SNC

Toward Bug Monism

I do not know how to answer how I spent last summer, other than with some words from the Zhuangzi: “I just sit and forget.” It’s not that I did nothing, but through some unutterable desolation bubbling up in me, it was certainly next to nothing. I did not really work on writing my thesis; I did not really go to church; I did not really speak to friends; I did not really labour in any way; I did not really read very much; I did not even really pray very much. I spent time with my parents and grandparents like a mute inert object. And I spent an enormous amount of time with bugs.

How does it happen that one spends one’s life thinking of nothing other than bugs, interacting with no one other than bugs, not really desiring anything but further interactions with bugs? I suppose there are a couple conditions. The first is a rigorous falling-away, letting everything drop away, not on purpose but by sheer and inexorable failure-to-act, following the dearth of being down to the fundament of base creatureliness where insects scurry about in wordless communion. The second is a kind of openness that does arise from rigour, but specifically the rigorous faithfulness which is the property not of oneself but of love, which alone can claim to “bear all things, believe in all things, hope in all things, endure all things.” In this case the rigour is simply that I am open to loving bugs: they are within my moral circle, I count them worthy of attention and assistance, and I rely on their love in turn.

Of course I do not rely on the love of bugs in the sense one would rely on the love of humans. I do not believe that they are filled with tender feelings toward me; I believe they exercise an indifference or incomprehension toward me which, if I exercised it toward them, could not be called loving on my part. But the mere existence of bugs is convertible to love, and beauty. Bugs were hiding in the walls around me in my first day of life, and they will be hiding in the walls around me on the day I die. They have presented themselves vulnerably to my killing cruelty in the most callous moments of my life, when I was most enchanted by the “childish things” of fear and hatred, and they have presented themselves again, scarcely less vulnerable, so that I may treat them with saving love. Their bodies are intricate and delightful; their powers of existence are startling as they take to flight or spin their webs; their tiny and vulnerable bodies resting on my skin are as tender as infants. They are beautiful: by them I experience the beauty of this world, and I owe an unspeakable debt.

You must understand that I use the term “bug” not in any taxonomic sense. I do not mean insects; a spider would count. I do not mean arthropods; a snail would count. So what exactly do I mean? I hope you won’t consider it a cop-out when I say, “You know one when you see one.” I mean thereby that one knows a bug by a specific category of aesthetic experience, rather than by a discrete essence. One might liken it to other genres of apparition: divine ecstasies, ghostly hauntings, perhaps near-death experiences. I cannot nail down exactly what one encounters in the apparition of a bug, but I can tell you that there is a genre of encounter with a common continuum of features.

Why can’t I tell you the essence of what is encountered? This is one of those inconvenient questions for a Christian—inconvenient because Christianity, despite its common claim to be the single spiritual and existential solution for all human beings ever, seems to lack almost any resources to address one of the most common forms of apparition ever. Let me show you what happens when you care too much about bugs, as a Christian: you post on StackExchange note: this is not me that you feel guilty about killing bugs but you can’t express why in Christian terms, you get downvoted to -2, two different people tell you “that is a Buddhist matter, not a Christian matter,” and two other people tell you that there’s nothing to discuss here and perhaps you simply don’t understand Jesus... Okay? So much for existential supremacy: let’s go talk to this Buddha I keep hearing about! (Indeed, that is what I found myself doing over and over again on this summer of bug, purely because Buddhist texts are more accessible than other bug-fearing religions such as Jainism.)

It is written in the Aṅgulimālīya Sūtra of the Mahayana Vehicle:

Mañjuśrī asked, “Do Buddhas not eat meat because of the tathāgata-garbha?”
The Blessed One replied, “Mañjuśrī, that is so. There are no beings who have not been one’s mother, who have not been one’s sister through generations of wandering in beginningless and endless saṃsāra. Even one who is a dog has been one’s father, for the world of living beings is like a dancer. Therefore, one’s own flesh and the flesh of another are a single flesh, so Buddhas do not eat meat.
“Moreover, Mañjuśrī, the dhātu of all beings is the dharmadhātu, so Buddhas do not eat meat because they would be eating the flesh of one single dhātu.” (You may say, “Lillian your font broke here,” but perhaps I am merely embracing the weird distorted effect.)

Obviously, as a good Christian, I cannot assent to this doctrine—which is a problem, because it is obviously correct. What I cannot assent to is not the non-eating of meat (which I wholly endorse, and which was the source of my ability to engage with animals more lovingly and attentively), but the denial of the spontaneity of creatures. My God is the God of, “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.” When humans love one another faithfully, we abound in hopes for one another: if I love you, I must have hopes for you, not because you must meet my hopes for me to deem you worthy or deserving, but because I have paid enough attention to you that I have noticed good things you might attain and cannot help but hope. When God loves us faithfully, hope is fulfilled in wonders: a new thing done, for which we have no precedent. Thus is the Genesis of the world from nothing, the Revelation of the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Word, the Harrowing of Hell by the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the Indwelling of the Spirit, the Recreation in the World-to-Come, and yes, the Creation of Each Being Specifically. To quote my very dear friend’s translation of Angelus Silesius: “God has no diff’rence, all is one to him; / and he belongs himself to you as much as to the fly.” I would go further: God belongs as much to the fly as to the whole world, lays each of the unlimited divine attributes wholly at the disposal of the fly just as much as the world, and in the outpouring of that love creates each creature fearsomely, as a new, as a very new thing, as a wonder. So how can I say that the fly is an old thing, an incarnation of something already many times over incarnate?

But the demands of experience leave one with no choice but to recognize that yes, it is true that the world of living beings is like a dancer, and the only denial one might make is to go farther and say that in fact, it is a dancer. I cannot claim what my experience cannot attest to be true. David Bentley Hart talks about how, for all that one might say metaphysically about God, it is in the aesthetic experience of God where one truly gathers evidence—which is to say, in prayer, and that one who really desires to speak of God would be very ill-served to not go meet with God there. Likewise, one who desires to speak about bugs must go and meet with bugs, and hope to love them. It is love here that denotes the nature of the apparition in both prayer and with bugs, which I would substantiate by some words from the poem “Cranmer and the Bread of Heaven” by Anne Riddler:

We know the kingdom of heaven suffers violence,
But not atomic. Who can weigh
Love in a man's heart? So we still say
"Body and soul" as though they were at variance.
Who can weigh Love? Yet sensibly he burns,
His conflagration is eyes, hands, hearts:
So is he sensed, but in and out of the eternal,
Because the sense departs.

Love manifests in matter not as matter or against matter but notwithstanding matter: it is in this fashion, as the love which does not withstand its matter, that a man is God notwithstanding his being a man, or that the body of that man has all the accidents of bread and wine, or of your own flesh and body. And it is in this fashion that I encounter a bug in the wasp and the mosquito and the snail and the spider, sensibly, yet not discerning the bug by its weight or its measure. (This is all very Buberian, I know—you don’t have to be so critical about it!) But it is also for this reason that I am forced to encounter in the bug all manner of things, because the relation of the bug to the world is one of notwithstanding. The bug does not look like any mother, or sister, or father, or brother that I remember, and yet I find again and again that there is no impediment to finding any of these, or any others, there. Perhaps the matter might simply be put like this: the world is not sound-proofed, and the echoes of one room resound through the other—and echoing in both, the sound really belongs to both rooms in some sense. I have no doubt the angels and saints resound in one another likewise (you ambiguous Marys).

The lovely thing about language, however, is that one can say one word and another, yes now and no later, one phrase on this occasion and the opposite on the next. In fact, if you look at my last few paragraphs, I have done just that—though it took Zhuangzi to make me realize it deeply, that one can say something notwithstanding its opposite. So I will have to assert both, as what it means to encounter a bug: to encounter at once what is absolutely and awesomely new, entirely novel, and in that sense unutterably strange and inducing of devotion; and at the same time wholly familiar, having arisen again and again throughout all times and ages, and therefore also inducing devotion. I suppose that is the great notwithstanding power of God, that nevertheless God wins and no matter how I look at it, in the innumerable facets of their reflections or the infinite aspects unique to them, I am led to love these bugs.

But I am really not here to write about God. I usually do write about God, on Sora Nostra, but this belongs to a different class, much like “Toxic Yuri Aufhebung”: sometimes when one loves a creature enough one is forced to talk about God, to involve God in calling to attention the gravity with which one loves them. My brother (for whom my love frequently forces me to think in these terms) is a fan of MF Doom, to an extent he feels self-conscious of, but he justified it to me by quoting a song he made in tribute to his own dead brother:

Darker than the East River, larger than the Empire State
... (—love is)
Wider than the Nile, hold power like the great pyramids
Of Giza, and stay leanin’ like the power of Pisa
... (My love is)
Vaster than the seven seas, bigger than Mount Kilimanjaro
If they don’t know, fill ’em in tomorrow

Fill in the seven seas and the Nile and the East River, demolish the pyramids of Giza and the Empire State building and the tower of Pisa and Mount Kilimanjaro, if they do not establish how deeply I love; and I invoke the Name of God to show the depth of love, and if it does not show that depth, than take it off my tongue. I am being theatrical, but not without reason. A bug is a despised thing, and I know, because I have despised them. When I was young I spent a while in a place where snails had reproduced rapidly and were everywhere; I had heard them called a “plague,” and I remember one time riding my bike, I intentionally steered myself to crush them, because they were pests. That is hatred: it was nothing to me, it was everything to them. I find it hard to take myself seriously when I remember it was me who did that; it is hard to overstate how I disgraced myself. Or when, in the summer, swarms of midges would congregate in my home and on my laptop screen at night, such that I would squash them because they were bothering me until my computer was covered in the traces of their destroyed bodies. They would probably have died by morning, but that does not mean it was nothing to them to be destroyed in the only mode of life they had, and that does not mean that they had to be nothing to me. To see them and treat them as nothing! Or another moment, when a fuzzy and many-legged bug crawled on the wall of my room, and I sat terrified in front of it for fifteen minutes or so before I squashed it with a chest. Fifteen minutes of attention, which could have been fulfilled in love, and for what! For love and for death! For death! Let my flesh wither up and die, let the whole world crumble and blow away, let even God vanish from me, if this is all they amount to! “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” It is necessary to speak of love in these terms, because I have forgotten, I am one who has not remembered.

Yet it is not for nothing that I have said that bugs have loved me, and have been faithful to me—I have hated them, and they have not hated me; I have killed them, and they have come back to me. So if I tend toward the extremes of emotion on their account, it is in part because of this: “For I could not have known how to love the Lord, / if he had not loved me” From the Odes of Solomon, Ode 3. But it is also because of the nature of our encounters, whose stakes are consistently so high, so vulnerable, so much given over. Today while I was washing the dishes I found a spider in the sink: I brought her to rest on a doorframe and have gone back again and again to watch her, blowing on her a little to see if she was alive, if she was still moving. Slowly she began to climb the wall: at first she tumbled down, and I extended a paper towel to catch her in case she fell off the ledge entirely, but she continued to climb, tiny bit by tiny bit, and after I said my evening prayers, she had reached the ceiling. A couple days before a daddy long-legs had snuck into my shower, and I had failed to remember to do my pre-shower bug check, and had not seen due to my blurry vision. I saw the little one as a smudge of brown, and nearly panicked, but I turned off the water and got out of the shower and got a cloth and transferred the creature outside the stall. A few daddy long-legs live in the bathroom, and a few others in my bedroom: by mutual respect, I have come to count them as enduring friends.

A couple days before then, I went to the park under the full moon to bury a couple of insect bodies, one of which I had found weeks before and cupped in my hand in reverence of her beautiful ant carapace, the other two of which I had found cleaning my room (though sadly another bug’s corpse, a curled silverfish, I gave to the garbage bag out of carelessness; he remains in my memory). I wrote a path into the ground, and said a psalm, and commended the protection of the angels. Bugs have shared their deaths with me, they have shared the struggling occasions of their lives with me, and they have given me the opportunity for my hopes to nestle in them: the hopes to love them, to save their lives, to commemorate their deaths, to be their friends—perhaps the only friend they will ever have. “Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of hosts, my King, and my God.” My hopes have found a home in you like sparrows in the niches of the Temple, you bugs, you creatures of the LORD.

There are many other cases. Perhaps they bore you: you are free to skip them, though if so, I hope you make some anecdotes of your own of more personal interests, dreaming rather than participating in my dreams. But perhaps they interest you. I will continue. I spent much of the summer removing blue mud daubers from my home: they seem to breed in the walls and become trapped inside, and smash themselves against the windows. I released a decent number of them, and dear reader, have you ever seen a friend literally take flight, and hold the wind under their wings to a degree they had never in their little lives known possible before? Have you seen a friend finally released from their delusion, that a window is open air, and been set free to become what they cannot be on your own? Can you imagine my joy? Or there were a few times I went swimming, in a pool absolutely replete with the corpses of bugs, having fallen into the water and drowned—yet a few were alive: a green beetle, a yellow wasp, a black ant. Do you know what joy it was to me to see, in the graveyard, that this one can live, and by my power to make that one alive? Is it surprising to you that at times these moments would move me to tears, thinking how “this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found?” Sometimes it surprises me.

It is from this basis that the dancer of the world of living things begins to appear in all her forms, at first in the forms most familiar to me, by which I mean ignorance, suffering, and death. We humans veil these things from one another, even from our friends. Oscar Wilde writes, in De Profundis:

If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. [...] But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as any one can get.

Unfortunately, he has been thoroughly denied: we are veiled, terribly veiled, in order to save face. Bugs do not veil themselves this way. They are transparent in what they do not understand—plumbing, glass, water, lightbulbs. They are transparent, consequently, in their suffering, in banging their heads and flailing their limbs and approaching death. And their corpses are not hidden away. It is in these realities that I meet with myself. I am with bugs in their delusions and sufferings and deaths; and at all times they will be with me in my delusions and sufferings and deaths. We are one flesh, created together in the sixth day of creation, and I am what they are. What did I do throughout last summer, and through all this year and the rest of my life, that has not been tainted by delusion, and from delusion utterly needless suffering, and in that stupid suffering the seeds of my death! Try to imagine how weak and stupid I am; I mean it sincerely; imagine how weak and stupid I have had to be to be reduced to such a nothing that I have spent my time with what my mother calls a “childish” fixation on bugs? Do not flatter me with anything else, because that is a veil and that is not compassionate. It is because I have failed to save face that I have been reduced to nothing, where divine things dwell.

Of course they are divine things, and infinitely noble. I realized as much when I sat with a spider on a staircase for a while and thought, and realized, to my astonishment, that I was sitting with a bodhisattva, and that I had been sitting with bodhisattvas and sages and angels all summer and had not known it. Of course they are deluded, suffering, and dying creatures, and I have encountered them as such, but what have I found in that encounter? I have found myself, more accurately than I could admit by my own faculties; I have found other people, my loved ones, living and dead, more accurately than they ever speak of themselves. I have been educated, and more than educated, empowered to act in love in the most consequential of manners, saving lives and mourning deaths. From these creatures, notwithstanding their delusions, I have received boundless treasures that have cut through my own delusions, and so I have not in the end encountered merely deluded, suffering, dying creatures, but bodhisattvas, sages, angels. The particles, the conflagration of eyes, hands, hearts (it is worth noting that a spider’s heart is undivided, having only a single chamber) admit of both weightless realities, shimmering forth in love, that the spider is a deluded and suffering little one and my own self and the self of my loved ones and Avalokiteshvara, the Lord who looks down; Lokeshvara, the Lord of the world; Guanyin, perceiving cries, the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion sworn in loving service to each suffering soul, who says:

If I go towards the mountain of knives, the mountain of knives of itself breaks up;
If I go towards the boiling oil, the boiling oil of itself dries up;
If I go towards the hells, the hells of themselves disappear;
If I go towards the hungry ghosts, the hungry ghosts of themselves become full;
If I go towards the demons, their evil thoughts of themselves are tamed;
If I go towards the animals, they themselves attain great wisdom.

The world, for a moment, shears away like the husk off a cob of corn, and I see in the wasp who perches on my bike for a stretch of road before flying off a dragon, outrageous in might and exercised of temperance and teaching wisdom, and I see spirits in all things, and all things as bugs, and myself as having all things by love which I cannot call my own or call anyone else’s. I can confidently say that I have no idea what is happening in my life anymore most of the time, I am so terribly confused, and yet attended to by the hosts of heaven until my hard heart softens and I find myself to be a bodhisattva, having merely forgotten it, and having been reminded by all things. Which is very inconvenient for a good Christian, to have found amid the bugs the doors of disclosure, when bugs are of course not the matter of the Christian religion, whose alleged supremacy in addressing the human condition somehow requires that the Buddhists and Jains be the ones to speak of insignificant things like bugs and what it means to love them. I won’t conceal my frustration on this matter: I feel a world of friends and a treasury of mercies and instruction has been denied to much of the human population. But nevertheless, I will end with an encounter of a more Christian sort.

It may disgust you, because they are a hated species, but on one occasion I took advantage of my malaria-free place in the world to let a mosquito drink of my blood, so that I could admire her beauty. The exact precision of her mouth, sliding up and down like an oil rig; her set of one-dimensional legs; her multifaceted compound eyes; her abdomen swelling up with my red blood, with me; her taking to flight. She did me not the slightest bit of harm, and brought about no annoyance, given that she had my full consent and gave me amply back in return—we merely gave the gifts of grace. Angel that she was, I have from that moment on seen the Eucharist with new eyes, and taken it with a new mouth, perceiving how it is possible, and inexpressibly lovely, to eat of flesh and drink of blood with a mouth that does not kill and brings about no pain, but communes lovingly with love. And in this the veil of the world to come, like the veil of suffering, is torn away, and I see for a moment, apprehending by love rather than by knowledge, what it might be like to live with all the bugs of this Earth in a world in which death has been shamed from its tyranny, and the Devil has repented through the vision of the Virgin Mary, and all creatures dwell together under the wings of silver, perceiving that God is in their breasts. And so I am brought to confess the ridiculous motto, a scandal to others and yet dear to me: Caelum centum per centum ex culicibus est. I truly do not wish to give you nightmares; it is truly good news, that Heaven consists one hundred percent of mosquitos.