Luminous Lepidoptera and the Lumbering Human Keeper
To think. To taste and feel. All with your feet. And to fly, no matter how short and circular the distance, how futile the circumference. We love butterflies. We adore them in the way we love all things that are almost broken, that are absolutely beautiful. We symbolise them when there is no need, when their paper thin presence and luminous flutter means everything they can and should.
It would be strange to know what they think of us, but looking into their compound eyes, fractured eyes, elegant and ghastly, you would think, and you would be right in thinking that they think nothing at all of us.
And why would they. Not a matter of intelligence or perception. We never cross paths. How strange you might think. Summer time companions, in linen draped backyards and flower lined patios. There they are, and how we look and breathe, even the biggest and most brutal of us, we let our eyes follow and rise and drop with them, but we shall never know each other, we and the butterfly.
To taste and feel with your feet and drink with your nose and recognise through the indefinite convection circularity of pheromone turn-ons. Nothing we will ever know and what a shame we will never know. They know where home is, host plants with their chemical beacons, and they know instantly, and we can spend a lifetime searching for that one word. Perhaps that is the simple beauty of it. There instantaneous finding of things, of each other.
We are incapable with our words and ideas and hostile concepts. We are no longer able to smell our mate and our loved ones, only in the crook of their arm and only after we have found them. The butterfly just knows. It has to because it has been told. Chemical certainty. It is not poetry, but it becomes poetic when we think of it, when we paint the colors that make things beautiful, when we cannot be beautiful on our own.
Butterflies are unusual creatures. Compound eyes that can only see the margins of movement, the soft gradation between light and dark. Alien and strange receptors scattered all over fragile skin, powder on wings, and how the wind can shift and make their skin jitter and jump, force their hands in war or love. They are intensely chemical creatures unlike their admirers and benefactors.
We embroil ourselves in things at rest. The more cultured of us can stare at a painting for hours and we will toddle off home and write books and odes. We will gently take in the sight of a loved one in sleep and turn in our ever pondering minds what it means to love and cherish. We, like the butterfly, are also built to notice change and shift, we are always calculating and adjusting contrast and saturation, playing the jigsaw puzzle of form and distinction, but we look away and turn our minds and eyes and ears and fingers to things at rest and we wonder.
Does the butterfly have time? Does it know how precarious its perch? All i am willing to assume is that their minute would have no equal in our obese conception of time. 20 beats of their wings per second, a molecule can attach to a receptor site in 1/50,000th of a second. That is how long it takes them to know something, without doubt or reflection and they move accordingly, diagonal motions following things that we cannot perceive or know. The scent and chemical touch of a lover from 2 feet away, the distance across a room, confounded by our distraction.
Butterflies dance in twos, drawing ribbons of motion around each other, the female always larger, the male always the dandy and small, fragrant and mascaraed around circles of translucent colored light. He beats his wind so as to carry the stench towards his coveted, and this is what he does well, most of all he covets and stalks and waits for rest, for the female to lightly touch down, to spread her wings and invite.
They mate tail to tail, no need for the gentle caress of the face, their wings touch and make their lover's duvet. They mate for hours,12 at a time. When they touch like this, they give the major part of their lives. 12 hours out of 72, they will not live to see their children grow, will not see the 95% that perish without suffering the gruesome change that leaves us with these winged flowers.
We spend 3/4 of our lives trying to figure out exactly what our purpose is, what ties us into the fabric of things out there. They spend 3/4 of their lives in the glory of it, in the quiet embrace of it, and they needed no thought and no word to bring it to them. The complexity of their interaction with the world ( and it would be a sad thing to ever underestimate it) is distilled into this one experience, finding a home and chasing the one you want to share it with.