Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  For our peace of mind, animals do not pass away,

  but die a seemingly shallower death

  losing—we’d like to believe—fewer feelings and less world,

  exiting—or so it seems—a less tragic stage.2

  An uncommon sensibility. Almost like a child meeting death for the first time, grasping analogy, tentatively building a bridge. Tentatively. The poet is tentative. Her knowledge of the small (and sometimes large) acts of bad faith through which we live our lives is what makes the poem.

  Difference

  Three years ago, Sharon and I walked through the entrance doors of the Montreal Insectarium, down the curved staircase to the open-plan exhibition hall, and within minutes, were absorbed in the displays. All those insects in one place got us thinking about the megacategory the museum had taken on, about the unreachable diversity contained within that word insects, and about how unfortunate it is that the negative connotations of the word sweep up so much. Such are the perils of taxonomy in the public sphere. And what a huge task it leaves a place like this.

  * * *

  But pretty soon, realizing that everyone else—people of all ages—was just as absorbed, we began thinking how well the curators, designers, educators, and other staff had succeeded in their mission to “encourage … visitors to think more positively about insects.” We were struck by the combination of exhibits on topics that are more familiar (insect biology) and less familiar (cultural connections between humans and insects). The exhibits were thoughtful and fun; the text was smart and didn’t talk down. The examples were diverse and intriguing.

  And then, like a thought unthought, like that peculiar biblical image of scales falling from Saul’s eyes, like waking from a dream, like that moment when the drugs wear off (or, alternatively, when they kick in), we both realized, at what seemed like the exact same instant, that we were in a mausoleum and that the walls were lined with death, that those gorgeous pinned specimens, precisely arranged according to aesthetic criteria—color, size, shape, geometry—were not just dazzling objects; they were also tiny corpses.

  * * *

  How strange that we look at insects as beautiful objects, that in death they are beautiful objects whereas in life, scuttling across the wooden floor, lurking in corners and under benches, flying into our hair and under our collars, crawling up our sleeves … Imagine the chaos if they came back to life. The impulse, even in this place, would be to lash out and crush them.

  But if you watch people going from case to case around the room, you see right away that many of these objects (not necessarily the largest, not necessarily the ones with the longest legs or spindliest antennae) possess intense psychic power. It’s clear in the way that everyone—myself included—navigates the displays, in the way that we move along the rows a little tentatively and then pull up short and sometimes back off sharply. And it’s a little odd that we act like this, because the animal is not only locked behind Perspex in a display case but is, besides, not at all physically dangerous, if, in fact, it ever was. It is as though, along with their beauty, these animals find their way to some deep part of us and, in response, something taboo-like draws us in. Despite death, they enter our bodies and make us shiver with apprehension. What other animal has this power over us?

  * * *

  So much about insects is obscure to us, yet our capacity to condition their existence is so vast. Look closely at these walls. Even the most beautiful butterfly, observed Primo Levi, has a “diabolical, mask-like face.”3 Unease has a stubborn source, unfamiliar and unsettling. We simply cannot find ourselves in these creatures. The more we look, the less we know. They are not like us. They do not respond to acts of love or mercy or remorse. It is worse than indifference. It is a deep, dead space without reciprocity, recognition, or redemption.

  Defeat

  Flies, Saint Augustine wrote, were invented by God to punish man for his arrogance. Was that what the people of Hamburg were supposed to feel in 1943 as they stumbled through the smoldering ruins of their city during the pauses between Allied bombing raids? Flies—“huge and iridescent green, flies such as had never been seen before”—were so thick around the corpses in the air-raid shelters that, across the floors writhing with maggots, the work teams detailed to collect the dead could reach the bodies only by clearing the way with flamethrowers.4

  And then, here and elsewhere, on the heels of imposed vulnerability come the images of famine and disease, flies sipping from the corners of dull eyes, sucking at the edges of crusted mouths, crusted noses. Child and adult too weak, too pacified, to keep brushing them away. Animals, too, dogs, cows, goats, horses. Flies taking over, moving in, preparing the generations, the eggs, the larvae, the feast. Heralding the transition, only slightly premature.

  Evolution

  1.

  “The maggot is a power in this world,” wrote Jean-Henri Fabre, the Insect Poet, in a moment of characteristic awe. He was philosophizing about flies—bluebottles, greenbottles, bumblebee flies, gray flesh flies—and their capacity “to purge the earth of death’s impurities and cause deceased animal matter to be once more numbered among the treasures of life.”1 He was pondering the rhythm of the seasons and the cycles of mortality, and he was exploring the grounds of his new house in Sérignan du Comtat, a small village in Provence close to Orange where he was unearthing his own treasures: decaying bird corpses, fetid sewer ducts, ruined wasps’ nests—secret refuges of nature’s alchemy.

  Fabre had called this house, with its large garden, l’Harmas (“the name given, in this district, to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme”), and it is now a national museum, recently reopened after six years’ renovation.2

  It is a beautiful house, large and imposing, glowing pink in the summer sunshine, thick walled to keep out the mistral, pale-green shutters. A handsome house that was known locally as le château.3 Fabre was fifty-six when he moved here. Almost immediately he had a two-story addition built onto the main residence: on the first floor, a greenhouse where he and his gardener grew plants for the grounds and for his botanical studies; above, a naturalist’s laboratory, in which he spent the greatest part of his time. The property is on the outskirts of Sérignan, and one of Fabre’s first acts was to surround its nearly two and a half acres with a stone wall six feet high, isolating it still further. Indeed, Anne-Marie Slézec, the director of the museum, told me, in his thirty-six years here, Fabre never once ventured the few hundred yards into the village.

  Mme. Slézec had been assigned to l’Harmas from her position as a research mycologist at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, and now, after six years in the provinces, her task complete, she was eagerly anticipating her return to Paris.

  There was a good reason to select a mycologist for this posting: among the chief treasures of l’Harmas are 600 luminous aquarelles of local fungi, delicate portraits that Fabre painted in an effort to preserve the colors and substance of objects that, once collected, rapidly lost all relation to their living form. The paintings are justly famous, and they seem in some way to distill Fabre’s entire life’s work. Powerfully descriptive and immediately accessible, they strive to capture the ecological whole and, in doing so, to convey the beauty and what he saw as the mysterious perfection of nature. They are the product of exceptional observational skills. They utilize a talent that was largely self-taught. And they reveal a profound intimacy with their subject.

  But Mme. Slézec’s task was to be less mycological than antiquarian. She rapidly turned detective. To reconstruct Fabre’s study, she hunted down old photographs, securing the crucial lead from a librarian in Avignon who found a contemporary image, which the director set out to reproduce in every respect. Somehow she turned up the very same framed pictures; the same books; the same clock (which she had restored to working order); the same globe; the same chairs; the same cases of snails, fossils, and seashells; the same set of scales. She reinstated the famous writing desk, just two and a half fee
t long, a school desk really, insubstantial enough for Fabre to pick up and move as needed. She brought the photograph back to life. Or rather, she brought it into the present and, in the process, re-created the study as a memorial. Only Fabre himself is missing (and he is missing from the image, too), though the sunlight that still floods through the garden window fills the room with the aura of his life, a life lived fully right in this space.

  The grounds presented a different challenge. When Fabre arrived, in 1879, he discovered that the nearly two and a half acres of land he now owned had once been a vineyard. Cultivation had involved the removal of most of the “primitive vegetation.” “No more thyme, no more lavender, no more clumps of kermes-oak,” he lamented.4 Instead, his new garden was a mass of thistles, couch grass, and other upstarts. He ripped it out and replanted. By the time Mme. Slézec arrived, however, the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, which had taken possession on the death of Fabre’s last surviving son, in 1967, had turned much of the land into a botanical garden. Scouring Fabre’s notebooks, his manuscripts, and his correspondence, studying photographs taken on the grounds, Mme. Slézec searched for clues that would enable her to restore what Fabre had intended to persist after his death. She cleared the shrubs obstructing his much-loved view of Mount Ventoux, the isolated outlier of the French Alps that—following in Petrarch’s famous footsteps—Fabre often climbed. She reintroduced bamboo, forsythia, roses, and Lebanon oak, and she protected and managed the surviving Atlas cedars, the Aleppo and Corsican pines, and the graceful lilac walk that leads from the entry gate to the house.

  The garden, she determined, had been planned in three sections. In front of the house, Fabre had laid out a formal flower garden surrounding a large ornamental pond. This was where he entertained his not inconsiderable number of visitors: members of the local intellectual elite and, toward the end of his life, dignitaries and admirers from further afield. Beyond the flower beds, he established the harmas for which the house was named, an area of native shrubs and trees that were planted, nurtured, then left to grow with minimum management. Finally, beyond the harmas, he planted a large area of trees, a parc arboré, again allowed to thrive with relatively little intervention. These latter two areas were his “laboratory of living entomology,” the habitats for his insect studies.5 Viewed from the flower garden, they looked wild and untamed, but as in the Romantic tradition of landscape gardening, this naturalness was an effect of much art and labor.

  Fabre lived at l’Harmas until his death in 1915 at age ninety-two, and it was here that he wrote nine of the ten volumes of his Souvenirs entomologiques, a massive work with a mass readership on which his fame and reputation rest. It was a labor he conceived as an irrefutable demonstration of the “Intelligence [that] shine[s] behind the mystery of things”6 and as a monument against “transformism”—that is, the evolution of plants and animals through the adaptive transformation of species descended from common ancestors, a formulation of evolution general enough to include both Darwin and his French forerunner, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It was here in the harmas and the parc arboré that Fabre encountered the animals that fill those volumes and bear the burden of his calling: the wasps, bees, beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars, scorpions, and spiders whose behavior he describes in such vivid detail. It was here, in this “Eden of bliss,” as he put it (with one eye ever trained on his legacy), that he would “live henceforth alone with the insect.”7

  2.

  The garden at l’Harmas and the countryside surrounding it were a naturalist’s paradise, and Fabre’s interests were voracious, his knowledge encyclopedic. He studied birds, plants, and fungi. He collected fossils, seashells, and snails. But above all, it was the insects that fascinated him.

  Fascination, though, is not always twinned with affection. Hundreds of cicadas lived in the two plane trees outside his front door, and each day in summer he heard their calls. “Ah! Creature possessed,” he despaired soon after arriving, “the plague of my dwelling, which I hoped would be so peaceful!” He considered hacking down the trees to be rid of them. He had already eliminated the frogs from his pond (“by means perhaps a little too rigorous,” he admitted).8 If he could, said Mme. Slézec, he would have silenced the songbirds too.

  The cicadas were a “real torment.”9 But like all of nature, they were also an opportunity. As a child, Fabre had been deeply impressed by La Fontaine’s Fables, though less by their moral complexity and social satire than by their ability to make the natural world serve as a vehicle of moral instruction. Nature was everywhere and at every turn offered occasion for inquiry and education. Insects, especially, were around every corner and beneath every footstep. And so were their secrets. Insects struggled, they triumphed, they failed. Their lives were full of drama both epic and homespun; they had personalities, desires, preferences, habits, and fears. Indeed, their lives were much like his own. Unearthing an insect’s biography was both an exploration of the unknown and something more: a journey on which everyone was invited and for which Fabre was both the guide and the subject. “Fabre’s accounts of insect life,” writes the historian Norma Field perceptively, “convey both the drama he found in it and the drama he experienced in exploring it.… The narrative of insect life becomes the narrative of Fabre’s life.”10 Field sees in this convergence a persuasive narrative structure that gives Fabre’s writing its exceptional force. And perhaps it’s not only his readers who are being persuaded. All this narrative blurring signals an ontological blurring between the man and his insects, an effect of deep affinities. What does it take, we might wonder, to become a true insect poet?

  Everyone could participate in Fabre’s narrative. Scientific inquiry demanded specialized skills, patience, and ingenuity. But its dissemination would be accessible and democratic. Each insect was a mysterious neighbor whose true identity was revealed only through the patience and ingenuity of its biographer. By the time he is done, each insect has given up its secrets, surrendered its life story. And, Fabre insists, this biographical approach is a surer route to knowledge than any science that takes as its object the dead animal pinned to a card and viewed under a microscope. Morphological similarities might be meaningful to the elite theorists in their metropolitan studies, but what counted out here in the world was behavior: who did what to whom, how, and why.

  The great institutions of natural history, botany, and zoology were increasingly preoccupied with questions of classification. For Fabre, such activities and (what he saw as) their newly distanced ways of engaging with nature—as object, specimen, icon—were, quite simply, “burying us.”11 Insects were all around, yet we scarcely knew them. If, like La Fontaine, we observed their behavior with patience and dedication, they could provide an unrivaled source of moral and scientific education. Even the cicadas. Even the maggots. And even—perhaps especially—those ruthless hymenopteran hunters, the solitary wasps.

  3.

  Work on the high wall surrounding l’Harmas started soon after Fabre and his family arrived in 1879, but construction was frustratingly slow. For the naturalist, however, the delays were serendipitous. The builders left large piles of stone and sand in the garden, and these were soon occupied by bees and wasps. Two wasps, the Bembix and the Languedocian sphex, were old friends that Fabre knew well from previous encounters. They made homes in the sand, and he spent much of his days observing and recording their behavior.

  Fabre truly loved wasps. Along with beetles, they occupy more of the Souvenirs than any other group. (He wrote little on ants and butterflies.) He loved that they were still so unknown. He loved their determination—so close to his own—to overcome the largest obstacles. He loved their precision. Above all, he loved that they allowed him to disclose the astonishing complexities of their behavior and then, like a magician, reveal that this behavior, no matter how much it looked like problem solving and ingenuity was—contra Darwin—entirely devoid of intelligence. He loved the wasps because, as exemplars to him of both the “wisdom” and the
“ignorance” of instinct, they were his accomplices in the campaign against transformism.

  He seeks them out. Knowing their habits, he finds a likely spot—a sand dune, a steep roadside bank, a small clearing in the undergrowth, a south-facing garden wall, a kitchen fireplace—and he waits. He watches each species prepare its nest in its own style. Here is the Bembix rostrata digging like a puppy (“The sand, shot backwards under the abdomen, passes through the arch of the hind-legs, gushes like a fluid in a continuous stream, describes its parabola and falls to the ground some seven or eight inches away”).12 Here is a small group of Cerceris tuberculata, “industrious miners” who “patiently remove with their mandibles a few bits of gravel from the bottom of the pit and push the heavy mass outside.”13 Here are some yellow-winged sphex (Sphex flavipennis), “a troop of merry companions encouraging one another in their work; … the sand flies, falling in a fine dust on their quivering wings; and the too bulky gravel, removed bit by bit, rolls far away from the workyard. If a piece seems too heavy to be moved, the insect gets up steam with a shrill note which reminds one of the woodman’s ‘Hoo!’”).14 And here are the Eumenes wasps, whose nest is so “gracefully curved” and so carefully decorated with snail shells and pebbles that it is “both a fortress and a museum.”15

  Their nests complete, the wasps fly off. Fabre waits, his patience inexhaustible. Finally, they return, laden with food for the larva that will hatch in their nests. A Cerceris lands with a metallic Buprestis beetle. A hairy Ammophila (a sphex) arrives with an outsize lepidopteran larva. Here is a Chalybion (another sphex) clasping a spider between her legs. Here comes a yellow-winged sphex dragging a cricket far larger than itself.