Photos – Page 61 – Via Negativa

August 19, 2006 by Dave Bonta

After forever

I’m awoken at 2:30 by something crawling on my back. I turn on the light, and there beside me in the bed is a big, black cricket. I scoop it up and pad downstairs, open the front door and toss it out into the darkness.

Five and a half hours later, my dad and I are rummaging around in the basement of my parents’ house, looking for the big can of miscellaneous nuts and bolts. I’ve just been given an old stereo — my first in fifteen years — but one of the speakers is missing a nut where the wires attach. The nut can isn’t in its usual place on the shelf. We look high and low without success, and we’re on our way back up the cellar stairs when I spot a can on top of the shelf where the nails are kept. Eureka!

The stereo only came with one, thin speaker wire, but I find a couple coils of thicker stuff in one of my dad’s boxes of electrical supplies. Now let’s see if I can put it all together. It’s an overcast morning, with rain in the forecast — perfect weather for puttering around indoors.

The stereo components appear to date from the late 60s or early 70s. There’s a Sherwood receiver, AR speakers, a Pioneer tape deck and a Benjamin Miracord turntable. It would be cool if the tape deck works — I have a lot of cassettes — but I already have a boom box if it doesn’t. I’m mainly hoping that the record player works, so I can bring down some of my classical records from my parents’ house and listen to music in the evenings, which is generally when I would prefer to listen to music, I think.

The previous owner had kept all the manuals, which is good, because unlike more modern equipment that I’ve owned in the past, the connections aren’t color-coded; everything is explained in terms of ohms. After a great deal of fussing and muttering, I get it all hooked up and plugged in, but now I can’t find the “on” button. I turn up the “Loudness” knob and get a rain of static — the radio works! In a burst of inspiration, I connect the old, thin speaker wire to the screws where an FM antenna is supposed to attach and run it up to the ceiling, and suddenly I’m listening to NPR’s Scott Simon oozing fake empathy. Huzzah!

One of the speakers has a distinct, rattling buzz. I get a screwdriver and pry off the cover, and as I suspected, only a small piece of foam still connects the woofer’s black paper cone to its frame; the rest has disintegrated. I gather from the web that speakers in this condition can be repaired, though I’m not sure I’m up to the task. What’s surprising is that the other speaker still sounds fine. If the turntable works, I’ll count myself lucky.

First, though, I test the tape deck. It makes a faint grinding noise when I turn it on — that’s all. I recall that my dad’s brother gave us an old tape deck a few years back thinking we might be able to use it, though we never did. I go fetch it from my parents’ attic, and it sort of half works: sound comes out of the left channel loud and clear, but nothing from the right. That’s O.K., I guess, since I only have one good speaker. Fortunately, the receiver has a monaural setting.

My classical records are up in my parents’ collection, as I mentioned, and years ago I sold off my blues records in a fit of madness, so all I have down here right now are a couple dozen old metal and punk records. For testing purposes, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality should do. Besides, I don’t have it on cassette — I haven’t heard these songs in a very long time.

The needle looks O.K. I drop it in the groove between the first and second tracks and “After Forever” comes on. Damn — it sounds good, even with the one fuzzy speaker! The great, stoned, bass-heavy riffs instantly take me back twenty years, but the lyrics sound relevant as ever:

I think it is true it was people like you who crucified Christ
I think it is sad the opinion you had was the only one voiced

I listen to the rest of the record with one ear while I type. Then it’s over, and the phonograph arm returns to its cradle with a quiet whir and click — a sound that provokes a nostalgia all its own.

In the aftermath, I find myself focusing on the crickets. There’s a loud one calling right outside the front door.

UPDATE: I replaced the buzzy speaker with the one that still sounded good from an old pair of Polk speakers in my parents’ attic. So I now have a working stereo.

August 18, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Residence in the earth

The way our would-be straight lines fall on the land, whether along the contour or across it, makes me think of clothes on a body — the farther from town, the more natural the fit. From highway to road to lane, it’s the same-size wheels, but then for the crops they must grow, sprout treads. Suddenly escape is no longer an option: if we want to eat, we must slow down and pay attention to every detail.

Why any of this should amaze me is difficult to explain. As long as I’ve lived in the country — almost all my life — I am still a creature of books and screens and flat Cartesian spaces with their promises of freedom. I must continually remind myself that power is round: gears. Coins. Bellies. The sockets in which our animal limbs revolve as we wander the globe.

Why Monday and not Saturday, the Amish woman wonders as she hangs out the wash, darks and lights together. The breeze swells a kerchief the same way the earth ripples under the fields. Aren’t weaving and harrowing pretty much the same? Her eyes still lazy from Sunday follow a hedgerow up to where the woods start in earnest — a good thing, because desire works best within limits. It’s a sin to want more than what you can properly attend to. She gazes at the mountain, a long, low ridge nearly identical to all the others she’s known since childhood. Every few miles another mountain, like a permanent Sabbath rising between weeks of fields.

August 16, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Forbidden fruit

If I told you that it was reported that a shepherd was killed because his goat wasn’t wearing a diaper, and goats are simply too sexy to be naked, would you believe me? Or if I said that three people were killed because of the provocative way their vegetables were displayed in the market, would that make sense? The celery and tomatoes were deemed too naughty by clerical edict.

–Robin Andrea, The Fertile Naughtiness of the Natural World

We laugh at such thinking at our peril, we WASPs. A hundred years ago, we too were mortified by such things, teaching our children (for example) that a table or chair had limbs, not legs. Did anyone honestly believe that careless reference to the sexiness of furniture could lead an impressionable mind astray? Where does such prudishness come from?

The great Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin introduced some useful concepts in his book Rabelais and His World, as he strove to bridge the chasm between modern and pre-modern European ways of looking at the body. The predominant imagery of the pre-Lenten Carnival, he found, was grotesque: like the tomato in these photos, it exceeded itself in ways that were both comic and sexual, with a mixing of lower and upper body symbolism whereby, for example, a nose became a penis, and vice versa. Though material rather than spiritual, the grotesque body was, in a sense, cosmic, both literally and figuratively larger than life — “a body in the act of becoming,” as Bakhtin put it. A popular survival from pre-Christian days, it persisted in an uneasy balance with the Body of Christ and what Bakhtin termed the classical body of church and state, which was as finished as the grotesque body was unfinished, closed off to the world and therefore susceptible of that sine qua non of priestly religion: purity.

The European so-called Enlightenment gave the mind-body split a huge boost, in conjunction with the rise of capitalism and the modern nation-state. The classical body dominated the thinking of the emerging middle class, whose members always aspire to better themselves by embracing elite mannerisms and perspectives and turning away from their origins in the village and the soil. But it seems to me that the new, ideal body of the industrial bourgeoisie was even more private and tool-like than the classical body had been, in keeping with new, reductionist ideologies.

Reductionism is the genius of the modern age, the source of our immense scientific and technological power. Religious fundamentalism, though often seen even by its adherents as a rejection of modernity, is equally modern in its insistence on reductionist interpretations of text and doctrine. (Recall that for Islam, the Wahabite and other modern “fundamentalist” movements arose only in the 19th century; Sufic and syncretic movements dominated popular Islam up until modern times.) As oppressive social structures spread their tentacles (a grotesque image!) into every facet of society, one unintended consequence is to inspire ever higher levels of fear and paranoia in its increasingly individuated and isolated members, now reduced to the status of taxpayers, occasional voters and consumers. Modern medicine and industrial warfare promote a diminished vision of human beings as little more than animated cadavers, suicide bombers, collateral damage.

In place of the comic body of Carnival, we have the angry, anonymous mob, summoned up and defined by its fear and rejection of some threatening other: capitalists, immigrants, Arabs, Jews, Shiites, Sunnis, Americans, whatever. The institutionalized religious or insurrectionary mob is like a grotesque body with bulimia. Its obsessive quest for purity, now liberated from the constraints of an empathy-based ethics, feeds a revulsion toward its own members, and purge follows purge. Nazi propaganda defined its undesirables as “life unworthy of life”; Chinese communist propaganda rejected sexual desire itself as anti-Communist. These are of course extreme examples, but I am trying to understand how people can be put to death for displaying suggestive vegetables. The mobocracy instinctively acts to control whatever threatens its supremacy, and what could be more subversive than sexual desire?

It may seem as if North America is relatively free from these impulses, but that’s hardly the case: true freedom and wildness are perceived as deeply threatening by most Americans. Aside from a very few towns and cities, our streets are virtually lifeless, devoid of informal commercial activity, vagrants, even loiterers. The symbol of middle class respectability is the weed-free mowed lawn. Lifestyle ordinances are strictly enforced, even in many rural townships. In place of riotous carnivals, we have parades. The reductionist equation of human being with zygote gains ever more popular acceptance, even as we become more willing to deprive our undesirable members of liberty and life in a vast prison-industrial complex.

Our actual, individual bodies bulge grotesquely in perverse reaction, it seems, to the unattainably attenuated, hard, machine-like bodies pimped by our elite-controlled popular culture. Sex in America now comes in two official flavors, liberal and conservative. Among liberals, sex is seen as a glue for self-fulfilling relationships, a form of healthy exercise, and/or a subject for therapy. For conservatives, it is a time-honored, divinely sanctioned technique for procreation. Both strike me as a radically impoverished understanding of what love-making could and should be.

Humans have, I think, a natural desire for self-transcendence. The physical excesses of the grotesque body of Carnival honored this desire by spoofing it: as Bakhtin somewhere points out, in ancient times and in highly traditional cultures, religion included a healthy admixture of comedy and burlesque. When the belly shakes with laughter or the whole body with orgasm, the line between self and other grows thin — a perilous situation for those whose power depends on anathematizing the other. You want self-transcendence? Make babies. Or wait until after death … and thus the death-dealing at the heart of reductionist ideologies attains an aura of sanctity. Keep your vegetables in line, buddy, or your ass is grass.
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Long-time readers of Via Negativa might remember my previous, more comprehensive treatment of these themes with reference to Zuni Pueblo: Laughing in church and Houston, we have a problem.

August 15, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Milk of paradise

The last blossoms have faded and fallen at the milkweed patch, so things aren’t quite as frantic there now as they were a month ago. But it’s a still a pretty happening place. Whereas in July the patch was like a saloon, serving everyone who came, now it’s more like a walled garden, unapproachable to all but the few species that are adapted to feed on milkweed — and the things that feed on them. When I stopped by on Sunday, every other plant seemed to host a monarch caterpillar.

Judging by their size, they must be about ready to pupate. I did see one monarch butterfly with very tattered wings going around laying eggs on the leaves, but I wonder whether her offspring will have enough time to complete metamorphosis before frost.

I also found a dead monarch caterpillar — a grim reminder of the fact that, while the monarch’s ingestion of milkweed’s potent alkaloids makes it poisonous to birds, that doesn’t mean it’s safe from all predators.

Wheel bugs still stalked the patch. I found one busy feeding on a wasp. A second wheel bug sat on a leaf a foot below it, and I wondered briefly whether they might be male and female, but I didn’t have the time to stick around and see if any interaction would take place. They seemed perilously close to the nearest monarch caterpillars. I thought of Coleridge:

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

. . . For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The milkweed bugs are as gregarious as the wheel bugs are solitary. I found several milkweed pods that looked from a distance almost like ripening tomatoes, so covered were they by the bright orange-red bugs. A closer look revealed that most of the insects were busy feeding, their long beaks piercing the skin of the pod to get at the ripening seeds beneath. Milkweed bugs go through five larval instars, each of which appears progressively more like the adult form, and most stages seemed to be represented at each of their feeding pods.

I also discovered a couple caterpillars of the milkweed tiger moth — yet another milkweed obligate, as its name suggests. They too had bright warning colors, notwithstanding which they seemed to prefer feeding on the undersides of leaves. With all the wheel bugs around, that seemed like a good idea.

In the middle of the patch, an Argiope spider sat motionless on her web with its characteristic zigzag line stretching away from her like some sort of ornamental garden path. This feature has earned Argiope aurantia one of its common names — writing spider. But not surprisingly, such an eye-catching and frequently encountered spider has more than one common name: around here, people tend to call them banjo spiders, for some reason.

By far the most widespread name, however, is garden spider. For me, as for her, a garden can found almost anywhere, if you’re willing to take the time to really look.
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See my growing milkweed patch photo set for more photos. See also Burning Silo blog for frequent updates on Bev’s captive monarch caterpillar rearing project, including such fascinating posts as today’s feature on a prominent predator — stink bugs.

August 14, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Lust

It doesn’t seem right that such great & graceful wings should bear such a small & ugly head. From underneath, at least, you can’t see its nakedness, backlit as it is by the far more naked sun.

August 10, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Spined micrathena

Click on the photos to view the larger versions

Micrathena gracilis: not, perhaps, the specific name that most of us who have tried to walk through an August woods sticky with her webs would have chosen. But is she not slender and graceful, this spider, apart from the spiked club of her abdomen?

The ventral side of her abdomen appears to bear the spiral template for the web, whose silk emerges from its central point. Every morning at dawn she spins her web anew, spanning some path or opening in the forest where the light pools. If a human or other animal should blunder into her web, she’ll have a new one completed in a couple of hours. If it lasts until sunset, she devours the silk, leaving only the three foundation threads. The forest of the night throbs with the call-and-response of katydids — a noise like the surf, or a bank of industrial looms — while hundreds of spiders quietly erase their work.

She too can stridulate, though I’ve never heard it: a low-pitched buzz or hiss, they say, designed to frighten off predators.

The male is a fraction of her size, and has only two, flattish spines where she has ten. His spinning is limited to a single, non-sticky strand that he lays across her web: a path bisecting the net that spans the path. He hides under a nearby leaf, waiting for the right moment to place himself at her service but not at her disposal.

They each have two copulatory organs, and each pair must make contact, necessitating some complicated gymnastics. To ensure success of this risky business, he dances vigorously at the end of his thread, making the entire web vibrate as he bobs and waggles his skinny rear end. I would have to suppose the female finds this spectacle deeply entrancing. During copulation, if all goes well, the male flips over onto the female’s abdomen, and she can return to hunting flies with her new appendage sprawled on his back among the graceful peaks.
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See here (PDF) for a complete description of the courtship and mating practices of M. gracilis.

August 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Wheel bug

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by the milkweed patch on the way back from a walk to the Far Field. A few monarchs still sailed back and forth, no doubt looking for places to lay their eggs, and a tiger swallowtail and great-spangled fritillary patronized the few remaining blossoms. The clusters of gray-green pods poking out from under the big, flat milkweed leaves almost suggested a miniature banana plantation.

I was pleased to see that the juvenile assassin bug I’d photographed a couple of times for my milkweed patch photo set was now an adult, and readily identifiable. It turned out to be one of the most bizarre and distinctive of the 160 species of assassin bugs found in North America: the wheel bug, Arilus cristatus. It’s a very large, eye-catching insect with a shiny dark patch at the end of its wings and a semicircular crest — the eponymous wheel — crowning its thorax like the blade of a circular saw, or a misplaced mohawk. I spotted it in the top leaves of a milkweed plant not three feet from where I first photographed it as a juvenile on July 17, and just as before, it reacted to me and my camera with the wary poise of a street fighter, sidestepping away in a manner that clearly said don’t fuck with me.

And I wouldn’t want to: web sources describe its bite as much more painful than the sting of any hornet. In fact, assassin bugs used to be used as instruments of torture in Central Asia (and might be still, under dictators like Karimov and Turkmenbashi). Their mouthparts are essentially weaponized straws, first injecting a poison that paralyzes their insect prey and turns their insides to soup, then sucking them dry.

The function of the “wheel” is completely unknown. That’s not too surprising, really, because like many common insects, wheel bugs have rarely been studied. The best thing on the web appears to be an article at the Hilton Pond nature center website, which includes general background on bugs (i.e. hemiptera) for the entomologically challenged, as well as some excellent close-up photos — much better than mine. See also Bugguide, the insect wiki, for more photos of wheel bugs in larval and adult forms.

If you like trees as I do, you should be grateful for the presence of wheel bugs. They’re one of the few predatory insects capable of feasting on hairy caterpillars such as fall webworms; tent caterpillars, which were in outbreak mode in many parts of the northeastern U.S. this spring; and gypsy moth caterpillars, which about a month ago defoliated hundreds of acres at higher elevations around Central Pennsylvania. With all the gypsy moth egg cases and empty cocoons on our ridgetop oaks right now, I fear we may be headed for a defoliation here next year.

Predators are different. The quality of attention that they bring to bear on their surroundings can seem both charismatic and a little intimidating, as anyone who as ever gazed into the eyes of a hawk or a captive leopard can attest. Praying mantises, with their large, space-alien eyes and their unique ability to swivel their heads, strike us as highly intelligent, but it’s not the kind of intelligence that, in humans, would lend itself to multi-tasking or associative thinking. I doubt that the mind of a predator can easily accommodate the kind of broadly focused awareness most useful to omnivorous habitat generalists such as crows, raccoons, bears, or humans.

By “mind,” of course, I mean the whole of the nervous system and its responses, whether learned or instinctual. For such a finely tuned instrument as an assassin bug, the brain itself may be somewhat superfluous. In a series of famous experiments on a related species from the American tropics — Rhodnius prolixus, the carrier of Chagas’ disease — the British entomologist Sir Vincent Wigglesworth surgically removed the brains of a number of captive assassin bugs and found that they not only survived, but far exceeded their normal lifespan.

Though some human males do identify strongly with the single-minded hunting prowess of natural predators, they should remember how most male praying mantises meet their end: as food for their mates. Apparently female wheel bugs, too, are in the habit of eating their partners as soon as they have completed their single-minded task. Cannibalism is common among wheel bugs; they are not given to displays of sociability. Neither the wheel nor a second set of tiny eyes on top of the head are present in the larval form, when mating is not a concern, so perhaps they evolved to help the male fend off attacks from the female prior to mating. If anyone has a better theory, I’d love to hear it.

August 1, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Carnivalistic

Get into the carnival spirit at the Festival of the Trees 2.

Then enjoy the rides at Circus of the Spineless XI.

Yesterday evening, I visited an enormous bur oak tree in a friend’s back yard. Other photos are here and here.

July 29, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Happy Hour

Click on the photos to see the full-size versions

July 24, 2006February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Slow

Who cares what
the slow
guy thinks?
I watched a slug
gliding over a rock
on its single
foot: water
flowing uphill,
Aladdin’s carpet.
I like how,
during a yawn,
my head fills
with the roar of
its own surf.
So much better than
those hiccups
called anger, pride,
shame,
or the fever
with which
my poor sam
pee-body — as
the sparrows say —
tries to rid itself
of that virus
love.