Horrors Of The Insect World

For a third of my life, I was afraid of spiders.  A common phrase in the argot of children is “spider bite.”  Spiders, we knew, having been told by other children and helpful adults, would bite us at any provocation.   And God help the child who slept open-mouthed, inviting a spider to drop in from the ceiling.  A black widow could kill you.  So could tarantulas, which were bigger than your hand.

The deadliness of tarantulas was nonsense, as I knew from book learning.  And in any case there were no tarantulas in the Southern Tier of upstate New York, where I was raised.  But the webs of black widows could be found in sheds and outhouses.  These webs were disorganized and foggy-looking, and if you poked them with a stick they sounded like crackling cellophane.  I left the poking to others, always standing at the rear, ready to bolt if the deadly arachnid ran up the stick, which of course it never did.

Eventually I came to understand that spiders not only don’t want to bite you, but their venom, designed to work upon insects, is often too weak to affect a human.  Regardless, all through childhood and into my mid-twenties, I dreaded spiders and killed them if they were proximate.

I recall an incident from my late teens. Seated in the loo, I am startled when a large spider falls from the shower curtain onto the tiled floor.  Without even taking a moment to get its bearings, it rushes toward my stockinged feet.  Desperately I reach for a plastic cup from the sink and place it over the oncoming spider.  At the close of the digestive process I leave the cup where it is and pad to the bedroom where I know there is a fly swatter on my dresser. But before I get there, from the bathroom a few paces behind me comes the unmistakable sound of the plastic cup toppling over onto the tile.  I backtrack and peer around the corner of the bathroom door.  The cup is resting on its side.  There is no sign of the spider.  For the rest of the day and night I am troubled to think that this alarmingly clever and strong fellow is lurking somewhere, and will crawl upon me when I fall asleep.

All of this changed one summer day when I was a graduate student at Ohio University.  Athens was warmer than my northeastern habitat, and I discovered that the jumping spiders of the region were large and vivid.  Mind you, these were spiders I admired on white picket fences.  I did not want to see them in my home.

On the day in question, I was relaxing on my sofa when I noticed a dark spot moving slowly across a curtain.  I investigated.  It was Phidippus audax, a jumping spider.  A big hairy one.

I went to the window dressing with a tennis ball can, my standard tool for capturing insects and transporting them outside.  But Phidippus wasn’t having it.  He jumped off the curtain onto the sill, and eluded every approach of the can.  There would be no capturing him.  He had to die.

I found a magazine and rolled it up, feeling sorry for what I was about to do.  But this was a scary-looking spider, damn it.  Phidippus had by now jumped to the window screen and was a nice, fat target.  I swung the magazine, but Phidippus was too fast and jumped back on the sill.  I swung again.  Once more the spider escaped, scurrying into a corner.  I had him now—I could drive the top of the rolled-up magazine into the corner and smush his life away.  It will be a quick death, I told myself.  Slowly, I moved in for the kill.

Seek the image of Phidippus audax—in a book or online—and you will note his black beady eyes, his large, green or blue pedipalps, and the spikey punk-rocker hairs sticking up on his head.  You will either be horrified or enchanted.  Why the latter?  I am not wise enough to say, but in fact when I gazed upon the face of this specimen, cowering in the corner, waving its forelimbs at me in what I took as a gesture of entreaty, my feelings were transformed.  The spider suddenly looked appealing. Even—dare I say it—cute.  In retrospect I am not surprised.   If you approach a jumper (which is what their fans call them—yes, they have fans, check it out on Facebook) that is walking across a picnic table, it will stop and look at you, raising the register of its eyes to take you in.  Move to the side and the spider will turn its body to follow you.  You can do this repeatedly, and Phidippus will continue to rotate, maintaining eye contact.  The first time I observed this behavior I was astonished—and charmed—to behold a creature so very small that engaged me, a veritable colossus, in an aware and forthright manner.

The jumper on my windowsill did the same thing, watching my every move with staring eyes and quivering pedipalps.  It became a personality, and killing it was unthinkable.

I tossed the magazine aside and stood for a while watching Phidippus watching me.  Tentatively, he left his corner and hopped back on the screen.  This time, with slower movements I was able to coax him into the can.  I went to the back porch and allowed him to crawl from the can onto the wooden railing.  “Off you go,” I said.

From that day on I have not killed a spider, or any other insect besides mosquitoes and deer flies that are biting me.  Strike that—there was one other insect that I could not bear to cohabit with until recently: the house centipede.  You’ve all seen them.  Lightning fast, with more legs than any living thing should be allowed to have.  The centipedes I have flattened probably number in the double figures, and I take no hunter’s pride in that tally.  Finally, after years of embattlement I simply decided not to kill them, because they intend no harm and are voracious predators of undesirable insects.  Another reason was that a centipede’s legs will continue to vibrate after its slender body has been squashed to a pulp, a nightmare image I hope never to see again.

Despite my touchy-feely description of the encounter with Phidippus, I acknowledge that the insect realm can be viewed as horrifying.  Relentless and innumerable, insects come at us in stealth or in swarms.  A plague of locusts reducing a field of grain to a wasteland. A column of army ants—as wide as a football field is long–eating every creature in its path. Roaches hiding under the stove, waiting to emerge at night and befoul whatever foodstuffs we foolishly left on the counter.  During the cold-war fifties, when Americans feared an apocalypse of H-bombs, Hollywood preyed upon that fear with films about rampaging insects grown to gargantuan size by the very radiation that fueled atomic terror.  Giant ants, grasshoppers, scorpions, spiders, even a praying mantis big as a steam shovel.  Of course the idea that radiation would inflate an ant to the size of a bus was ridiculous, but the wide-eyed children who watched these monstrosities in darkened theaters were not weighing scientific principles.  An advertising ploy of the era was to create lurid posters with the word “SEE!” listed from top to bottom, followed by the abominations that moviegoers would indeed witness.  If a group of entomologists got together to make an exploitation film, they might call it Horrors of the Insect World, and put this on the poster:

SEE!  Slave raids by marauding ants!

SEE!  The living death of caterpillars captured by wasps!!

SEE!  The queen mantis devour her mate during sex!

And so forth, there being no lack of gruesome theatrics in every green acre of suburbia.

As a young man afraid of spiders, I was also somewhat apiphobic.  This was a cowardly indulgence, for I was not allergic to the stings of bees, wasps, and hornets.  Lincoln said that when he heard a man preach, he liked to see him act as if he were fighting bees.  Abe would have thought me a true man of God if even a single hymenopteran flew into my personal space.  Fortunately I have experienced pivotal moments in which I vanquished particular entomophobias, the incident with Phidippus being one of them.  Another occurred during a summer I spent as a camp counselor in the Berkshires.

I was seated in an Adirondack chair on a lawn overlooking the lake that provided campers with swimming and boating activities.  A staff meeting was in progress, and I wanted to make a good impression on my fellow counselors.  I had already established myself as a serviceable athlete in a pickup softball game, but as I listened to the camp director explain various policies and procedures, my equanimity was threatened by a fat, buzzing bumblebee headed right for my face.  I tensed up, knowing that my only means of escape would be to thrust myself backwards, toppling the chair and sprawling clown-like in the grass.  What a spectacle that would make!  There would be howls of laughter, and the loss of my credibility as a person capable of grace under pressure.  Even as the fearsome black and yellow projectile bore down upon my nose, I had time to consider all of this, and I chose the valiant course of action: to remain utterly still except for raising my hand to block the insect at the last moment.  But the bumblebee swerved, and I was not required to employ my hand in defense.  Later it occurred to me that never again would I have to make such a choice, for I had visualized the worst that could happen—a quick stinging somewhere on my face, and my acceptable grunt of pain (not a cry, mark you), and a shrug as I recomposed myself to hear more of what the director was saying.  This was a valuable lesson.  One moment of courage (and I use the word lightly—it was, after all, only a bumblebee) put an end to my fear.

I admit to being an unusual case when it comes to insects, which have occupied a prominent niche in my life.  Fascinated by their colorful markings, their songs, their behaviors, I have always been the weirdo at the garden party who abruptly departs a circle of chit-chatters to spy on a certain bug that has landed on a nearby flower.  And I have also observed the roles—usually peripheral, and sometimes grotesque—that insects play in the lives of others.

During college I shared a dorm suite with two football players who enjoyed shocking visitors by gathering dead flies from the window sills and eating them on Ritz crackers with strawberry jam.

Another fellow—Ziggy—became a campus legend for his habit of eating live insects.  At a party I watched a delicate freshman girl shyly approach him to ask if the stories were true.  Apparently she had been put up to this by Ziggy’s pals, for when he opened his mouth to answer, a moth flew out.  The poor girl ran screaming from the room.

Recently I was a passenger in a car driven by a local businessman admired for his high intelligence and calm demeanor.  His wife sat beside him; I was in the back seat.  At a stop sign, a moth, not unlike the pale thing that flew out of Ziggy’s mouth years ago, entered the car through an open window.  As trapped moths will do, it began fluttering across the length of the windshield, seeking egress.  The woman shrieked in terror, raising her arms to protect her platinum helmet of hair from the menacing intruder.  The intelligent businessman flailed at the windshield with the flat of his hand, trying to crush the insect.  During the chaos his expensively shod foot pressed on the gas pedal, causing the car to lurch into traffic, and we were almost in a wreck.  Blaring horns, the screech of tires, a shout of rage from a passing car, and all because two mature adults were thrown into a fit by a mere moth, which happily escaped through the same window it had entered, while our car sat half on the sidewalk, having narrowly missed a woman walking her dog.

In the sixties I was friends with Roy, a slender, animated New Yorker who sported a big, curly “Jew-fro.”  We took the same freshman biology course, and I was amused by his habit of pestering the professor—a no-nonsense rationalist, a man of pure science—with questions about spiritual possibilities in a material world.  “Since we have no way of knowing whether a soul exists and what it might actually be,” Roy asked one day, “how can we state with certainty that insects have no souls?”

The professor, a red-faced, pudgy man with gold-rimmed spectacles and thinning gray hair, stared with irritation at this far-out hippie, his most bothersome student.  At that moment a yellow jacket landed upon the professor’s desk and began investigating a paper plate littered with donut crumbs. With one fat hand the professor hoisted his biology textbook and brought it crashing down on the hapless insect.  “We state it thus,” he said, echoing Dr. Johnson’s refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s theory of immaterialism.

After class I asked Roy if he really believed that insects might have souls.  We were on a sidewalk leading from the Science Building to the dorms, and tall weeds grew on both sides.  “Wait a minute,” he said, approaching the weeds and looking carefully at their flowering parts.  “Ah, here we are!”

Roy stepped toward me with something held between his thumb and forefinger.  I saw that it was a beetle, red with black spots, its tiny legs kicking in a futile effort to escape.  “Listen,” he said, thrusting the insect at my ear.

I backed away at first—reflexively, for I didn’t want a prankster shoving a bug in my ear—but decided to trust him.  And then I heard a small, shrill voice, an eep eep that sounded like a cry for mercy.

Roy restored the creature to its weedy perch.  “You see?  It communicated with you.  Soul to soul.”

I laughed.  “Oh, come on.  It’s an evolved defense mechanism.  A high-pitched sound to distress a predator.”

“But didn’t you feel compassion?”

“Would a praying mantis feel compassion?  If he could get past the sound, he’d eat the sucker.”

But Roy’s point was made.  Although the beetle had acted instinctively, there was a connection between insect and human.  And I had to admit that when I heard the eeps, I felt empathy.

Once when we walked along a street in our college town, I had to veer from a series of trash receptacles on each corner, as they were teeming with yellow jackets, and if you passed by too closely, they would fly at you in what seemed like a fit of pique. I said that these insects were much too aggressive and should perhaps be wiped from the face of the earth.  Roy drew my attention to the grillwork of a parked car, which also swarmed with the yellow jackets.  “Look what they’re doing,” he said.

I looked.  The creatures were busy picking at the grillwork, a veritable buffet of protein tidbits—the smashed remains of insects intercepted in flight by the moving vehicle.  Yes, the yellow jackets were annoying and downright hostile, but they were an admirably efficient clean-up crew.

Same time period, different location.  My girlfriend Phyllis and I have driven to the Adirondacks for a weekend of hiking in the woods.  Another couple, Jack and Laurie, are waiting for us in a large tent that can sleep four.  We arrive to hugs, laughter, the sharing of food and pot.  We are good friends and card-carrying, tie-dyed hippies. After a while, Jack and Laurie decide that they aren’t high enough, and dig out a cache of MDMA, or so they think it is.  Phyllis and I are dubious, for we have read that pills purporting to be MDMA are often something else, such as horse tranquilizers. We express concern.  Our friends take the pills anyway.

Phyllis and I want to do some hiking before sunset.  I urge Jack and Laurie to come with us, but they are not up to it.  The pills have made them weak and groggy.

The woods are wonderful, with red squirrels, deer, a variety of butterflies, and staggeringly beautiful vistas as our trail takes us up into high country.  We return to the tent well before twilight.

In our absence, Jack and Laurie have passed out on top of their sleeping bags.  The pills, acquired from a person they didn’t know very well, were not MDMA at all, but heavy “tranqs” liberated from a veterinarian’s office.   At some point either Jack or Laurie stumbled out of the tent to pee.  Whoever it was forgot to zip up the flap after returning.  If you’ve been to the Adirondacks, you know that it’s a maelstrom of mosquitos and biting flies, each one a scourge to humanity.

‘Oh no,” I say, noticing the open tent flap.

“What is it?” asks Phyllis.

“Wait here.”

I enter.

Upon the walls of the tent dozens of deer flies and horse flies move to and fro, looking for an exit after having enjoyed their fill of human blood.

Phyllis follows me in and gasps at the scene.  She directs my attention from the insects to our miserable friends, whose zonked-out state prevented them from brushing away the flies and mosquitos that feasted on their flesh.  I marvel at the condition of Laurie’s face, so savagely bitten that her eyes are swollen shut.

Phyllis and I did our best to shoo the insects from the tent, but soon wearied of the Sisyphean task.  We covered the half-conscious couple with towels and flannel shirts, then took our leave and spent the night in a tourist cabin on route 9.

In bed, holding Phyllis in my arms after an episode of tender lovemaking, I mused aloud on the sorry state of the friends we had left behind.  Surely there would be no lovemaking for them, covered with painful bites.  Phyllis squirmed out of my embrace, accusing me of schadenfreude.  Not at all, I said.  Just filing this away as practical knowledge.  In the domain of the deer fly, avoid heavy drugs.

This occurred before the remake of The Fly, but some lines by Jeff Goldblum—as Brundlefy—would have been apt.  He asks Geena Davis’s character, “Have you ever heard of insect politics?”  When she says no, he continues: “Neither have I.  Insects don’t have politics.  They’re very brutal.”

Jack and Laurie would agree.  But the Dalai Lama said that insects respond to compassion. Can this be so?  Feelings, in an insect?

Most scientists will say absolutely not.  Even though many insects have primitive limbic systems—the part of the brain that processes emotion—the whole brain of, say, a cricket, is too small to generate feelings.  But until we find a way to actually be in the mind of a different species (and when is that likely to happen?) the question remains unanswerable.

When I observe the suffering of an insect, I imagine what it is feeling based on its movements.  I, too, would be frantically flapping my wings if I were a moth caught in a spider web.  But the action is probably instinctive and robotic.  The moth is simply stuck—it’s not horrified by the prospect of being eaten.  The famous, munchkin-voiced plea, “Help me!  Help me!” came from a fly fused with a human.  Within the human half of the mutated insect lay the feelings.

Trying to enter the mind of an insect can lead to some very odd thoughts, for if they have feelings, might they have souls, as Roy had conjectured?  My friend Mark and I once visited a hippie commune where the children ran free and wild, and I recall one little girl holding a caterpillar in her palm and asking her mother if the creature would go to heaven when it died. Her mother, whose fringed rawhide blouse lay open as she casually suckled an infant, assured the girl that all living things would eventually find peace and love high in the sky with the Great Spirit.   Ah, the sixties.  Innocent times they were.  As we walked on, Mark, his head still turned to the mother’s exposed breast, commented thus: “I’ve always wondered about overcrowding in Heaven.  But imagine if insects can also get in—there are so many of them!”   I took it a step further, proposing that if insects could gain entry, why not protozoans?  If, as the Bible claims, God notes the fall of every sparrow, and that every hair on our heads is numbered, then what of the thousands of bacteria clinging to each of those hairs?  As God has given them life, why should he deny them an eternal reward on his own luxuriant and infinite head of hair?

Most people canvassed on this topic would probably consider it ridiculous.  But how many believe that the higher non-human creatures—dogs and cats, for instance—are entitled to an afterlife?  A quick Google search suggested that the figure hovers around fifty percent. As to whether or not the higher animals have feelings, I contend that all pet owners will say they do.

I grew up with a dog that my mother had christened Ladybug.  Hating the name’s cuteness, I called her LB for short, and it stuck. Our family went to Maine once for a week-long vacation, and LB was put in a kennel because the resort didn’t allow pets.  When we retrieved her she walked out of the cage looking dazed, perhaps resigned to what she had come to believe was her new life—being locked away forever from the people she loved, for what can a dog know of such things?  I was surprised that she didn’t jump up on us and cry and slobber like the dogs you see greeting soldiers returned from war.  She simply walked with us to the car and got in like it was no big deal.  After we had driven a couple of blocks she began to give voice to her feelings, a series of low cries that seemed to indicate her growing sense of being rescued.  These became louder, drowning out the baby talk we were lavishing upon her.  Her cries wouldn’t stop, and my parents and I looked at each other in astonishment to hear such a sound from an animal—a continuous warbling of joy tinged with lamentation, akin to human speech, and unmistakably begging us never, ever to leave her again.  And we didn’t.

Ladybug died—peacefully, in her sleep–when I was a freshman in high school.  In my grief, I impulsively called the rectory of St. Thomas Aquinas Church, got one of their priests, and asked if dogs went to heaven.  The priest was not unkind, but very firm.  No, dogs did not go to heaven.  Animals don’t have souls, so when they’re dead, they’re dead, and that’s all there is to it.  I don’t recall what I said in response, but I hung up quickly.  I had expected that’s what he would say.  I think I just wanted another reason to stop going to mass and being a Catholic.

A few years later I read John Rechy’s City of Night, a fascinating account of the lives led by gay street hustlers.  On the book’s last page, the narrator recalls a scene described earlier—the corpse of his beloved dog lying on the ground being covered by dust in a fierce Texas wind, and he laments, “It isn’t fair!  Why can’t dogs go to Heaven?”

Overly sentimental?  Not to a reader who has ever loved an animal.

Consider the fly. Except in winter, the common house fly, which Ambrose Bierce purposely misnamed Musca maledicta, is everywhere to be found.  Daryl Van Horne, Updike’s devilish character in The Witches of Eastwick, correctly points out that the “poor things” only live for a few days—twenty-eight or thereabouts, according to entomologists.  Short lifespan notwithstanding, they manage to torment us by landing on our potato salad and cupcakes, upon which they will automatically defecate (the key word is “automatically”—it’s what they do whenever they land on anything).  The tormenting never ends because of the housefly’s remarkable fecundity. It has been estimated that if every maggot produced by one mating pair of Musca domestica were allowed to survive, within a period of five months every land-mass of the globe would be covered with approximately two-hundred sextillion flies to a depth of several meters.  I hate flies as much as anyone, but, like Norman Bates, I won’t harm them.

My aversion to harming flies has been the cause of much head-scratching among my associates.  I admit that it’s hard to explain why it would cause me sorrow to bring a fly-swatter crashing down on a creature that will, given its wont, deposit feces on my cupcake.  But there is something expressively vital in the fly’s frantic, surging flight, accompanied by the familiar buzzing that sounds like…what?  Terror?  Triumph?  Taken together, they imbue this airborne, dark dot of pure energy with an identity of sorts.  I Want to Live! is the title of a melodramatic film starring Susan Hayward.  It could also be words on the sigil for the kingdom of Flylothian, written above an illustration of flies gathered upon a gobbet of putrescent meat.

Humans are at war with insects, but I am a conscientious objector.  A few minutes ago I found a stink bug on a towel hanging from a hook above the kitchen sink.  It was just sitting there, perhaps absorbing moisture.  Around here there are occasional infestations of these insects. People complain that there are dozens in their houses.  I have asked some of these people if the bugs actually stink, and I have yet to receive a straight answer.  They do if you crush them, one woman said.  Did you crush any? I asked.  No, she answered, I vacuum then up. but that’s what I’ve heard.

I have not smelled a fetor emanating from a stink bug, but of course I don’t crush them.  As far as I can tell, they tend to mind their own business, although they do have a propensity for turning up in laundry baskets.  Sometimes I’ll find them on the kitchen counter, but they don’t seem interested in my foodstuffs. I read online that they will eat fruit, but the few to whom I offered a sliver of peach turned away.  I doubt they would make good pets.

The stink bug on the towel?  I carried him to the balcony and eased him from my hand into the darkness of night. I don’t know what will happen to him, but I think it was right to liberate him from my apartment.  Before he left I took a moment for close observation.   I wondered what kind of consciousness hummed within that tiny head.  The mad proposition is that we are likely to know—at some point in the future—more about what lies beyond the Milky Way than what a stink bug is actually thinking.

Or what any insect is thinking.  And I consider that mystery, that unfathomable strangeness, as good a reason as any not to kill them.