insects where you least expect them
Browsing the Public Domain Review recently, I came across Dürer’s Stag Beetle and took a screenshot. I’m not totally sure why. I just liked it. Maybe I thought it meant something to me that I would later figure out. But later that day, watching videos of the protests in Shanghai, I watched a man holding aloft a bunch of yellow flowers, pacing before a crowd. As he walked across the street, exhorting the people to be brave, there it was again, suddenly, on the back of his olive-colored coat: Dürer’s beetle, rearing its head. I took a screenshot. The man went back across the road. Plainclothes officers tackled him and shoved him, hard, into a cop car.
What had I just seen? This beetle passing through my screen like some clue. This man suddenly felt more real, marked with a random sign from my world. And yet I was abstracting him further, from video subject to news item to the figure on his coat. And Dürer’s drawing—did it mean anything? To me or to him? Had he pinned it to his back as some symbol? Something small and defiant? Was it just a beetle? Just a coat?
This intense rush of potential significance quickly subsides into meaninglessness and embarrassment. As uncanny as it initially seems, this sort of thing is unremarkable. It means nothing. Dürer’s Stag Beetle is a famous, freely available painting by a world-famous artist. Like his Rhinoceros, you can buy mugs and postcards and t-shirts printed with it. I had merely seen some common image twice. Giving it further thought would be to fall for some cognitive fallacy.
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That sudden flash and dissipation of recognition is one place thought begins. An arbitrary concordance between unrelated things creates a spark. A beetle crawling low through all the noise. The difficulty, however, is knowing whether that spark is one of imagination or madness. Watching the world online, it often feels like the latter. The Internet’s torrent deadens the thrill of déjà vu while also heightening it into a kind of constant, mild paranoia. Unrefreshed feeds, targeted ads, stolen tweets, recommended content, jarring juxtapositions—we see so many things we never would have seen; we see so much we have seen before. As algorithms and advertisers track and entice us through the Internet’s architecture, the mind staggers toward synchronicity, suspicious of itself.
Still, there’s something about seeing the same thing twice in different contexts. Having recognized the beetle will fix that man more firmly in my mind, for whatever it’s worth. Repetition, random as it is, makes us take notice. The noticing marks a repetition, too.
So: to repeat again:
When I was a child, I found a dead leopard moth on a hiking trail and I took it home and kept it in an old cigar box. Later I moved it to a small plastic case that I kept on my desk. I’m not totally sure why. I just liked it. Maybe I thought it meant something to me that I would later figure out. Years later, my final year of college, the year a friend of mine died young, long before he should have, we were all walking into his wake in Queens. Beside the door, caught within a spider web, a leopard moth struggled in vain to be free. I saw it for a moment, felt the confusing rush of almost-meaning, and passed through the threshold.
If it felt like a sign it’s because that’s what I was looking for. My mind flailing outward in its grief. But it was illegible, insignificant. Leopard moths are common at night in the Eastern US. It is common for moths to meet their end. Nothing, it all meant nothing.
Nothing, these doublings mean nothing, these startling acts of noticing, on the Internet or on the street. There is nothing my delight in an old drawing of a beetle can do for a man who disappears into the apparatus of a repressive regime. There is nothing to bind those two dead moths; their concordance yields no suitable metaphor, for death or for anything else. Nothing but the small fact of my looking. Nothing but the thought of those two moths together, black and white and flitting hopelessly—as if to say something—against the always left-on porchlight of my desperate, meaning-making need.
ben tapeworm