A Beautiful Life Story has More than One POV
The Truths Found in Limited Perspectives
Sunday morning was cold, and clear. I headed to the theater to help strike the Panto set. The day after a long process is something like the day after a binge. I walked up a narrow space between two office buildings and nearly stumbled on a little ceramic angel, sleeping, head rested on folded arms propped up by a ceramic tree stump. All around him were off-season rhododendron bushes and empty bottles: cheap whiskey, dark beer. He was sleeping. Passed out, maybe.
Is there a word for looking back on an earlier time in your life, not with a sense of loss and longing, but with an objectivity that has your mind bouncing between shame and pity for your former self? Compassion may be years away, but I am learning to stay in the difficult spaces when I stumble upon them: face-to-face with memories that are mine, but that haven’t been polished by my rumination—that haven’t been made familiar. That is what it means to tame something, isn’t it? To be made familiar to it. Can these memories, tucked into my being like parasites, tame me?
Will they break me?
I read this week, quite accidentally (not having been researching wasps at all), that there is a species of parasite, whose eggs grow inside—and feed upon—the abdomen of paper wasps1. These insects castrate the wasps, who in the autumn, leave their colony to congregate and overwinter outside of the nest. The wasps feed on a specific flower that keeps both them and their parasites alive. The trumpet creeper has a kind of antibiotic effect that mitigates the wounds the parasites’ larvae inflict.
Nothing is wasted in nature. Which is not to say that nature is kind. Which is not to say that nature is cruel. It is.
Yesterday a colleague walked around the office, showing us all a beautifully smooth granite rock that she’d found on the beach. She invited us to touch it, but when one of the other teachers, curled his fingers around it to lift it from her hand, she pulled it away. No. Just look at it.
I didn’t ask her, but I think that he’d made the mistake of scrutinising something beautiful—interrogating it in search of flaws. This little rock, from this particular angle, on this particular day, is extraordinary. Why should it need to be more?
Choosing a perspective is not always the same thing as contextual denial.
The article about the infected paper wasps, has a photo of the larvae protruding from between the segments of the wasp’s abdomen. I’m surprised I find this more difficult to look at than nearly all of the images I have seen doing the wasp research. Including the wasp autopsy. I can’t help but wonder if this is a kind of transference. My matrilineal line, not seen through a lens of judgement or anger anymore: here is my paper wasp mother, who lived with an open wound.
And in seeing this, from another—particular—point of view, I can see beauty. And I understand that is isn’t an imperative to interrogate every moment within the context of every other.
How could we bear it?
This is why we tell stories. I’m sure of it.
Thank you for taking the time to read/listen. I’ll be back again next Monday with an audio poem. Until then, I hope you have a great week!
Warmly,
Ren
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https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2018/11/16/remarkable-wasp-parasite/#:~:text=Strepsipterans%20are%20one%20such%20group%20of%20parasites.&text=The%20Strepsiptera%20is%20a%20group,paper%20wasp%20as%20a%20host.&text=The%20female%20spends%20her%20entire%20life%20cycle%20inside%20her%20paper%20wasp%20host.