Annie Dillard recounts a riveting—if unsettling—phenomenon of nature in her splendid work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In the pages of 19th century naturalist and entomologist J. Henri Fabre’s journals are found some peculiar habits of pine processionary caterpillars.
Dillard writes,
Pine processionaries are moth caterpillars with shiny black heads, who travel about at night in pine trees along a silken road of their own making. They straddle the road in a tight file, head to rear touching, and each caterpillar adds its thread to the original track first laid by the one who happens to lead the procession.
Fabre housed a group of pine processionaries in his conservatory for observation, where he initiated an experiment demonstrating, in Dillard’s words, their “blindered and blinkered enslavement to instinct.” By modifying the silk track in their glass enclosure, he created a closed circuit. Fabre wanted to determine how long they might travel its futile track. “To his horror,” Dillard reports, “they march not just an hour or so, but all day.” Day after day Fabre observes them slogging in their futile orbit of “imbecility”. A time or two they reorganize, yet, in tragic form, wander again onto their cruel circuit and resume their “dismal parade.” Fabre puts food and water alongside their path to no avail. Deprived of moisture and nutrients, the hapless column of insects processes to their collective demise.
Fabre notes with incredulity the lack of “any gleam of intelligence in their benighted minds.”
Dillard is more disquieted still,
It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness…
It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.
Our world is thoroughly laced with such charmed, glistening yet altogether deadly threads, onto which all are prone to wander. Isn’t it? Maybe you suspect you are straddling one such thread presently. How does one find one’s way off, and, perchance, liberate others in the process? Continue reading “Imagination”
Matthew Podszus 