The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Alice

  • Bugging Out

    In “Through the Looking Glass,” Alice converses with a gnat:

    “I know you are a friend,” the little voice went on; a dear friend and an old friend. And you won’t hurt me, though I am an insect.”
    “What kind of insect?” Alice inquired a little anxiously. What she really wanted to know was, whether it could sting or not, but she thought this wouldn’t be quite a civil question to ask.

    A gnat is a small fly, but this one seems huge, as gnats go:

    She found herself sitting quietly under a tree — while the Gnat (for that was the insect she had been talking to) was balancing itself on a twig just over her head, and fanning her with its wings. It certainly was a very large Gnat: “about the size of a chicken,” Alice thought. Still, she couldn’t feel nervous with it, after they had been talking together so long.

    Alice tells the gnat she’s not overjoyed when she sees an insect, because she’s afraid of them, particularly the larger ones.

    I’m not fearful of bugs, spiders and such. It’s the season here though when I’ll run into an orb-weaver spider web spread across the walkway between tree branches, face level, too, but invisible unless backlit with the rising sun, and I feel the sticky web as it envelops my face. I shake my shirt and comb through my hair with my fingers and watch a little reddish bug falling to the ground.

    Then came another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the poor Gnat really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice looked up, there was nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as she was getting quite chilly with sitting still so long, she got up and walked on.

    A problem with bugs is not that they are gigantic, but that they are small, and they are quick, and usually invisible to us. If you allow yourself, you might get all obsessive about bugs hiding behind baseboards, in the yard, or in your hair. But most bugs we never see, and they don’t bother us, in spite of the fact that about 10 quintillion bugs are living on Earth at any given moment.

    I enjoy reading blogs foreign to me, made possible by Google Translate. I recently read a blog post by a Japanese woman about centipedes. I was curious, having myself come across a couple of centipedes in our humble abode this summer. But this woman was nonrationally fearful and sprayed her unfortunate centipedes with excessive amounts of insecticide. She even posted a word of caution to potential readers at the top of her post, concerned some might be scared out of their wits reading about bugs, and she posted a deliciously horrible photo of a centipede slightly curled. Maybe something was lost in translation.

    Not too long ago I posted a piece on ants in our coffee maker. The infestation was so severe we had to abandon the electric coffee maker, and I went back to using a manual French press. I was reminded of E. O. Wilson, who changed his mind about how evolution works, as he found group altruism at work in ant colonies. He said that cooperative workers were more successful than competitive ones. Thus he favored altruism as a collective trait. His reversal of his prior position on the matter greatly upset his scientific community; many stuck in the web of their old position.

    As if real bugs aren’t enough, we find in Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis” a metaphorical bug. A human awakens one perfectly normal morning to find himself turned into a true liking of his image, for he’s already living the life of a bug, a small bug-like creature working a menial job for the hive. Not all bugs are insects, but for our purposes here, I’m calling them all bugs. Bugs may seem a far fetched idea for an anthropomorphic story, but E. B. White wrote a very successful book with “Charlotte’s Web,” about a pig, a spider, and a little girl living on a farm. When walking outdoors this time of year, and watchful of walking into a web, always be sure to check for web messages.

    Science Lesson: I once knew a bug who for a short time kept a blog. Bugs don’t leave likes or comments; they leave bites and itches. Why are there so many insects living here on Mother Earth? Bugs have had a long time to adapt. Nature tends to overseed tiny organisms. Elsewhere no doubt there are planets full of bugs, oceans where none have yet decided to leave their salty paradise, tiny and invisible even to our new space telescopes. They don’t send messages and have no need for technology other than their own three part harmonies. Bugs are not picky eaters. Bugs are good pollinators and some, centipedes, for example, feed on other bugs perhaps dangerous to humans. Centipedes are not particularly harmful to humans. They are masters of the 100 yard dash.

    Theory: I had a friend in high school I admired for he was fearless and loved snakes. Then I discovered he was afraid of spiders. Whenever a spider was at hand, he called me in to deal with it. Over time, I developed a theory: people afraid of spiders are not afraid of snakes, while people afraid of snakes are not afraid of spiders. Occasionally, as the topic may arise, I’ll ask the question in conversation – below I’ve created a “poll” to test my theory (and to test the format of a poll, which for this blogger is a first). Please feel free to answer the poll, or leave a comment below to the post, or simply enjoy the cartoons I’ve added at the end. Time now to bug out.

    Update: I’ve already been advised my poll block didn’t work, so I’ve removed it. Not sure what I did wrong. But please feel free to answer the question (Snakes or Spiders) in a comment to the post below. And enjoy the cartoons!

    He awoke to find a giant spider hovering.
    Infestation.
    “It’s a giant bug!” “Want a piece of tissue paper?”
    I’m having the chocolate covered ants.

  • Writing and the Wickets of Croquet

    In Chapter VIII of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, titled “The Queen’s Croquet-Ground,” Alice plays a game of croquet with some of the Wonderland characters. Croquet, of course, at least as played in the domestic, backyard game I am familiar with, is notorious for its confusion of rules, which reminds me of rules for writing.

    “Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.”

    Just so, as I sit down to compose, I must first compose myself, and decide which pose I should adopt. But the words soon reveal themselves to be live hedgehogs (spiny and fortified), the keyboard a live flamingo (awkward, to say the least).

    “The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute.”

    The Queen would be the reader, the grader, the scorer, but what’s she looking for in this game with so many rubrics on the field all at once? A fragment and it’s off with your head.

    “‘I don’t think they play at all fairly,’ Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, ‘and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear oneself speak — and they don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them — and you’ve no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there’s the arch I’ve got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground — and I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!’”

    Style is a way of putting the words to sleep, of arresting the croquet balls and mallets. Alice is talking to the Cheshire Cat, who has only partially reappeared, and who soon disappears, “while the rest of the party went back to the game.”