On Being Tickled by Insects
Mark but this flea.
— John Donne, ‘The Flea’
Now it is summer, so I read outside and write in my notebook. If I sit beneath a tree, or in the grass, I am interrupted by insects: a fly lands on this page, a spider falls onto my shirt. I’m trying to make sense of why I read, why I’m writing. In their books about writing, Annie Dillard and Marguerite Duras write about little insects: in The Writing Life, Dillard describes the writer as probing, ‘delicate as a worm’, but then interrupts herself to notice the absurdity and wretchedness of every inchworm she has seen; in Writing, Duras spends nearly ten pages describing the time that she watched a fly die in her house—the house in which, as she points out in the first sentence of the book, she is never alone.[1]
I have sensed the difference between insects and other animals. When I notice this fly, it is because it flicks against my skin and tickles my hand—not because I see it. Very few living things touch us before we see them. (What gives them the right?) And when we see insects, how often do we actually look at them? There is clearly something strange about what Dillard and Duras have done. We take insects as less than animals, less even than objects: they are like particles of ambience, tangible only when they irritate us. As if their solidity depends on us.
With Duras, writing brings solidity to the fly that is very nearly dead. She describes how she sat still by it and watched silently as it struggled to control its little weight, how it ‘struggled up to the last spasm’ and then succumbed. She says, ‘now it is written.’ What is different about this fly is that it has been written about—that we are still talking about it. (That makes me think of the idea that people die twice: once when their bodies die, and finally when they are remembered for the last time. Flies too?) At the end, Duras says that she could have just watched, and not written; and to do so, she says, would be to forget the fly and to notice it just for a moment, ‘terrible and accounted for, in an unknown sky, made of nothing.’ So maybe she writes not to forget, but doesn’t it seem that to ‘forget’ here is not just to lose a memory, but to let something die (twice)?
I read Hélène Cixous say that she started writing to repel death.[2] ‘It goes like this,’ she writes: ‘you die in my absence. While Isolde is not there, Tristan turns to the wall and dies. What happens between that body and that wall, what doesn’t happen, pierces me with pain and makes me write.’ After reading this, I can’t help but think of the wall that Duras watched a fly die on. When Duras pointed out a spot on the wall to her friend, and ‘told her a fly had died there at three twenty’, her friend laughs. Why? Because she didn’t write anything? Because she was in the same place that Duras would have been in, had she not written and thus forgot? It is as if the things we experience are lonely enough that they might die without our presence; that without being written they will remain as little ambient particles, unformed and indistinct, not quite alive.
And so Cixous sees writing as a recovery from the fragility that comes when we are not quite alive, when we ask: why live? Why me? Like Duras, Cixous finds madness and solitude in the drive to write. ‘Madwomen: the ones who are compelled to redo acts of birth every day. … I wasn’t born for once and for all. Writing, dreaming, delivering; being my own daughter of each day.’ What the fly and I have in common is that I won’t live forever, either; but when I write I am more aware of why I am living, or of who this ‘I’ is, anyway. I write to become more, to become less capable of forgetting myself.
Becoming more. There must be something in Dillard’s choice of an inchworm, ‘the caterpillar larva of several moths or butterflies.’ Its destiny is to metamorphose and to become something else (or more than one thing: I like that she says ‘several’). Nothing dies in Dillard’s description; the inchworm ‘wears out its days’, clutching at a grass stem with its tiny feet, turning one way and the other before finding its footing and moving forward, but always—Dillard supposes—seeming a little lost. Its expression (does an inchworm have an expression? Does it have a ‘face’?) seems to say ‘What? No further? End of world?’ Before it manages to take a step, what lies ahead of it looks like the end.
So the inchworm—which, Dillard already told us, is just like the writer—exists between fate and randomness. While it waits to become a moth, the grass bends any which way beneath its ‘wee weight’. I suppose there is some point to be made here about the fragility of life and the certainty of death. But really I’m thinking about how, in writing—in the middle of writing—it is easy to be lost in the grass and to have forgotten why the writing began. (I started writing this thing a few days ago; now I can’t remember why.) Fate and destiny and direction concern us only when we reach the end of the line. ‘The bright wideness surprises you; you had forgotten there was an end. You look back at the ladder’s two feet on the distant grass, astonished.’
I cannot look forward at what is unwritten, at what Duras calls the ‘unknown sky’; I must step forward and let the grass bend beneath me, and only then can I look back and make sense of what I’ve done. Or, on the human scale rather than the insect scale, there is what Nietzsche said: ‘There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.’[3]
Dillard gives us the sentence, ‘You are-writing a book.’ I love this hyphen: as if what I am is swallowed by what I am doing, or as if what I am doing is constituting what I am. I have a sense that what I have before I write is less than words, less even than thoughts. It becomes tangible only when I make it solid—when I am tickled by it.
[1] Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 7-8. Marguerite Duras, Writing, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 28-36.
[2] Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4-5.
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 129.