by Primo Levi
Just as butterflies are beautiful by definition, and serve as our standard of beauty, similarly caterpillars (“entòmata in difetto,” Dante called them, “like . . . unto insects undeveloped”) are ugly by definition: awkward, slow, stinging, voracious, hairy, dim-witted, they are in their turn symbolic, the symbol of the crude and the unfinished, of perfection unattained.
The two documentaries that accompany the show reveal to us, with the powerful eye of the motion picture camera, something that very few human eyes have ever had a chance to see: the caterpillar suspended in its lofty, temporary grave, the cocoon, transforming itself into an inert chrysalis, and then emerging into the light in the perfect form of the butterfly; the wings are still unusable, weak, like crumpled tissue paper, but in a few moments they strengthen and extend, and the newborn insect takes flight. It’s a second birth, but at the same time it is a death: the creature that flew away is a psyche, a soul, and the torn cocoon that remains on the ground is the mortal remains. In the deeper layers of our consciousness, the butterfly with its agitated flight is a simple soul, a fairy, sometimes even a witch.
The strange name that the butterfly has in English harks back to an ancient northern belief that a butterfly is a sprite that steals butter and milk, or turns them sour; and Acherontia atropos, the large Mediterranean moth with the death’s-head pattern on the thorax, which Gozzano encountered in the villa of Signorina Felicita,1 is a damned soul, “which brings sorrow.” The wings that popular iconography attributes to fairies are not feathered bird wings but the translucent, ribbed wings of a butterfly.
The furtive visit of a butterfly, which Hermann Hesse describes on the last page of his diary, is an ambivalent annunciation, with the flavor of a serene foreshadowing of death. The aged thinker and author, in his Ticinese retreat, sees “something dark, silent, and ghostly” take flight: it is a rare butterfly, a brown-and-violet-winged Nymphalis antiopa, and it lands on his hand. “Slowly, like someone breathing easy, the beauty opened and shut its velvet wings, clinging to the back of my hand with its six fine legs; after a brief instant it vanished, before I even noticed its departure, in the great hot light.”
1. A reference to the poem “La signorina Felicita ovvero la felicità,” by Guido Gozzano (1883–1916).
Fear of Spiders
A very young friend of mine was assigned in third grade to write a paper on insects, and his triumphant opening line ran as follows: “Insects take their name from the fact that they have six legs.” His teacher pointed out to him that their name would have been just as suitable if insects had seven legs, and he replied that there is only a small difference between six legs and seven.
The difference between six legs and eight must be a vastly greater one. Many people, children and adults, women and men, courageous and timid, feel an intense repulsion for spiders, and if you ask them why spiders in particular, they usually answer: “Because they have eight legs.”
I’m not proud to admit that I count myself among their number, and I can never forget one of my most horrifying nights: I must have been nine, and I was in the country, sleeping in a bedroom where the wallpaper had peeled off the wall and therefore amplified sounds like a drum. I was on the verge of sleep when I heard a ticking sound. I turned on the light, and there was the monster: black, all legs, descending toward the night stand with the hesitant yet inexorable gait of Death. I called for help, and the maid crushed the apparition (an innocuous Tegenaria) with unmistakable satisfaction.
This ancient terror of spiders, now dormant, thanks to the disappearance of those adversaries from the urban environment in which I live, came to mind while I was reading an article that appeared in La Stampa a few weeks ago. In it, Isabella Lattes Coifmann describes a number of new discoveries concerning the sex life of spiders. All spiders, from the minuscule scarlet spiders that live in porous rocks to the obese cross spiders that lie in wait, head down, at the center of their geometric webs, fill me with a completely unjustified horror and disgust that is highly specific. I would touch a toad, an earthworm, a rat, a cockroach, or a slug, and, if I were guaranteed to suffer no harm, I’d even touch a scorpion or a cobra; but never a spider. Why?
The answer I quoted above is classic but it is also a non-answer. Obviously, there is no reason that eight legs should be any more repugnant than six or four, even if we conceded the likelihood that we enemies of spiders, before launching into our ritual shiver, were to take the time to count legs; which, come to that, are often seven in number or even fewer, because spiders are subject to accidents (on the road or on the job) at four times the rate of us bipeds, and because, if grabbed by the leg, spiders will happily let it go: they “know” that a new one will grow the next time they molt. Equally unsatisfactory, however, are the other usual responses.
Some say that they hate spiders because they are cruel. So they are, but no more than many other animals. Anyone who has seen a cat toy with a mutilated mouse at death’s door for hours at a time will at most feel pity for the mouse; toward the cat he will experience a sense of understanding, and perhaps a wicked mammalian solidarity, even though the cat’s cruelty is (at least in appearance) more gratuitous and guilty than that of the spider. We cannot subject animals to moral judgments (“for every wish of yours”—that is, theirs—“is nature’s doing”);1 how much less right do we have to export our human moral judgments to animals as distant from us as the arthropods. To judge from the behavior of wounded or amputee spiders and insects, it seems unlikely that they feel anything comparable to what we call pain, and likely on the other hand that our pity for the spider’s victims is wasted: it would be better to channel it toward, say, chickens raised in battery cages, or man’s human victims.
Some hate spiders because they’re “ugly and hairy.” Various spiders are, in fact, hairy, but then, if hair is repellent, why are we happy to touch many other animals covered with hair or fur? In fact, what we love is precisely their hair, with a strange love that drives us to shear them, or even to skin them so that we can adorn ourselves with their pelts. Nor do other fuzzy little creatures, such as honeybees or bumblebees, inspire repulsion in us. As for ugliness, no term could be more ambiguous or questionable: prudence suggests that we restrict its use to the works of man. There is nothing ugly in nature, neither animals nor plants nor stones nor bodies of water, much less are there ugly stars in the sky. We have been taught to describe as ugly (“ugly beast”) certain animals that are considered harmful, but the ugliness of nature ends here.
Do we hate spiders because they lay traps? I believe that this, too, is mere moralizing. If anything, the spider’s web is deserving of admiration; and in fact it is admired by all those who are immune to our phobia or who have overcome it. To witness the hatching of a nest of spiders, which as soon as they emerge from their eggs scatter over a bush and busily set to work, each weaving a web of its own, is to see a wonderful spectacle, not a horrible one. Each of them is no bigger than the head of a pin, but is born a master: without hesitation, without error, it weaves a web the size of a commemorative stamp, and takes up a position to await its tiny prey. It is born adult, and wisdom has been handed down to it along with its shape. It does not need to go to school: is this what strikes horror into us?
There are more daring explanations. Who can stop a psychologist of the subconscious in the performance of his duties? Every weapon in the arsenal has been unleashed upon spiders. Spiders’ fuzziness supposedly has a sexual meaning, and the disgust that we experience therefore points to an unrecognized rejection of sex on our part: that is how we express it, and, by the same token, this is how we will seek to free ourselves of it.
The spider’s method of capturing its prey, by wrapping it in filaments as it lies caught in the web, would seem to make it a mother symbol: the spider is the enemy-mother who envelops and absorbs us, who wants to return us to the womb from which we emerged, swaddle us tightly to lead us back to the helpless state of infancy, to take us back into her power; and there are those
who point out that in nearly all languages the names of spiders are feminine, that the biggest and most beautiful webs are made by female spiders, and that some females devour the male after or while they mate. This last fact is strange and horrendous, when seen from our human point of view, but it doesn’t explain how a strong aversion could derive from an observation that almost no one has made with his own eyes and that very few have learned from books.
I believe that simpler explanations are in order. In Mediterranean countries, spiders are thought to be poisonous, and in Spain and southern Italy the memory of tarantism is still vivid. It was believed that a tarantula bite infected a person with a fatal disease, from which it was possible to recover only by dancing frantically. Today we know that the tarantula is harmless, as are nearly all the spiders in our country, but there isn’t a child, especially in the countryside, who hasn’t been told by his mother, “Don’t touch that, it’s a spider, it’s poisonous”—and childhood memories are lasting.
Perhaps there’s more. The old cobwebs that we find in basements and attics are loaded with symbolic weight: they are the banners of neglect, absence, decay, and oblivion. They veil the works of man, wrapping them as it were in a shroud, as dead as the hands that built them over the years and centuries. And it is impossible to overlook the furtive manner—this, it is true, is extremely specific—in which spiders appear on the scene: not with the warlike buzz of wasps, not with the lightning determination of rats, but through invisible fissures, with the slow and silent step of ghosts; sometimes they drop straight down from a dark ceiling into a cone of lamplight, unexpected, suspended from their metaphysical thread. Spectral also are their nocturnal webs, unseen but sticky on our faces when in the early morning we pass between hedges on a path that no one has yet taken.
As for my own personal and negligible phobia, it has a birth certificate. It is the engraving by Gustave Doré illustrating Arachne in Canto XII of Purgatory, with which I collided as a child. The young woman who dared to challenge Minerva to a competition in the art of weaving is punished by an unholy transfiguration. In the illustration, she is “already half spider,” and she is brilliantly depicted backward, with her buxom breasts where you would expect to see her back, while from her back six gnarled, hairy, painful legs have issued: six, which with the desperately flailing arms make eight. Kneeling before the newborn monster, Dante seems to be contemplating its pudenda, half disgusted, half voyeur.
1. From Leopardi’s “Il passero solitario” (“The Solitary Thrush”).
The Force of Amber
If you rub amber with a cloth, a few odd and minor things happen: you will hear a crackling, in the dark you will see sparks, bits of straw and scraps of paper that are placed near it will dance crazily. In Greek, amber was called elektron; until about 1600 those effects had not been observed on any other substances, and they were therefore called electrical effects. To name a thing is as gratifying as naming an island, but it can be dangerous, too: the danger lies in the way you persuade yourself that the hard part is done, and that whatever you have just named has also been explained.
Now, until well into the nineteenth century, no one suspected that the little game you could play with amber was a signal to be deciphered: that it was an annunciation—in the form of a riddle—of a force that would change the face of the world, and that the lovely sparks shared the nature of lightning. Nonetheless, all Western languages have preserved the term “electricity,” that is, “the force of amber”; only the Hungarians have coined a neologism that, more logically, amounts to “the force of lightning.”
Today it is generally known that electrical effects can be obtained by rubbing certain solid objects together, but it is usually overlooked that comparable phenomena can also be generated by the friction of a liquid against a solid. I found this out many years ago in a dramatic fashion.
It was summertime. In the factory courtyard there was an aboveground storage tank that held ten tons of solvent. A factory worker approached, with a container in his hand: he intended to fill it, just as he and other workers had done countless times over the years. He opened the petcock on the storage tank, and the solvent came out in flames, as if from a flamethrower. The factory worker hurled the container away from him and ran off to give the alarm. Meanwhile the liquid continued to pour out: a burning puddle had formed on the ground, spreading rapidly and threatening to invade the production areas.
An experienced, courageous man who happened to be on the spot came to the rescue (to everyone’s immense good fortune): he managed to make his way between the flames and the storage tank and close the petcock, after which the fire died down without causing any serious damage. This spontaneous ignition of a fairly ordinary substance seemed mysterious and magical, but then I found the explanation in a specialized handbook: certain liquids, extremely pure hydrocarbons among them, become electrified if they flow through conduits at velocities higher than given limits.
Between the storage tank and the petcock, in fact, there was a fairly narrow stretch of pipe; the factory worker must have opened the petcock in a single move, and the liquid had become electrified over the short distance. That was the first withdrawal of the day, but already it was late morning and the sun was shining; therefore, the liquid had sat in the pipe for a long time, long enough to be heated to a temperature above its ignition point. There must have been a small spark, perhaps between the petcock and the liquid itself, and the ignition followed.
A subtle danger, then: neither obvious nor banal. How to defend against it? According to the handbook mentioned, there are substances that, if added in very small quantities to the hydrocarbons, make them sufficiently conductive to eliminate the risks due to the “force of amber.” It struck us as strange and absurd that these concepts were so little known, even among people who handle solvents; in any case, we adopted the additive prescribed, and from then on, whether because of it or not, nothing of the sort ever happened again.
On another occasion, however, I myself came close to unleashing that force, through an excess of zeal and sheer ignorance. It was the morning of December 31 and the factory was closed. The security guard called me on the phone and told me to hurry down; on the road, outside the front gate, a tanker trailer full of gasoline had just overturned, and he didn’t know what to do. I told him to call the fire department, and, just in case, I set out myself, preparing for an unusual New Year’s Eve.
I found a sinister scene. The truck driver, out of either caution or fear, had unhooked the truck cab, which was also filled with gasoline, and had disappeared with it into the fog. The tanker trailer was lying on one side, across the road from the factory, and gasoline was gushing out of the cover (which hadn’t been closed properly, or had come unbolted at impact). It was very cold and the gasoline, instead of evaporating, was pooling in the adjoining field.
A short while later, the fire department showed up; we went into a huddle and decided that the first thing to do was right the tanker trailer, but that would require a crane; they phoned the garage to have a crane sent out, but I said that it seemed dangerous to attach a hook to the trailer in that atmosphere saturated with gasoline fumes: the impact of steel against steel could produce sparks. So the firemen proposed covering everything with foam, the trailer, the road, and the field, and it was done in a flash, after which the field became snowy white, and was lovely to behold.
While we waited for the crane, and as the gasoline continued to pour out and flow away under the blanket of foam, another danger occurred to me. As the fuel tank gradually emptied, air entered to replace the gasoline, but that air was saturated with flammable vapors: this could result in the formation of an explosive mixture, and you couldn’t rule out the possibility of a spark being struck for some reason—during the lifting operations, from the impact of a monkey wrench banging against metal, or even from the friction of the gasoline pouring out. Who could say whether this gasoline contained the notorious additive?
I told the lieutenant fire
man that it might be wise to fill the emptying tank with inert gas. In the factory we had plenty of CO2 fire extinguishers: we could cautiously lift the lid, spray in the carbon dioxide, and close it again. The lieutenant approved; night had fallen, and we began the operation in the glare of spotlights. One after the other, we emptied five or six fire extinguishers into the half-full tank (the other half was still full of gasoline, because of the angle of the overturned vehicle), then we shut the lid again.
In the meantime, the cold had intensified and the fog had grown thicker; everyone else in the world, in the warmth of home, was getting ready to celebrate, and we felt abandoned. The firemen ran up and down like tightrope walkers on the rubber hoses of the foam pump, because the mixture in the hoses was beginning to freeze. The overturned tanker, covered with foam, had taken on the appearance of a centuries-old wreck.
At last the crane arrived, just before midnight, and along with it arrived champagne, through whose generosity I can no longer remember, whether it was the local police or the fuel company or the factory. The tanker trailer was righted, we slapped one another on the back in good cheer and to warm ourselves up, and we drank a toast to the new year, the success of the operation, and the danger we had avoided.
Two days later I learned that the danger we had avoided was even more serious than we had imagined. In another book, just as obscure as the first, I read that CO2 fire extinguishers are excellent for putting out fires after they’ve started, but they should absolutely never be sprayed at flammable solvents to prevent a blaze. As the carbon dioxide rushes violently out the nozzle, it cools and condenses into needles of dry ice; as they brush past the nozzle itself, they are electrified and generate sparks that can ignite the solvent before the atmosphere has become inert, or when the extinguisher is empty. The book described a terrible fire with an explosion that took place in the Netherlands: dozens of people were killed, and it had been started by the improper use of a CO2 fire extinguisher.