September 19, 2009
Laurie’s studio is a few doors down from mine at the barn. We sit on her sofa and she reads to me out loud – a beetle-roach creature comes trundling swiftly towards us along the floor. All three of us lock gaze – two humans at bug, bug at two humans. Time suspended. Movement cancelled, all species equally transfixed by this cusp of action.
What do you think? my friend asks.
Well, it seems friendly enough, I say, but then again, it’s sort of a cockroach. And you have good food.
The beetleroach cradles its little carapace on waxen legs, canting sideways ever so slightly, and bobbling a bit. Its internal debate illustrated with such direct physicality. There is a moment of stillness, and then it stiffens its legs and rises up higher off the ground and begins conducting a very resolute and stately passage towards the sliver of shadow beneath the couch.
It’s fine, Laurie says, a sort of theoretical pronouncement, a test balloon. It hangs low in the air.
The beetleroach stumbles over a bit of upwardly-crushed pile in the carpet, then rights itself with a little shake of the exoskeleton. An upward cant to assess the status of our detente, then a reaffirmation of its decision to follow the dream despite all risk and intimidation: it will reach the land beneath the sofa.
Yes, I say, finally, I think so.
Laurie continues on into the next paragraph in her piece, while beneath the sofa the BeetleRoach attends to its inky business.
There’s a lovely, unassuming little book by David Bayles and Ted Orland called Art & Fear – it’s required reading when I teach because I once bought a copy and it was stolen by a student (I don’t judge, I’m a horrible absconder of borrowed books as well). I purchased another one, and it too was stolen. This happened so many times I figured I should take prophylactic measures: make them buy it and leave mine alone.
Here is a line I like to ponder:
”What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears continue; those who don’t, quit.”
Here in the prehensile hinterlands of Virginia, deep in the acres upon acres of pasture and woods that refuse to let go of us, we hole up in our studios amidst the many things with legs, most of which fly. (If I could fly as well as walk, I would probably not be here right now. The bugs have both capacities, and yet remain. Curious.) It’s difficult. There are a lot of bugs. We are seriously outnumbered. They are large. And mysterious. Intimidating.
When I first arrived, I allowed the arachnids to remain, but ceremoniously dispatched each trespassing bigger-than-a-nickel insect back into the great outdoors one at a time.
By week two, I shifted to a critical mass strategy – rather than constantly interrupting my work to get rid of them, I would wait until I could look up and see fifteen bugs without turning my head. If that quantity was readily apparent, out they’d go in a batch. I could mark a day by how often within the hour the 15-nickel test was met.
But it became a little scary, this ferrying of so many creatures. I wasn’t frightened of the bugs, but I was definitely bothered by the situation, inexorable, where I seemed so outnumbered, and thus so overwhelmed…and feeling overwhelmed means feeling uncomfortable.
Now – at the inception of Week Three – we have evolved considerably: they are a crush of guests at my studio, arrived for a gander at manuscript and photograph. Respectful, facetious, dismissive, laudatory – impossible to say what discussions take place behind the artist’s back in these situations.
As I observed at Ragdale, open lands are the Los Angeles of bug life. It’s a Friday night. They grab a couple hundred dates, polish up the antennae, and go out looking for a good time.
They go to check out the art scene.
We nod at one another across the room, keeping an askance-y sort of watch as we gradually move closer, tracking the clockwise and counterclockwise movement along the walls. They regard the art. They don’t want to be hustled into buying anything. I don’t want to presume. In large part, we wish the other weren’t there at all, and yet here we are. Symbiotic, somehow, despite it all. Not entirely sure about the balance of power.
Invariably, we meet in close proximity to the cheese and drink. There are asked and unasked questions.
Why are you doing this.
Is any of it worthwhile?
What will this cost me.
Will you love me?
Where is the door?
Turns out, each bug responds to the first moments of our acquaintanceship quite differently. Patterns emerge, but individuality does, too. This has brought me to a heightened awareness of the moment when we meet – that fulcrum – that first sight instance whereupon I must make my decision of whether to ignore, provoke, forcibly relocate, kill, or mercifully transplant, and it must make its decision of run, stay, distract, attack, or engage in subterfuge. I include flirting within the category of subterfuge.
I stop and watch. Take it slow. See who’s who.
Some have that It’s about time – the fourth boxwood on the right, please, attitude and hop right on the scrap of paper as though it’s a taxi at Lincoln Center. This seems to be the prevailing attitude of the Virginia stinkbeetle.
Yet there have been a few rare stinkbeetles who have actually started to quiver violently, and hunch down with their legs splayed out past the sides of their shell because their shaking has disrupted their balance and they must tripod themselves for security. It must be agonizing, to have the legs so exposed. From my perspective, it was alarming. I was completely taken aback. I had to go sit in the chair and collect myself. To be the cause of such alarm for another creature was completely unsettling.
Some of them rear backwards, and then race away. While it may look like fear, I suspect it’s anger.
Yesterday, one of them stopped, looked at me, raised up its back leg in a cocked position, and rained down eight or nine distinct black pellets of grainy charcoal poop. Right on my manuscript. And then lowered its leg with a slam before moving off to intimidate the miniature spider living under the adjacent windowsill.
OBSERVATIONS GAINED BY A SERIES OF INTERACTIONS WITH BUGS IN MY STUDIO:
(1) healing also hurts. The only way to tell the difference between healing and injury is that after healing, one is capable of more. After injury, one is capable of less. But yes, both are painful.
(2) discomfort arises from movement and change, whereas death arises from accommodating stagnation.
(3) decision tree for building better relationships with bugs: debilitating fear –> the rejection of protection –> getting to know the bug –> new relationships that weren’t previously possible.
(4) contaminate. get muddy. make marks. poop. fly into open windows. visit with spiders. poop.
(5) fly into walls, fall down, moan, lay on back wiggling legs, flip over, crawl, and then fly again.
(6) walk away from being the watchman, the fence builder, the line drawer, the vase. Traditions give justifications for cowardice. Walk towards the sofa placing the dream ahead of the fear.
Haven’t caught the bugs’ reviews of the show – a few images from the Prairie Apothecary project I began at Ragdale a couple weeks ago. I’m actually quite happy with a lot of the images, and pleased with the new-old cameras that did so well out in the field. The text that goes along with these images is a bit bleak, and it’s been good to return to find the beauty, and enjoy the delicious resonance between the two – how one amplifies the other.
But the bugs are quite absorbed with this particular body of artwork, the Prairie project. All those plants – I think there must be some bugland communication between Illinois and Virginia. An alert goes out – hey, there was a photographer here taking our picture. Go check out what she’s gone and done with it.
Imagine the hundreds of bugs that are hidden inside these prairie pictures. With each negative containing sixty or seventy exposures, this is a whole legacy of bug life. Perhaps these are their family photos, and thus deeply subject to interpretation. No wonder there are so many guests in my studio these days.
