Insects

I used to collect insects. This was approximately one thousand years ago when the word digital referred to your fingers rather than electronics. I started with wasps. We had mud daubers everywhere and some yellow jackets. One snow white cotton swab soaked in chloroform, one mason jar and a blue spring sky and I would be out prowling around flower beds and house eaves preying on the predators. I had a viewing box where I would impale their little chitonous shells. I remember positioning the first wasp and jabbing it with a stick-pin. I smoothed the wings and adjusted the legs. I was technical, unhindered by empathy. I was seven or so. It was pure investigation, a burning need to know.

Later I collected butterflies. At my grandmothers house out next to a field I collected the white butterflies that used to float over the cotton fields. I only would trap and kill the ones I did not already have. I remember I scored a tarantula wasp out there. This was California and they had tarantulas. I gathered some beetles. I finally I found waterbugs and waterboatmen. And of course I trapped a few spiders.

The pins suspended these dead creatures in serried rows in my homemade viewing box that I would open slowly, as if wondering if any would still live and might fly from their tomb. I showed them to everyone: parents, friends, aunts, uncles. I had the names on rectangles of paper. I learned to pronounce them all. It was my personal insect museum.

All the actual names of these critters, I have long forgotten. I will probably never collect like that again, though you never know. I do miss it. These days I can’t get enough of taking close up pictures of bugs and little critters, and I credit this to my intense involvement with bugs as a child. But of course the desire was there then, and perhaps it has never gone away. Perhaps something in me needs to know more about the world of antennae, mandibles and multi-faceted eyes.

But what I do miss is the burning feeling in my head that I needed to hunt these insects and categorize them, to hoard them and inspect them under a magnifying glass. What shape are the moth’s scales? How do wasp’s claws grab prey? How many eyes can I find on this spider? What are insects?

Now the word digital refers, of course, to the numeric nature of computational electronics. Bits and bytes. Ones and zeros. I still have the burning in my head, but it has locked onto the language of computers and for now, I am not overly inclined to shift focus. But the beauty inherent in creating a block of great working computer code pales with the magnificent clap of tin on glass and the ominous hollow buzz as you pull a yellow faced, black masked hornet high and look it in the eye and ask: and just who, my friend, are you?