All that teems
What does it feel like to be a memory?
I’ve offered the monarch as a kind of avatar for memory, but this linkage worries me. After all, no single butterfly “knows” the entire migratory route. Moreover, each insect, in the process of metamorphosis from caterpillar to winged adult, essentially liquefies—its internal structure, all its systems, break down and reform. What survives this process—the unspeakable, everyday catastrophe of adulthood—to lend the butterfly its ongoingness, its slender bequest of individuality? What can we call this but memory, vast as a continent, written in brightness and bloom, slant of light, shift of temperature?
It may seem too much to think that a butterfly—a creature with a brain smaller than a poppy seed—might experience something like remembrance, might have stories to tell. The world is full of storytellers, however, and they take many forms. “Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones,” Duke Senior instructs in As You Like It, “and good in everything.” Like the butterflies, we seek memories that resist intergenerational liquefaction. “The cradle rocks above an abyss,” wrote the lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, “and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” And yet everywhere, the most seemingly virtual and abstract kinds of memory are immanent, material, registered in the very substance of the world. They bridge the gaps.
So memories are never mere annotation, but things in the world. Memory matters. Even as you add information to a computer drive, you change its mass: information is encoded in bits, which take shape as magnetic dipoles on the hard drive; as those bits are written to memory addresses, the mass represented by their energy—infinitesimal but never negligible, as Einstein showed; calculable if not measurable—compiles. These clots of energetic matter on the hard drive's ferrous surface are called “magnetic moments”—a resonant term, rich with the confusion of time and energy, forms of ephemera. Sorting into patterns, they call to mind the monarchs making their way down the long limb of the continent: a murmuration of magnetic moments which, in the density and algorithmic regularity of flight, makes a record. And thus all memories—the evocations of odor, the cunning constructions of historians, the kinds of remembrance bound up in tales—are composite things, made of many parts and patterns.
Memories made of mountains and rivers, and the branching forms of trees. Volatile memories, redolent memories. Winged memories. In the orange-spangled flash, a flood of recollected childhood fascinations, curiosities, and transient horrors wells up. Both memory and insects may be said to teem, and my memory teems with insects.
I think of my grandpa’s old garage—how it leaned to one side, as if bending with the sunlight angling in through the slatted walls; how I was fascinated by a row of discarded denim chore coats hanging there from nails. Grandpa had worn them out, one by one, working in the Texaco oilfields across southern Illinois. Tatter-fringed and gauzy, the coats were of little value now except as rags. What fascinated me was inside: mud-dauber wasps had filled the sleeves and seamed the collars with their nests like slender earthen flasks, corrugated craftily and perforated with holes. It was as if the wasps had tried to build a crew of vespine golems inside the denim costumes.
Gently disengaging the nests from the fabric, I put them in jars and brought them home, where I would take them down from a shelf in the basement to ponder their fluted architecture. I would wonder if dormant wasps still slumbered within, who might at any point awaken and, like dispossessed ancestors, rise from their burial mounds seeking revenge.
No wasps ever emerged, however. The narrow apertures in the cardboard-colored mud remained dark and empty, like finger-holes in a flute—cross-sectional traces of the wasps, slender as quarter notes, which had escaped from within. I turned the jars slowly in the basement's muted light, listening to the dried mud clink against the glass while my parents' and grandparents' murmured conversation filtered down from the dining room.
And when grandpa came to visit, if I woke early enough, I could catch a glimpse of his glass eye floating in a drinking glass on the bathroom sink like a pale beetle in a specimen jar. Grandpa had lost his right eye in the Second World War, in the Marshall Islands. At the time, all I knew of “island-hopping” came from war movies, TV miniseries, and the encyclopedia. And though he brought me out to the oilfield sometimes, rattling down long dirt roads in his battered company truck, we rode in silence. Contrasts: at home, stuffed chairs hugged by shadows, the light filtering through grandma’s cigarette smoke, and the sour whiff of instant coffee; in the oilfield, the punch of sun on hard surfaces, dried mud tiling the panels of the truck. And in the air everywhere, the heady fragrance of crude. On one of these tours, we stopped at a pumpjack nodding like a giant mantis amidst a churn of torn sod and wet gravel, where I remember grandpa opening a tap and letting the oil trickle through his hand, puddling in his palm. The recollection is distinct, although it also feels apocryphal; I don’t know if pumpjacks really have taps on them where the oil comes out. I remember the substance as amber, filmy, more aqueous than I would have expected, rank with a smell from the far side of rot, the whiff of millions of years of compressed biosphere.
At ten years old, there was so much I didn't know about the Marshalls—how they were shattered by war, and irradiated by a US nuclear-testing campaign that was also a kind of war; how years later, they would come to be threatened by rising seas brought about by the light, sweet crude flowing from that pumpjack tap. How the prosthetic eye might be a kind of memory of these far-flung traumas only now occurs to me, as Grandpa never talked about the war in my presence. His consuming quiet arose in part because of his wounds, which had damaged his hearing as well as taken his eye. Between himself and the rest of us, however, a blind abyss of memory seemed to throb, inexorable in its deflective, centrifugal mystery. Yet his face was always blossoming in smiles, and the gothic arch of his eyebrow, where the shell fragment had entered his skull, gave him an aspect of frozen, astonished delight. At another wellhead outside of Odin, Illinois, grandpa stopped the truck to show me a hornet nest hanging like some fey lantern high above the road. We listened awhile to the deep, throaty buzz sifting down through the whorled paper of the hive, and I imagined dive-bombers silhouetted in white skies.
Back home, it was birds that I drew, only ever from photographs, mostly taken from the pages of the National Geographic; but it was insects that riveted my attention, kept me connected to living things as they moved out in the world. My mother found the lawnmower abandoned between the big walnut and the line of lilacs, engine running; I was inside, ensconced behind the silver brocade armchair, reading about ground wasps. I had mowed over a bare patch in the lawn, had seen yellowjackets mobbing an angry hole. Curiosity welled up even as fear of stings put me to flight, and I sought the refuge of settled knowledge in books. A series of aqueous gray photographic plates in our ancient copy of the World Book Encyclopedia showed the stages of metamorphosis: the featureless egg; the helmeted larva; the ghostlike pupa, folded like a pocketknife; and finally, the slender menace of the adult, a weapon made by a watchmaker.
Days disappeared in the backyard as I traced out the exploits of the ant empires that terraced the slope below the tulip tree. Red ants and black ants—how natural it seemed to assume that their relationship be one of perpetual war. In their marching lines, limning contours through the sedge and bunched violets, I saw only industry and anger, and I wondered what disasters compelled them to evacuate their larvae from the nest in such great numbers, veins of pale rice threading the lawn.
Then came the summer when cicadas raved in the crowns of the trees, their alarm incessant in the eye-stinging heat. Thumb-sized with wings like gothic dollhouse windows, the cicadas bombed drunkenly into car doors and lay thick on the ground. One day I was startled in the sideyard by a horrific rattling buzz, and a tangle of insects fell heavily from the walnut tree to my feet: a cicada clasped intimately by a great wasp with its stinger buried in the abdomen and its jaws clamped to the head. Even after the chanting of the adults had faded, the amber husks of the cicada pupae festooned the tree trunks, their wingless backs split open, clasped like abandoned brooches with a pinch of barbed legs. I would later learn to call the winged, red-eyed adult by the term imago, but these empty shells seemed the image of another insect altogether, beetling, subterranean.
Flashing in the sunlight or glistening in shadow, the forms of insects fascinated me; their jerking movements, their robotic, relentless automaticity, and their teeming thrilled me with horror as well. I would knock a zooming beetle from the air, crush it in the grass, and feel the cold prickle of hair on the back of my neck: suddenly, it would seem, the lilacs, the peonies, the foundation bricks of the house, would blossom with menace, as though the whole of the insect world somehow had seen my deed and now tensed to strike me down. The compulsion of a dragonfly, as it traced rhomboids above nodding reed-heads in flashing flight, entranced and unnerved me with its ritual implacability. All this uncanny throbbing and twitching, all this alien exuberance, forever had me retreating to the encyclopedia in its nook behind the brocade chair, or pedaling to the library, where field guides and mid-century compendia domesticated the twitchery of insects by netting them in the authority of names. Reading in the encyclopedia that ants and wasps were both members of the order Hymenoptera and thus related, I suddenly could see the commonality in their sleek, sharpened features. Not as mere echo or similarity, but as memory.
The books, the names, offered a kind of control that kept the uncanny at bay, bent it to system. And in the shapes of the living insects, the sharp and fluttering forms they made in sun and soil, I sensed a kinship of divergent pathways connecting not only the myrmid and vespid lines, but all creatures—a kinship of which we ourselves are memory traces.
I started out wondering what a memory is and how we come to have them; I find myself wondering what it means to be a memory. How do we feel our way into memory as a form of life?
“Using samples cut from the center of the sediment core and prepared and analyzed in the dark so that the material retained an accurate memory of its last exposure to sunlight, we now know that the ice sheet covering northwest Greenland—nearly a mile thick today—vanished during the extended natural warm period known to climate scientists as MIS 11, between 424,000 and 374,000 years ago.”—Paul Bierman and Tammy Rittenour writing about their research into the traces of past life beneath the Greenland ice sheet—what the ice remembers, and what it might say about a postglacial warming future.
Such landscape memories are awakening already. “The loss of glaciers could expose territory equivalent to the entire country of Finland—huge stretches of land that are both relatively pristine and, in many cases, unprotected, according to new research.” —Warren Cornwall writing about the work of scientists studying the scale and implications of land the glaciers leave in their wake.
I think of the Pleistocene snail, Discus macclintocki, a relict species from the last ice age, persisting down to our time in the landscapes’s refrigerated memory banks. These memories are, literally, banks: more specifically, “algific talus slopes,” found principally in the so-called “Driftless Area” of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, a region left untouched by the terraforming work of the last glacial advance. These landforms shelter a cold microclimate that allows subsurface ice to persist through the summer—thus perserving fragments of ice-age habitat as refuges for ice-age liverworts, lichens, and the Pleistocene snail. As you might have guessed, global warming threatens these refuges of past biodiversity. Climate change is a form of dementia.