photograph by Steve Irvine

The caption at National Geographic reads:

July 2011
Canada—Fluttering wings leave lacy trails as moths beat their way to a floodlight on a rural Ontario lawn. The midsummer night’s exposure, held for 20 seconds, captured some of the hundreds of insects engaged in a nocturnal swarm.

Can you imagine! This is what our night skies always look like and we just can’t see it without the aid of technology.

I think it’s something with the way the two genres affect my mind, but when I read them together it’s as if they start a feed-back loop and my mind starts making weird connections, not static exactly, but definately off-the-wall cognitive shots. So for example, I am re-reading Woolf’s The Waves, and there is Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury along with Sherman Alexie’s books. Add to that a book called The End of Illusion: the end of literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, one called Proust and the Squid (great title), one on the philosophy of mind. There’s another on religion and the american mind and one by Foss that’s become a bit of an obsession (can’t seem to let it go, it’s just such a wonderful idea).

So I started dreaming about moths. My son, who sends me random topics to write about, sent me one about moths and their propensity to immolate themselves in candle flame and haunt floodlights. He sent me the topic some weeks ago, but I haven’t done anything about it because I could feel that whatever I thought of moths wasn’t ready to come out through the fingers. I suppose reading Woolf was bound to trigger a connection there. And the other books, those too – like somehow they are growing toward each other, sparking against each other, but only, it seems, when I turn my head, when I am not looking directly, but as Dickinson said, looking aslant.

So I have moths in my head.

Did you know that there is a theory that the reason male moths dive into candle flame is that the light emits a frequency also emitted by female moths ready to mate? Then there’s the moon theory, the idea that moths (normally nocturnal) are guided by the need to keep bright lights at a certain spatial location, and of course floodlights and probably modernity generally, muck up that previously perfectly functional instinct. (Something to consider with respect to human instincts and post-modernity, and probably the connection my mental moths are making to Proust and the Squid and maybe to The Empire of Illusion.)

So I dreamt about moths with wings made of water and white flowers, growing, a great white bell of a flower hung down toward the earth, and out of its mouth fell, fertilized by the moth, its joint seed, a great white moon.

For me this all has something to do with how the mind works. I have absolutely no clarity about this, but if my past processes hold, if I keep reading, keep calm in the storm of confusion, one day the bazillion moths fluttering in the great cavity that is my head, will begin to dance together, and then the emerging pattern will start to make sense. I will be able to interpret the bits and their relationships and some new understanding will come of it.

I’m going to leave this post here. I suspect, however, the moths will show up again as the weeks proceed.