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| Figure of a cicada (China, late 18th century; Metropolitan Museum of Art) |
The cicadas return this week to find me just where they left me 17 years ago: writing a column for the Sun-Times. I'm going to lay out the welcome mat properly on Monday — though I'll be hard-pressed to top how I greeted them in 2007. Back then, the column ran over a page. This item was toward the bottom.
AND THEN YOU DIE . . .
"Males die soon after mating."Darwin was right. You pop the kids out, lick them into presentable shape, pay for college and then hang around as long as modern medical science permits, growing silly and superfluous while your pleasures are, one by one, plucked off your plate.
—Cicada-palooza, Chicago Sun-Times, May 20, 2007
No wonder people distract themselves with elaborate cosmologies, dragooning God and angels and nature itself in one vast dance of self-significance — the universe exists as one big frame for you, a gilded stage on which your soul struts forever, in glory.
Pretty to think so. But my reluctant hunch is that the cicadas — who make their once-every-17-years appearance this week, if the cool weather breaks — are a better indicator of how reality works than any gem-crusted icon. Wake blinking into life, eat something, pass along your DNA, then waddle off to die.
OK, enough of that. The Sunday Blues. I'm actually looking forward to the cicadas, as a change of pace. The primordial beasties won't be much of a big deal at my half-acre of the world, I expect, because it already boasts about every known pestilence — mice and rabbits, moles and raccoons, wasps, hornets, bees, ants, grubs, flies, mosquitoes, spiders, earwigs. No cattle disease, yet, but I assume that's coming.
Over the weekend, I removed a nest of tent caterpillars from a newly planted crabapple tree, reaching in with my gloved hand and grabbing fistfuls of the squirming, furry caterpillars, to my wife's cringing revulsion, and dropping them into a plastic bag.
I tossed the bag into the fire pit, doused it with a blurp of gasoline and lit it with my Zippo — the resulting "foof!" of flame was the highlight of the week.
Which is how we refute the bad news of the cicadas: Post-reproductive life might be a pointless ordeal, but it's all we have, and we should enjoy ourselves as best we can.
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 21, 2007
I find that the coverage of the cicadas is out of control. The worst example of this are the constant articles & tv news features on how to teach an autistic child to survive this!
ReplyDeleteThere aren't that many autistic children & they seem to have survived previous cicada outbreaks.
I'll agree with you, Clark St., to the extent that the news coverage may be excessive, given that I, for one, have not seen a single cicada yet this year.
Deletejohn
Well said, Clark.
DeleteI know an autistic adult who's a naturalist and is quite interested. I strongly suspect the child version of him would have been fascinated as well.
ReplyDeleteThe interestion question is How do You Tell a 13-year Cicada from a 17-year Cicada? One has a drivers license?
ReplyDeleteI believe the 17 year version has red eyes.
DeleteAt least the cicadas only get the publicity every 13-17 years. Mother's Day gets to be more of a BFD every year, and its excessive coverage has been going on for some time now.
ReplyDeleteSomebody suggested taking Mumsy to the Cleveland Zoo, which is part of our superb park system. Everybody had the same idea..."OH, cool...the ZOO! That's the ticket!"
Now, every May. the zoo reaches its capacity by mid-morning, the parking lots are overflowing, and the neighborhood has to be sealed off and people are turned away. Cicadas don't cause that kind of chaos. They're just creepy. messy, and noisy. People cause the biggest problems.