death. Their bodies are beautiful, glasslike in shimmering greens and blues, their eyes a deep, warm red. They glisten, tremble, and the larvae hatch and eat. They are ingenious little maggots—so much that the body seems to move of its own accord from their motion. The sound of all this movement, all this life, writes one entomologist, is “reminiscent of gently frying fat.”
In time, other species of blowflies and houseflies arrive. The corpse begins to blacken, soften. (Corpses at this stage are called “wet carrion” by biologists.) The meat on which the maggots feed begins to liquefy and runs like melting butter. This is the fluid Fabre contemplated in quiet shock. “We here witness the transfusion of one animal into another,” he wrote. If the maggots fail to move in time, they drown in the broth of the corpse they are eating.
By the time these larvae have fallen off into the soil to pupate, a third wave of flies arrives—fruit flies and drone flies and others, flies that prefer the liquids. Toward the end, the cheese skipper appears, drawn to the smell, and carefully cleans the bones of the remnants of tendons and connective tissue.
I contemplate my ordinary, imperfect, beloved body. I contemplate the bodies of my beloveds: individual, singular, unique, irreplaceable people, their skin and eyes and mouths and hands. I consider their skin riddled and bristling with that seething billow, I consider the digestion of their eyes and the liquefaction of those hands, my hands, my eyes—the evolution of the person into the thing, into wet carrion and eventually into a puddle, into soil, into earth, and flies. And it will come, whether I turn away or not.
We are nothing more than a collection of parts, and each part a collection of smaller parts, and smaller, the things we love and all we cherish conglomerates of tiny blocks. The blocks are built up; they will be taken apart the same way; we are nothing more. (And yet we are something more; this is one of the mysteries, I know. I cannot point to it, hold it, name it, except in the limited and awkward ways I have already tried. But there is something more, and it is the totality of this nothing more.)
Flies are wholehearted things, leading wholehearted lives. They understand dissolution, and by understanding I mean they live it. The parts are separated, they become something new. Pouring one’s life into compoundedness without resistance, living by means of compoundedness and its subsequent falling apart—this is the wisdom of the creatures of the earth, the ones beside us, the ones who don’t fight it. Because the human heart is devoted to compounded things and tries to hold them still, our hearts break. (One more thing to dissolve.) How can we know their lives? How can we understand the spongy proboscis, softly padded, with its small rasping teeth?
What better vision of the fullness of birth and the fullness of death than the maggot and the fly? A legless, headless, gill-breathing vermiform, giving way to the complete stillness of the pupa, and emerging as a land-based flyer—each stage utterly unlike the others, with nothing remaining of what was before. In their turn, maggots and flies help us along in our own fullness of birth and death, until what we were is completely changed. Decomposed, recomposed, compounded, dissolved, disappearing, reappearing—a piece from here and a fleck from there, a taste of this karma, a speck of that memory, this carbon atom, that bit of water, a little protein, a pinch of pain: until a new body and a new life are made from pieces of the past. The wee bit they claim, can you begrudge it? Dissolved, our flesh is their water, and they lap us up.
“Placed in her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are one and all alike,” wrote Fabre. “There you have true equality, the only equality in this world of ours: equality in the presence of the maggot.” What lucky flies smelled the flowery scent of the Buddha’s death, and came—flowing through the air like a river in the sky, a river of flies! What lucky maggots were born in his body, in the moist heat of the afternoon while the disciples still mourned! The maggots and blowflies are the words of the old Buddhas, singing of the vast texture of things, a lullaby of birth and death. They came and turned him into juice and soil, the Buddha flowing gloriously like cream into the ground.
AFTER A NIGHT of more routinely menacing scenes—an insecurely locked door, a strange man in a wig—I woke in the early morning from a brief, vivid dream. There had been a series of burning rooms, and finally a room completely engulfed in flames. I saw several people walking calmly through the room, untouched, smiling. I woke as one turned and looked at me and said, “I can’t tell you how safe I feel in this house.”
One of the most famous parables of Buddhism is that of the burning house. The story is told by the Buddha in the Lotus Sutra. A man’s children are trapped in a burning house and won’t leave when he calls them. In order to get them out, safe and free, he promises carts full of treasure, great treasure. Finally, tempted, they come out, and are saved. Fire is change, loss, the impossibility of holding on; fire is also the burning, ceaseless desire we feel to hold on to that which can’t be held. The house is burning, and we stupidly stand there, refusing to leave—until we are tempted by the promise of treasure—the precious jewels of the Dharma, the practice, the Buddha himself.
RIGHT HERE, WHAT do I believe? I do believe in perfection, right here—and not just perfection existing in the midst of decay, but decay as a kind of perfection. I believe in beauty, especially in the moments when one least seeks it—not just the dewdrop, the grass, but beauty in the shuffling of papers on the desk in the little cubicle thick with the snuffles of the sweaty man a few inches away. Beauty in the rattle of the bus sliding halfway into the crosswalk right beside you. Beauty in the liquid aswim with maggots. In everything, in anything. I can believe this, without in any way really understanding. Even after I have my answer, the question is always being asked.
When I begin to truly accept myself as a flit, a bubble, a pile of blocks tilting over, my precious me as a passing sigh in the oceanic cosmos of change—when I accept this moment passing completely away into the next without recourse—when I begin to accept that its very fragility and perishing nature is the beauty in life, then I begin to find safety inside a burning house. I don’t need to escape if I know how to live inside it. Not needing to escape, I no longer feel tempted, no longer need promises or rewards. I just walk through it, aware of fire.
The north woods in summer smell like blackberry jam, and in the pockets of sun the tiny midges dance in the heat-sweetened air. They are drunk with it, galloping round and round as their lives leak quickly away. They are points of light in the light.
Conjunctions, Fall 2008
I have been practicing Soto Zen Buddhism for more than thirty years. One of the great masters of Soto Zen is a medieval Japanese teacher named Dōgen, and one of his most famous essays is called “The Sutra of Mountains and Waters.” Like most of Dōgen’s work, it is elliptical, imagistic, and dense; one understands it in an arational way, through experience. One day I was walking through the woods, watching summer flies, and thought I could write about them in the same way—celebrating their lives, their perfection and wholeness. Very quickly the essay grew into a meditation on the way life, in Dōgen’s words, “flashes out of emptiness.” And returns to it.
Falling
MY BROTHER, BRUCE, STILL CALLS ME “SIS” AND SOMETIMES “baby sister,” but we don’t see much of each other. For a long time we’ve been gradually drifting—if not apart, then into an accommodation of being apart.
We are both a bit skittish, abrupt, a little profane. Sometimes our conversations feel like the wrestling matches we used to have—fun, but a little painful. I call him, but he isn’t good on the telephone. His voice rises and falls, the phone in his hand half-forgotten as he throws a ball for his dog or tells my nephew to go do his homework. He comes back to me all at once, demanding, “W
hat?” In the photos I’ve managed to snap over the years, he is almost always frowning at the camera or making a face.
When he has to come to the hated city and renew a few of his many licenses, he stays with me. He limps up the steps and throws open the heavy front door. “Sis!” he shouts, dropping his small suitcase and slapping my shoulder hard.
We open a bottle of wine and he props his tattered right knee on a pillow. Broad and strong and fighting his weight like everyone in our family, he fills a room.
“Totaled the Beemer on Christmas Eve.” He is breezy. “James and me, we spun out on black ice going up the mountain. Thirty-five years I’ve been driving that road, never hit ice like that. But the Beemer did what it was supposed to—nobody hurt.”
Now wait one damned minute here. That BMW was one of his most prized possessions. He totaled it? With James, my twelve-year-old nephew? On the mountain, in ice? Not to mention that he hasn’t had steady work for a couple of years and had to let all the insurance lapse.
“My big regret, I just filled the gas tank. Now that’s gone.”
We drink for a while.
I ask him about the knee, about the next operation, put off with the insurance.
“I mostly drag my right leg around behind me,” he says.
“Does it hurt when you ski?” I ask, watching him lounge on my couch like a king, head back on a pile of quilted pillows. He glances at me, like it’s a stupid question. And of course it is; I can see the scars from across the room.
“It hurts right now, sitting here,” he says.
For a long time, as most people do, I’ve nurtured a seed of doubt about my place in others’ hearts. In all other hearts. Sometimes I find myself being careful around Bruce, afraid to upset him, because I can’t take him for granted. His most abbreviated comments echo and sing to me; a single name or phrase evokes a world. But between siblings, there are no vows, no contracts. No promises. It is so goddamned dangerous to love somebody.
Bruce worked more than twenty-five years as a skier of one kind and another. The walls of his house are covered with pictures of him upside down in space, skis akimbo, flipping off lethal cornices over canyons of snow. Bruce can read snow—layer by layer, its crystal language. He knows when a cornice wants to fall, when a side of the mountain is turning to avalanche. He is trained to handle explosives; for years, it was his job to stand at the edge of a crevasse on skis and toss dynamite into a few hanging tons of ice. He is trained in emergency medicine and rope rescue and can fix a ski lift. He’s won several gold medals in the Ski Patrol Olympics. For a while, his job title was mountain manager.
Summers were for construction jobs and river trips. He can run whitewater, so there are photos of him in the rapids too, in boats tossed like autumn leaves. He can handle Zodiacs and portage rafts along a cliff. He has a Coast Guard Master Marine license, so he can run bigger boats in open water. He loves fishing and rivers, but his life was about snow. Then the knee went, and the other knee, and it was the end of all that. He still works a little on ski patrol, keeping his hand in, but the legs aren’t up for more than that. Mostly he gets by as a part-time fishing guide in Alaska, scraping through the winters the way he used to scrape through summer.
We drink some more, and he tells me a few stories I’ve never heard before—harrowing accidents, close calls. Some are old stories, from our stupid kid years. Finally I have enough of listening. I pull up my pants leg and show him a little scar I’d gotten from being banged on some rocks in the surf. He answers with a long jagged line on his calf, and then we are both pulling up our shirtsleeves and yanking down our pants, bending over to point at the marks left behind.
I WAKE UP in a room blurry with dawn. Strange light. The room is fogged and soft, and I know it is snowing. The whole world is falling in snow, the kind of snow that is without beginning—without end. I barely move, coy under the blankets with all the time in the world. And then I jump out into the cold room and fling up the blinds and holler for my brother.
Later Bruce and I make angels in the dry, sibilant snow. Our padded limbs swish in rhythm, whispering. The shattered sky falls like ash, covering me in tiny scraps of white. I can hear the puffs of impact all around me. It covers me, it covers my brother an arm’s length away, a new world covering the broken world, leaving us safe and clean and cold.
We grow up in a small town in a high, dry valley braced by mountains. He is two years older, but we look so much alike that we pass for twins, spend that much time together. Summer is clear and hot, and we live outside as much as in—soaring hours spent in fields and vacant lots, clambering over boulders and climbing into the great cups of maple trees. Winter is clear and cold. We do everything in the snow but ski—skiing is pricey beyond words. So we slide down the hills on battered silver discs and patched-up inner tubes, shooting recklessly through the trees. We build snow forts and snow caves and snow houses. We stuff snow down our little sister’s shirt so she cries and goes home and can’t tell Mom we’re going into the culvert where we aren’t allowed.
Our mother teaches fifth grade at the elementary school and our father teaches industrial arts at the high school. He fixes televisions and radios on the side, in a cluttered shop behind our house, where the tools hang on pegboards in careful wax-pencil outlines. Dad is a volunteer fireman; all the able-bodied men in town are expected to volunteer. He drinks, more and more with each year, but he takes to driving the trucks, training other men. We grow up around policemen and firemen and ranchers—people who can fix things and build things, people who aren’t afraid of weather or work. People who run into burning buildings without looking back.
At two, at four, at eight years of age, I stare at the Polaroid camera my mother holds. I look at her as though she is under a microscope. Bruce, beside me, a little taller, grins stiffly. He is the oldest, he is the only boy, so he is getting the lessons I can’t have—how to use tools, build things, fix things. My father is an unsparing man, and he teaches with sudden slaps upside the head. Bruce is learning fast.
My grandparents own a small cabin on a big river, and sometimes we go up for days with boxes of groceries and books. We spend our days on the water, with little supervision. I like to swim across the wide, steady river to the sandy shelf under the cliff—swim with the unflagging, graceless stroke of a strong child, the slow current tugging against me, pushing back. I can feel the cold pull of the deeper, darker water beneath. Sometimes Dad drives us a few miles up the river in the back of the pickup and drops us off with our inner tubes to float back.
One day, when Bruce is almost twelve and I am just nine, we keep going past the cabin, around the blind curve of canyon wall where we are not allowed to go. We dip through a few shallow whorls and rocky turns, and then suddenly we’re caught in a narrow slot of white water, real rapids. I still remember only froth and foam, the power of it, falling, and then a hazy view back up a small waterfall we had somehow ridden down. I sit huddled on the rock where Bruce has dropped me after pulling me up from the bottom of the pool by my hair, the way he’d been taught in his junior lifesaving course.
I’ve lost my shoes. We walk back on the road, its sharp gravel biting my feet. Water runs in trickles down my thighs. We walk through thirsty sunlight, the breathless air suddenly cool under the pines. We walk in silence down the dusty road, carrying our secrets together. Then: “Don’t tell Mom,” he says. And I nod. Telling Dad never occurs to either of us.
TELLING THE TRUTH is a lot like telling lies, in the end. It is all just stories; like snow falling, they cover everything up. Family, for most of us, includes lifelong agreements about what is not said. Certainly the heart of my family is a maze of agreements, the main one being not to speak of things. At ten years, at twelve, at fourteen, I meet the camera with a mocking half smile, with scorn. Bruce gazes toward the horizon like Captain America. The fear of humiliation and the need for self-reliance is strong in us both, driving us differently. He wants to be perfect; he is taking lessons in it. I wan
t the lessons too, but not the grades—not the snicking of the leather belt as our father pulls it off his waist and wraps it twice around his meaty hands.
I discover books and theater and politics and trouble, and he finds football and gymnastics. I can’t fight fires or use a table saw, so I do more dangerous things. I ride motorcycles with men I meet in the park. I talk back at the dinner table. Bruce wins his varsity letter, and I start writing manifestos to my English teachers. Truth is what I insist on telling. I call it speaking up—words flying from my young mouth, flying up, filling the sky.
Right after graduation, Bruce leaves on a gymnastics scholarship to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, eight thousand feet high in the Rockies. He shaves his head, learns to handle a rifle, marches for hours. He goes skiing for the first time. He never takes a lesson—just pushes off and flies.
While Bruce spit-polishes his shoes, his very short romance with the military already over, I am getting kicked out of English class. When I am sixteen I quit high school before they can fire me, and somehow talk myself into early admission at the college one state border and a world away from home. After a year, Bruce quits the academy and joins me. There is a little of Captain Kirk now, a nerd with cool depths. He lets his hair grow and falls in with a gang of ski bums who cut classes and head up the mountain whenever they can cadge enough gas money together. My father tears the Air Force Academy bumper sticker off his truck and won’t speak to him.
When I leave college to test my ideas about truth and beauty in a commune, Bruce finds his way to the Rockies and begins to study snow in earnest. Each morning, he wakes up to the cold, bright Colorado sky, and skis straight from his apartment steps to the slopes. He skis his last run to the door of the restaurant where he washes dishes and chops vegetables each evening. Late at night, he skis home, under sulfurous streetlights. In the cones of light, snowflakes swirl, blinking in and out like shadows, extinguished when they touch the earth.
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