April 22, 2003
The Life of Insects
From Jacob Sturm’s 1796 Insecten-Sammlung come these entomological illustrations. I found them via a link at iconomy.
In the Admiralty park, on a fine & fresh Easter Sunday afternoon: the first butterfly I’ve seen this year. The Swedish word for butterfly is, I learn, fjäril.
Yesterday I finished Victor Pelevin’s novel The Life of Insects, which strings together a series of imaginative fables whose protagonists - inhabitants of a run-down Crimean resort-town - are human one moment, then insect the next: there are, for example, a trio of mosquitoes, two scarabs, a pair of moths, and various ants, flies and cockroaches. This premise yields a rich crop of metaphors which Pelevin deploys, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly, to great satiric, literary and philosophical effect.
One human-insect pairing not delineated by Pelevin in this book (but which does feature, if I recall it right, in his later novel The Clay Machine-Gun) is that arising from Chuang Tzu’s famous dream about a butterfly, often quoted by Borges (amongst others), from which he awoke not knowing if he was a man who had dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly that was now dreaming of being a man.
Click on the images to see the bugs in a larger than life size…
Posted by misteraitch at April 22, 2003 01:42 PM | TrackBackYes. THAT time of the year. Bugs! Nice, though. I guess.
Yes!!
Posted by: Rara Luna on April 22, 2003 02:38 PMSuch pretty bugs! It makes it all worthwhile when something I put on my weblog ends up as a interesting, informative and entertaining post somewhere else - especially here. This is fabulous. Thank you! This made my day.
Posted by: iconomy on April 22, 2003 03:19 PMNice...reminds me of hunkering down with those old "Field Guide to Insects" with the unnaturally-posed watercolors of various insect groups.
On this note, anyone with a chance to get to Montreal, I suggest heading to the Insectarium, right across the street from Le Stade Olympique. Fascinating.
Posted by: Tim on April 22, 2003 03:54 PMFabulous post, as usual. These were beautiful. I like the sequiturs to insect laden tales; I then remembered two that I have never been able to let go. One, by an author that escapes me, a tale of swarming ants, that consume all in their path. Don't want to go there. Two, "Insects and Angels", two shorties by Byatt. There is some very excellent insect-to-human behavioral ties there.
Posted by: Felicity on April 23, 2003 07:46 AMI recall, from Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's incredible "100 Years Of Solitude," the predetermining quote that drives the entire book: "the first of the family died completely mad tied to a tree in the backyard, and the last of them is being eaten by ants."
Posted by: Tim on April 23, 2003 03:10 PMOh yeah. I remember that one now as well. Eugh.
Posted by: Felicity on April 26, 2003 08:11 AM