When I first arrived I let men spray poisons and I lived alone.
Something called time did something like pass and just as I became ready for
company, the toxins wore thin and evaporated.
The surfaces
once again became organic
trailing with smells, with food, with my five fingers of I didn’t even know what.
Over the years, as the wood rotted and the water leaked and the cracks appeared, ants
built pheromone freeways extending all the way from their somewhere nests into my
kitchen and life. I watched them and tried not to harm them.
An ant expert who keeps ants in a Tupperware container in a lab said she doesn’t have
empathy for ants because they “don’t get discouraged or care”, but I do:
have empathy, get discouraged, care.
The queen, an ovary machine, sits in the nest laying eggs.
Virgin queens of formicidae fly outside my field of vision; whole cities are
constructed, communist colonies flourish, attended by workers, soldiers and drones.
The commensal, parasitic, mimetic swarm rises, the kingdom.
Animalia, arthropoda, insecta, hymenoptera, apocrita, vespoidea.
The morphology: elbowed antennae, exoskeleton.
They have no lungs you know.
Lungless, oxygen passes through spiracles.
All but blind, their eyes of tiny lenses — three atop the head — do not, I’m told,
see me bent down in study.
The expert calls them “incompetent”, marvels
at how “mindless individuals collectively can do so much”, yet even she cannot deny
the intrigue and pathos of one ant carrying the carcass of a larger ant on its back,
laboriously transporting the corpse, to eat, to mourn, to mystery.
What emerges from this emergence and who are we to say?
King Solomon instructed, “Look to the ants, consider her ways and be wise”.
Work together, yes?
See what hive mind holy order takes shape when we forget ourselves.
See what great works create when we are small, become ourselves.
Ants have no corporations, no stock markets, no matchstick factories crammed with
brown bodies earning less in a month than what I ate for lunch.
They’re working with the tide, working with the weather, working with the light, with
the drop of juice from a peach.
The problem was that I was killing them. I tried not to, but
the numbers overwhelmed me. They
found the bin so I moved it. I left no food out and washed the dishes,
but still they came in scattered fews or marching columns or frantic dozens and an
inadvertent plate would land on one, or
I’d notice too late the bodies swimming in a tiny pool of sink water.
I rescued those I could, in elaborate operations of relocations balanced on the flashing
silver of a clean butter knife, but the casualities were many and I grieved every one.
For their own good,
to stem the kamikaze flow,
I summoned a handyman to block up the cracks
they filed in and out of.
Widely held to be the most successful species on the planet,
with territories everywhere but Antarctica, ants
farm fight garden have generals organize wars keep livestock and
slaves nurse young engineer tunnel build design have no boss:
they do all this nearly blind and brainless, drawing diagrams, routes, fortuitous
architecture, information loops.
Traffic, signals,
neighborhoods of pheromones,
look closely at the ants,
at the antness in the whole and
you come to the crucial question: where is the thought?
Where is/the thought?
Where is it ever?
“Buried in the system” says some boffin. “Ants as authors” says another. A Princeton
biologist has an “ant map” of evolutionary errors. The death of the author! “Does the
painting materialize on its own”? Who makes a society?: “Everybody and nobody”,
neurons firing off each other in bodies firing off each other. Finally, a mathematician
weighs in: “No cell in your 100 billion cells in your brain is having a thought, but
together they are.”
Thank you. That is helpful.
The cell that alone is as mindless as an ant makes thought only in concert with the
other cells; the cellular ensemble makes sensation, motivation.
Together the cells are getting dressed to go to work, making love, deciding what to
cook for dinner, perpetrating genocide, adopting a child, writing a novel, playing a
cello, paying the phone bill, meditating, posting a photo to social media, heading to
court.
The ants that individually respond mindlessly to a chemical united build a nest. And
then there are equations outside of math. Each ant, like a cell, unable to think,
together make thoughts in action, make vibrating scents/sense, make super circuitries
like the Internet, deep in the earth, in my kitchen walls.
“Who conducts?” someone asks.
Wrong question.
“What is consciousness?” asks another. Listen: they exist.
Six legs attached to mesosoma, with a hooked claw at the end of each leg; nuptial
flight; larvae; pupa; sound; touch; pheromonian orchestra conducted with antennae.
“A crushed ant emits an alarm pheromone that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy
and attracts more ants from further away.”
Thriving in biomass, mutualistic presence making sounds by stridulation. “Some ant
species use ‘propaganda pheromones’ to confuse enemy ants, causing them to fight
among themselves.” What, then, is the right question, or are there already too many
questions for such obvious answers?
So the handyman comes to plug up holes and cracks.
Stomps in heavy-limbed and hard-done-by, all
resentful niceness like cheap cologne splashed over a stench,
talks to his apprentice like shit.
The apprentice takes it, wears it, hovers covered in the shame, holds in his pain, his
anger, his accent, because he might not feel he has the option to say “I quit” in his
language, and the handyman looks at me exasperated and says, “So, you want the
cracks plugged up. It’s an old window. Why bother?”
Because of the ants, I say; I want them to stop getting in so I don’t accidently kill
them. He starts filling up holes and cracks and then he turns to me, his face a pall of
contempt and spits, “Why don’t you just use some spray? They’re only ants!”
I don’t have the time and energy to explain, cause often cells outside me form a
thought I cannot change; I look him in his wide sure eye and say: because I like them.
He shakes his head and sighs, goes back to his work.
“Buried in the system”, I think — my cells, collectively, think.
“Who conducts?”
I have the answer, I long to tell him.
I have the answer: they want to live.