In the quiet of an autumn day, yellow leaves patter around me as I kneel down on the earth beside a fallen tree branch, along a path leading onward into the silent woods. I grasp the log and pull it back, revealing the dark earth below. A centipede blindly rushes for cover, its many legs grasping the earth in waves as it scuttles away; small brown snails clings to the moist under-surface of the wood; springtails catapult to safety; minute mites graze on mold, undisturbed, inhabiting a world of such different scale that to them my existence is vague, like a spirit from an unknown realm.
The earth below the log smells different- moist, cold, ancient. On the edge of my sight something shimmers, a black jewel shining in a sliver of sunlight. I reach out and grasp a little pea-sized ball of life, a black hister beetle, inhabitant of corpses and rotting leaves, hunter of maggots, an avatar of the secret world below our feet, the world from which the substance of our bodies comes, and to which all of us will one day return.
There is something sublime in the world of insects that has called to many naturalists and thinkers through the ages, from Egyptian mythographers, through Aristotle, all the way down to biologists like EO Wilson and William Hamilton. No doubt the fascination goes much further back than the 5,000 or so years of written civilization, back to ancient shamans observing plants in the primal forests of Africa and Australasia, or Ice Age hunters watching the decomposition of a mammoth by beetles and flies.
My love of insects began when I was a boy of 3 or 4, looking under stones in my mother’s garden, picking up bumblebees again and again even after being stung, seeing with a thrill a great water bug, as big as my hand, crawling between the folds of my net. All animals intrigued me (and still do), but the world of arthropods held a fascination which is remains unequaled even after decades of life.
When I went to university, initially to study entomology, I began to seriously collect insects, a habit which has followed me ever since. The thrill of searching through leaf litter after a rare beetle, or finding, tucked under a flower, a perfectly camouflaged assassin bug waiting for an unsuspecting bee, is a feeling of pure magic. To walk through a meadow of summer flowers swaying in a gentle breeze, sweeping my net to find the treasure that hides in every bloom; to peruse the shifting sand beneath driftwood for burrowing rove beetles, or to find a brilliant leaf beetle shining like a jewel among green leaves in the dim light of a jungle path, are moments of sublime wonder that bring one to a meditative state of pure joy.
And attempting to study them is a humbling experience. Gazing upon the rows and rows of beetles or flies arranged in a museum cabinet puts one in mind of the smallness of humanity, the unimaginable complexity of the rest of Creation. It is a sight that, properly considered, should evoke in even the most staunch technologist a sense of existential dread. Here is a tiny subset of the vast spiraling pattern of life, which goes on and on seemingly into infinity, with no thought for the vanities of human ambition. Build the tallest skyscraper or the most complex computer, make an engine to send men to mars, and it will be nothing compared to the intricate beauty of the smallest beetle crawling on a mushroom.
Yet there is a tendency among biologists to ignore the philosophical implications, and the raw spiritual beauty, of their subject. Professional science has always existed as part of the same system which creates machines, which feeds the great Machine of progress, and even the best scientists are seldom immune from the effects of the Creed of Civilization. As the art of natural history began to be subsumed into the science of biology, that sense of wonder began to be lost. I once listened with horror as one of my former professors, now the head of a university entomology department, cheerfully explained her research, which involved attaching electrodes to the brains of beetles, so they could be flown around like little drones.
Eventually, a naturalist to the core, I was unable to continue as a professional biologist, and left college with an English degree and deep disillusionment with the very idea of Science as it exists in modernity. My loyalty will be with the insects and the ecosystems that they and the plant kingdom have created through eons of ecology. Natural history is an art as old as humankind, and she deserves a category of her own in our thought; not to be shoved aside as a poor sister to the emperor ‘Science’. For me and many others, to live life as a part of nature, to study and observe the world for the sheer joy of it: because we are living beings, surrounded by a spiraling, cyclical, sacred web of life, is its own reason and purpose.
These essays are beautiful, Cody. I’m intrigued by your distinction between the art of natural history and the contemporary biological sciences. Are there naturalists whose writings particularly uphold the kind of artistry you value?