Come April, both the Great Southern and the Northern Illinois Broods will appear in Chicago, numbering some trillion cicadas. The last time such a dual emergence happened was in 1803. The cacophony will be tremendous.
By far the greater part of a cicada’s lifespan is spent underground. After seventeen years, life above lasts only from four to six weeks. Its first real threat is the possum, which lazily snatches up the insects as they surface in mating season. This seems like a cruel joke on Nature’s part. How could any creature born in darkness ever refuse the promise of breeze and light? Nothing is immune; no one choses prison and the larger the prison, the easier it is to pay the highest price. When it rains, worms wriggle up through the damp soil. They follow the rich moisture upward only to perish, lying beached and bloated on the concrete. Radiance kills—water, too. But this view is raw determinism, a dewormed analysis of the situation. (Pavlovian tests only prove that the observer is a Pavlovian) For the cicada, the open world does look like a slaughterhouse at first. Yet numbers are on their side. During those years down in the earth, the cicada mastered the art of patience, starving out many of the predators who waited in vain above. The other survival initiative of the cicada is sheer reproduction. Every birth is a rebirth, expansion against extinction (a great inverse numbers game), the overcoming of death in a teeming wave. The air will be taken over by the cicadas. Then they will seize the ground, littering it with their dry bodies like so many rusty nails. Life is not a game to be won but a cold mechanics. Yet this apparatus hums in all orders, Tettigarctidae and Cicadidae, 3000 species of cicada, our northern one called Magicicada, pulsating from the corrugated exoskeleton as its muscles relax or by the strident rubbing of its wings, each species at a different height (literally, in the trees) and in a different pitch, churring and chorusing, coupling or distressed, the whole racket a still motion, cryptic and unbridled, cracking the wind and shattering the alley.
We make many things of this insect. Jade cicada amulets were much prized in China, and the monk protagonist of the Journey to the West bears the epithet of the Golden Cicada. In the Tang Dynasty classic, The Thirty-Six Stratagems, “to shed the shining cicada skin" means to use a decoy to fool the enemy. The insect appears in Homer and Aesop, and in the Philippines, the goddess of dusk, Sisilim, is heralded by cicadas as she wanders the land before nightfall. The Japanese cicada, Meimuna opalifera, pronounces the end of summer. Summer expires but the insect is spared the knowledge of its own seasonal death. Bashō’s haiku says it best: In the cicada's cry/ is no sign/ it will soon die. The cicada has always been beautiful, even if some call it a pest.
Certain bugs are rare and delicate, others are just ordinary; the least of them are hated and crushed. This prejudice has the unnatural selection of myth behind it. The scarab is regal and heavenly. Scarab-headed Khepri, the Egyptian god of the morning sun, renews life each day. But the lower we go into the dunghills and mulch, the farther away the brilliant insect appears and the less we treasure the species. Some Buddhist monks practice ahimsa by ringing small brass bells to warn all living things of their approach; the devout Jain considers the killing of an insect as murder or manslaughter (if taking a life is permitted once, it will be acceptable a million times). The rest of us flatten the phylum Arthropoda underfoot, loping around ignorantly, never bothering to look down, fascinated only by ourselves. If we respected the cockroach, perhaps it could teach us how to be more stoic when we too are trampled underfoot.
The air was once full of insects. So many are now extinct. The global insect population has declined by 75% over the last fifty years. Which means our extinction also, written in the empty atmosphere. Where are the harvestmen, the incomparable lightning bugs, the bees and other astounding flying creatures? Does anyone truly mourn them, miss the lines their little bodies describe against the sky and their minuscule worlds, vaster than outer space and more miraculous than any legend? Well—the flies are still here. Flies are less musical than cicadas and not as mystical as the scarab. Their song is lower, baser, without that lulling homopteran drone. The fly-god is terrible Baal, Canaan’s eater of children, Ba’al Zevev (Baal of the Flies). Flies are universally loathed for signaling rot and reminding us that warmth is also decay, putrefaction and spoil. Soon they will be the only insect companions left to us. Perhaps it’s time to try to appreciate them.
Flies were not always just corpse-settlers or gluttons for excrement. In an ancient Babylonian poem, a fly helps the goddess Inanna when her husband is pursued by demons. Flies adorned the jewelry of the time—bluebottles made of lapis lazuli, horsefly wings of gold, tsetses of white silver. When the above-mentioned Baal later became Beelzebub, the fly grew foul in the eyes of the servants of the monolithic God[i]. Small and devious, a harbinger of ruin, a symbol for all that is petty and maliciously ironic in Providence and the natural world. In the 1958 film The Fly, after an experiment goes horribly wrong, the scientist Delambre is turned into a monstrosity half human and half fly. He is the loneliest of all men, head covered in cloth like an abused prophet, waving an obscene insectoid claw instead of a surgeon’s steady hand. When his wife sees his swollen Diptera head, her screaming face is multiplied a dozen times in his compound eye, a geometric mockery of identical women screaming in abject terror at the sight of two great orbs and million filthy, buzzing setae. As the doctor, Al Hedison gives a portrayal of existential solitude that is almost unbearable to watch. He moves in an uncertain, stumbling bluish buzz, preposterous and isolated, caught between demonic chance and a cartoon destiny. I wouldn’t hurt a fly… At the end, he is flattened by a hydraulic press, an end to torment made possible only with the help of a woman who dared to love a fly.
Flies are as extraordinary as spiders, cicadas, or scarabs. Like the more revered insects, they walk on ceilings and can soar to an altitude of 3000 feet. Romeo envies the fly sitting on Juliet’s hand, and William Blake saw the hazards of fate in the knee-jerk killing of a fly. John Clare wrote memorably of sharing the world with these banal insects: These little window dwellers, in cottages and halls, were always entertaining to me; after dancing in the window all day from sunrise to sunset they would sip of the tea, drink of the beer, and eat of the sugar, and be welcome all summer long…
Though it is named calliphora vomitoria, the bluebottle is a phosphorescent cobalt-green color, utterly unique in nature. No one has captured it on canvas or camera. And the fly has helped solve countless crimes by laying its eggs in the dead, thus making it possible to pinpoint the time of murder. Like the more exalted butterfly, flies are also attracted to flowers and nectar. This resilient, audacious creature touches down where it pleases and does not know fear. Flies have the guts to land on you and you spill out their guts for it. When you expire, the sons of this fly will return to sit undisturbed on your nose. Flies do not even want to be indoors. Your room is a stifling pit to them. After failing time and again to liquidate this little guest, the hysterical human flings open doors and windows even in the most frigid weather (How many fools have died by pneumonia this way, cursing the fly on their way out?). Finally, the fly is despised because it reminds us of our own waste. Its zizz is the wingbeat of our own self-disgust, two hundred times per second.
Both the fly and the cicada fascinated the great entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris (1797 – 1867). She was the first to discover that there were different species of cicada by simply listening to their song, and it was she who first investigated their subterranean lives. Though she lacked so-called formal education, she was tutored by the foremost naturalists and botanists of her day, becoming the first woman elected to American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850. She was also in touch with Charles Darwin (In their correspondence, Darwin dismisses several of her assertions about the water beetle which later proved to be quite correct). Miss Morris spent her entire life in Germantown, Pennsylvania, dying there in 1867.
Among her papers, we note a curious letter to the famous naturalist William Gambel, April 13 1848. She writes to him concerning the superb drawings she had sent to illustrate one of his academic papers, but more importantly, she speaks of her deep affinity with insects. She speculates that perhaps her hearing is attuned to their bodies in a particularly acute way. This attention to distinct intervals and tones is common to musicians, but Miss Morris states that she has never been musical nor had any real interest in the art. She goes on to say she feels an almost “mechanized” vibration in her own abdomen in sympathy with the cicada, accompanied by a slight stiffness in her back muscles, as if some physical characteristic, long absent in mankind, was being “recalled by the insensible history of the (human) body.” True to her calling as a scientist, she does not equate this sensitivity with any kind of mysticism or occult power, both of which she calls “laughable” and “a childish reliance, devoid of real observation and mental rigour.” She speaks of electrical charges (“clearly manifest and theoretically capable of measurement in frequency and intensity”) and considers the possibility of a “retrograde mutation” in the evolution of the ear in certain people. These clinical descriptions of her physical susceptivity to insect sound—and perhaps we might also add her passionate defense of women as being just as capable of, if not naturally more inclined toward, scientific study and practice than men—are all we have of anything remotely personal in her correspondence, published work, and public statements.
It is well known that the Kipsigis people of Kenya thought that the great American singer Jimmie Rogers was part gazelle because they found his voice so beautiful. Of course, ethnomusicologists have taken this as a crude factual statement rather than as a poetic term which is both literal and analogous at the same time. Using the same language, we can understand what Miss Morris had intimated to her learned correspondent above, quite cautiously, almost as if she were herself the last to know: That she suspected she might be half cicada.
It will be more than twenty years before the twin broods emerge again in the Midwest. Who will be around to see it? In insects and in time, in space and in thought, we can almost make out the vague outlines—erratic and eccentric, like the footprints flies leave in sugar or the flight of arrows that miss their target—of a circle forming in the dust of words.
[i] Yet this is also a crude generalization. Consider this elegy to the fly as the epitome of God’s creation by the great mystical poet and theologian, Thomas Traherne (c. 1637-1674): “That verie Flie being made alone the Spectator, and enjoyer of the Universe had been a little, but Sensible, King of Heaven and Earth. Had some Angel or Pure Intelligence, been Created to consider him, doubtless he would hav been amazed at the Height of his Estate… The Infinit Workmanship about his Body, the Marvellous Consistence of his Lims, the most neat and Exquisit Distinction of his Joynts, the Subtile, and Inperceptible Ducture of his Nerves… the stupendous union of his Soul and Body the Exact and Curious Symmetry of all his Parts… the vigor of his Resentments, his Passions, and Affections, his Inclinations, and Principles, the Imaginations of his Brain, and the Motions of his Heart, would make him seem a Treasurie wherein all Wonders were shut up together, and that God had done as much in little there, as he had done at large in the whole World. “ And the Jewish Midrash, though less effusive, reminds us in the B'reshith Rabba that “Our Rabbis said: Even those things that you may regard as completely superfluous to Creation – such as fleas, gnats and flies—even they were included in Creation…” Both flies and worms appear as Divinely-appointed teachers in several Islamic hadīth and in the Holy Qur’an.