So far, I’ve tried to resist turning these into laundry lists of recent experiences. I don’t want them to become meta-explorations of my inability to think of anything to write about, either. There are pages and pages like that in my personal journals, but to put the “performative” in the performative journal, I feel a need to make this at least semi-palatable, but that also seems to defeat some of the purpose for why they started in the first place.
An idea that’s been kicking around my head lately, sometimes with chemical embellishment, is that what you do is more important than who you are. Writing, much of the time, has been a means of self-exploration for me. In the personal writings not meant for public viewing, sometimes it’s even been a means of self-authorship, or at least attempts to do so. But the act of putting these entries on a website morphs them from being about the self to being more about the thing itself, the “artistic object,” if they can even be described as such. Therefore, they become a thing I do, much like songs or jiu jitsu or, dare I say it, the work I get paid to do.
But today, I’m wringing the cloth and it’s coming up dry. I’ll only share one moment from the weekend:
Yesterday, I killed a syrphid fly, because it kept flying close to my face and hands, and I thought it was a bee. It was pretty acrobatic how I did it, too. I got up from the wooden picnic table I was sitting at, brought my leg up, and stomped it down into the plank of the seat with a down kick. Out of mid-air. Its body was perfectly flattened, three dimensions turned to two, its resemblance preserved. Then I looked closer and saw that it didn’t have a stinger. After some basic research, I figured out what it was, and found out that they actually pollinate things and pose no harm to humans, and only mimic the look of the bee. I try to avoid killing bees anyway, and in this particular case, the fly died simply for being annoying. Or, looked at another way, it died for being too curious about a being much larger and more powerful than itself.
It didn’t just die—I killed it.
Some might say I was acting as an agent of nature—that the death of the syrphid fly was actually a choreographed occurrence, a natural law enacting itself through me that says you shouldn’t fly face first into danger. I don’t know about you, but as much as that interpretation would absolve me of guilt, it would also absolve me of too much agency for me to be comfortable with it. So, for lack of anything human to talk about, here’s a moment to think about that syrphid fly, and intrepid beings everywhere that die for wanting to know too much.
Yet again, who am I to ascertain his motives? Ill intent, good intent, it’s all irrelevant when you’re that small. Yet again (again), maybe human shit isn’t always the important shit. There’s an indifference that can go along with being so much bigger than something else. But a bunch of us read Horton Hears a Who as a kid– a person’s a person, no matter how small, yadda yadda.
I hesitate to be didactic here, because if you’ve read any of these things, you know that most of the time I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing or talking about. But, if killing the syrphid fly teaches anything, it teaches that the curious are often killed by the ignorant. The small by the large.
And to the syrphid fly: sorry I didn’t know your name.
It’s less about who you are than what you do. I’m not maudlin about it and this has turned rather sentimental, but I don’t want to be the guy who kills bugs just because he doesn’t know what they are. I guess, in this case, I thought it was going to sting me. But still. Even if it did, in that case, the punishment wouldn’t fit the crime. Think Aesop, frogs, scorpions, not blaming things for their nature, et cetera et cetera, but is it not human nature to also have restraint?
I hope wherever the thing ended up is nicer than it was here, if it ended up anywhere. Maybe in the end, I’ll have a big karmic debt for tons of little moments like these.
And if the tables turn and our curiosity gets the best of us, irreparably, may it all end quickly, on the wrong end of a big acrobatic splat.
matt nilsen 