Insects and Robots

I'm a little worried that this process is too satisfying. As time goes on, I'll have to be wary of allowing too much detail, of indulging in the mythology for its own sake. There's a strong temptation to turn this blog into a serialized novella about my obsessions, again letting them dictate the process on their own terms. Some might say that it wouldn't hurt to hear more about the mundane details of the Undigestible Man's morbid journey, but it must be kept in mind: talking about the story is therapeutic; actually telling it is acting out.

Once the Undigestible Man had firmly established himself in my mind, the mythologizing lost is emphasized forward progression and settled firmly into the background activity of my day-to-day mental life. And honestly, almost everything I experience now is filtered somewhat through the mythology, processed for relevant themes and lasting impact. When I scan people's intentions or interactions, when I'm digesting major global or political movements, when I'm trying to decide what to do or study next, I'm thinking about whether the mythology is big enough to encompass the reality that I experience, and what data it needs to improve. And I think that really gets to the heart of the problem. The obsession isn't concerned with just some random story that occurred to me one day, but with actually creating a Story that encompasses pretty much everything that anybody has or could experience. If I were to actually tell the story as fully as it wants to be told, the obsession would only be satisfied under two conditions: one - that the telling was flawless, and two - that for anyone in the audience, the story perfectly reflected and resonated with the themes and narrative of their own life's journey.

I wish I were exaggerating.

The natural repercussion of this is that I do *a lot* of collecting. Collecting experiences, themes, personality-types, tensions, psychological struggles - also, non-metaphysical (ie, real) things: animal and plant life, geographical regions, cultures, languages, politics, historical precedents. I need these things so that they can be distilled, their most important bits accommodated to the demands of the mythology. Let me give you an example.

After my first year of university I spent a summer tree-planting in the Canadian prairies. I went on a whim with a long-time friend, and we camped two months in the woods with a company of about twenty people. We worked mostly in previously deforested areas, replanting what the logging companies had taken away. I kind of saw this as my kharmic penance for the oil rigs and fishing resort; the pay wasn't nearly as good, but the work and mitigating factors were much less psychologically traumatic. The supervisors stocked fields with boxes of trees, and every morning we'd be dropped off by pickup truck with only our spades and planting bags and Nalgenes of water (and for many, a day's supply of marijuana). The pay was per sapling planted, usually about ten cents, and on a good day I could make three hundred dollars after the $25 camp fee (but that was a really good day). At the end of the day the pickups came back. Our meals were prepared by the camp cooks in a modified school bus. The evenings were spent on basic camping stuff (playing cards, begging the guitar players to break out their instruments). Every week or so we'd all go into town for a day and stay in motels just to use the showers and do laundry. It usually took me about four hours to wash out the caked dirt from beneath my fingernails.

So all of this was great, and maybe even ideal in lots of ways, but not particularly thematically poignant. We did have a guy in camp in his sixties who planted all day in nothing but a g-string. We'd often see him cresting a hill in the distance, completely naked (as far as one could tell) except for two bags full of trees slung around his waist and long blond hair down to his hips; a Viking God on the horizon. But for some reason he hasn't penetrated the mythology - I think it might be because he's not believable enough.

The only thing that has persisted is the one day when a group of us were walking along a logging road and happened to peer over the side of a bridge. There, clung to the backside of the bridge, we saw thousands and thousands of bugs. And when I leaned in closer to see what they were, I was horrified to discover that they weren't bugs at all, but the hollow and perfectly preserved shells of bugs - their contents long gone. None of us could figure this out, so we came back the next day at dawn. And witnessed this. (the important bit happens around 2:20). We saw this happen about twenty times that morning, each time with the exact same timing and precision of movement.

It changed my whole outlook on life. I've been obsessed with insects ever since.

They're like little robots - lifeless and mechanically automated and perfect. Cold-blooded, guided only by environmental factors and an over-arching hive mind. They're usually designed specifically to their surroundings, perfectly accommodated to their native ecosystem. Sometimes they look exactly like sticks, others subsist only on blood. If that's not evolution, then what else is it? Who designed that? Seriously. Bugs are too weird. I can't handle them.

And that's what it takes to be added to the mythology. With each new iteration, insects invariably play a prominent role. More on them later.