For a good stretch of the summer, therefore, I slept in the basement, where it was slightly cooler. (The only downside to this was my lack of blinds in the lower level -- the windows of which are about chest-level with passers-by outside -- which made for some awkward moments of near-eye contact in the morning.) For even longer, I kept all the windows open. And I nearly made it through the whole accursed three months, I tell you -- helped along by the fact that I was traveling for a good portion of it.
What ultimately undid my plans and made me call the HVAC company was a problem I had not before dreamed of -- the arrival in my neighborhood of a swarm of vermin resembling houseflies, but in form only. In nature, they are something far more dreadful. Cluster flies. I did not know the name then. I will not now forget it.
I first found a number of dead specimens who seemed to be interested in the garbage cans placed outside my front window (the Boston housing situation being as scrunched as it is, there aren't a lot of other places to put them). Then, as in any nightmare involving insects, having crossed the threshold of noticing them once, they were suddenly everywhere.
By the miniature shovel-full they were found dead and piled up between by window and the bug screen. Within a day, I started finding them inside. They were in the trash in my kitchen. They were in my bedroom. But above all -- true to their name and reputation -- they were clustered around the windows in the guest room and downstairs, pasted against the glass as if to soak up the warm sunlight, and seemingly spawning, Aristotelian-fashion, from nothing.
I did my best to kill as many as I could before the AC guy arrived, to save us both the social embarrassment. After he had fixed the device within (I was relieved) a mere hour or so, and I had written a check (my heart burst in twain) roughly equivalent to my biweekly paycheck, he asked, "How did you get through the whole season like this?" Had it been a whole season? Had it been hot for that long? How had I done it? I couldn't recall. In a mania of procrastination, time takes on a different meaning than it has to ordinary mortals.
The coughing of the HVAC system back into life allowed me to close all the windows, and I figured this would solve my fly infestation. But for the first days, it seemed that no, it had not. Every morning, when I woke up with heavy dread, I would glance at the windows upstairs and down. Sure enough, wherever the sun was just beginning to peek in, there the tiny unholy horde had already gathered, paying homage to their god of fertility.
At first I fell upon them with paper towels. And while they were fast enough to elude my first efforts, I quickly let go of whatever shred of compassion or decorum there was within me that was providing a last, bottom-most check upon my capacity for destruction, and I let them have it. Lunging, leaping, plunging and stabbing with my towel held épée-like, I realized that the problem had not been that they were too fast before, but that I had not yet summoned up sufficient urge to kill. I had found it now. I left the field awash in the blood of mine enemies.
The next morning, they would soon be back. And in greater numbers.
Sometime around then I finally turned to the internet. I did not believe it could actually help me, but I was desperate. I typed in something like "flies clustering around my window every day what can I do help" and the first entry that appeared was in fact the cluster fly. I knew immediately it was my culprit.
The new knowledge I gained from this only deepened my despair. As I read on, I heard account after account of people who had lived with cluster flies for years. Waking up every single day to do battle with them. Waking up again the next to find they were still there. Apparently they live in the woodwork. Apparently they reproduce inside one's drywall and window pane. Apparently they cannot ever ever be defeated and erased, but only held for a time at bay.
Thinking of the stretch of years ahead, I had a sensation that I have experienced only a few times previous -- generally in the presence of an unwanted guest. I realized that I was trapped. It is the feeling Joseph Mitchell describes in his Joe Gould's Secret, when Gould pays a visit to his office. "Oh God [...] He'll keep doing it, year in and year out, until I die or he dies."
There was worse still. You see that, in theory, now that the AC was fixed, I could close all the windows, which I proceeded to do. An HVAC system is supposed (I gather?) to circulate enough air through one's home than one will never really need to open the windows again. I could close them tight against the cluster flies, in that case, kill the ones currently inside, and finally be rid of my problem.
No sooner were the windows shut, however -- no more than a day passed -- before the next permutation of the madness set in.
I had recently concluded reading John Fowles' unforgettably frightening novel The Collector -- the heroine of which is held captive in a cellar. One of the thoughts and terrors her journal records is the sense of lack of air -- the horrid stuffiness of the enclosed space -- the need to somehow, in some way, open a door or window, to taste the cold fresh wind.
With all the windows shut, trapped nevertheless by the unwanted company of my cluster flies, I felt too somehow that I was running out of oxygen. As much as I dismissed this as a mere phantasm, the anxiety -- always a clever one with arguments -- always spoke back to me thusly: "well, why take the risk? Wouldn't it be a shame if your brain cells were dying every night just so you didn't have to be faced with more cluster flies?"
Every time I tried opening a new and different window, however, the cluster flies would gather there. Ingenious invaders of petty crannies, they seemed able to burrow under any insect netting, and to be continually going over ever inch of my house looking for some route in they had not already tried. "Testing the fences for weaknesses systematically." I truly could see no way out of the problem.
The infestation even invaded my consciousness. As happens every time one is introduced to a new concept, the cluster fly was suddenly everywhere.
One day, a friend and I were talking about Phish. We both agreed that Phish was at best underwhelming. There was no pronounced defender of Phish on that phone line. But she was trying to convince me that they had one okay song, "Farmhouse."
I gave it a listen, and it was okay. Just okay. A good-enough sort of song -- the best parts of which, as the band has acknowledged, are anyways all lifted from Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry."
But the second time through, I paid attention to the lyrics for the first time.
We have cluster flies alas, they sing.
Cluster flies? They have them too?
We are so very sorry, there is little we can do, they continue.
Oh no, really?
But swat them.
Oh God. They're right. It's so true! It's a fact, c'est ma vie! That's all I've found to do either. How hopeless it all is. What a crock, what a cheat, this life is. How hopeless humanity, nature, the world, existence. How utterly without friends in heaven or on earth.
But no. After sleeping off my sense of doom, I gathered my courage. Even if the struggle was hopeless, I would enter it boldly. Even if they would always return, I could make them smart from their presumption.
I went back to the internet. How had people done it before? What were the methods? How best to beat back the wingèd horde?
Many people were hawking various devices and traps. I entertained no hope that they would work, and anyways I was hungry for hand-to-hand combat.
Then I saw someone propose a solution that appealed to me deeply. He said that his favored tactic for dealing death blows to the cluster flies was to use a hand-held vacuum. Suck them up at arm's-length and you will never hear from them again.
It was marvelous. Just far enough away from the actual destroying not to be gross, but no less certain in its effects. It was so me!
I am a pescatarian, you see, and so am used to occupying such philosophically wobbly terrain as this. If being "a vegetarian who eats seafood" is an inconsistency, it is at the very least what Samuel Butler might call a "charitable inconsistency." Grounded in the principle that one ought to minimize, if one cannot quite bring oneself to erase, the consumption of the flesh of our kindred beings -- who breathe and suffer just as we do -- one can recognize that this is, if still flawed, better at least than -- as it were -- going the whole hog. It seems more compassionate on the whole, does it not, to eat fewer kinds of flesh, than all of them? And if I was already willing to carve myself a side of salmon, surely I could carve out an exception for insect life.
The only step remaining, then, was to find myself a hand-held vacuum. I went to Home Depot and found one with a clear glass shell around its inner chamber (I did not then foresee how this would affect my plans). I raced home in a fury of blood-lust, plugged the machine in, and turned its hideous shrieking, roaring maw in the direction of my poor victims.
They would fly a short ways against the great current of the maelstrom, but inevitably be sucked down into its belly. My vacuum gobbled about four flies in this way, before I turned it off with a feeling of triumph.
That's when I glimpsed a new horror. Looking down at the clear plastic cover that encased the chambered vault of my vacuum, I saw the four flies still buzzing around within. They had survived! More than that, they seemed in perfectly good health, albeit caged.
Thom Gunn has a poem about the insectivorous pitcher plant in which he memorably compares the helpless fly's descent down the slope of the inner bulb to a prisoner's being cast into an "oubliette." Here, however, was less an oubliette than a panopticon.
Horror or horrors, I was now to be forced to behold my enemy's slow annihilation within the vaccum's vault -- more than that -- to be able to regard it from every angle. It was a sick sort of universal judgment upon me and upon them. A poetic injustice.
I, who had dreaded to open a window because of a bizarre sudden obsession with the possibility of asphyxiating inside my own home, was now to be made to oversee the slow death by suffocation of the very flies who had forced me to enclose myself within the glass boundaries that I had feared would be my doom. Just as they had not permitted me to open my windows, now there was a transparent plastic sheeting in which they would forever be encased. I had ceased to be Fowles' heroine and had become her captor.
--
Encounters with insects are never fortuitous for one with a disposition to melancholy or panic. There is something about the confrontation with our six-legged co-inhabitatants of the earth that forces us to a more direct than usual examination of the essence of life at its most basic and futile. The struggle for existence stripped to its fundamentals. The war of kindred things against one another, each seeking the other's annihilation. The holding on of life for one organism only at the dear expense of the other.
Some of the most powerful metaphors for Nietzschean despair center, for this reason, on bugs. In John Updike's Terrorist the protagonist Ahmad compares the specimens of his fellow humanity to insects, "scuttling, hurrying, intent [...] fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation." In a bleak mood, one of Hamlin Garland's characters in his classic Henry George-inspired populist story collection, Main-Travelled Roads, contemplates life in these terms: "Struggle, strife, trampling on some one else. [...] The hawk eats the partridge, the partridge eats the flies and bugs, the bugs eat each other[.]"
Doris Lessing's narrator in The Golden Notebook recounts a scene in which she and her socialist comrades in Africa stumble upon a collection of large grasshoppers that are alternately mating and destroying one another in the frantic scramble for existence and dominance. Paul, the good-looking cynic, commits on this needless and endless cycle of propagation and annihilation.
Later in the same scene, once the subject has turned to other, more political matters, he interrogates the orthodox Communist Willi (a stand-in for Lessing's second, German husband) on this question of the struggle for existence and whether or not it poses any sort of challenge to his egalitarian project:“Comrade Willi, would you not say that there is some principle at work not yet admitted to your philosophy? Some principle of destruction?” To which Willi replies in a huff that the doctrine of the class struggle has already served to explain the whole thing.
Presumably the insects too will be liberated from this needless combat over scarcity once the material conditions for socialism have been established.
One could say that the solution is simply to forswear the destruction of other living things. I could have made a point of gathering my cluster flies in jars and releasing them into the air outside (maybe at a distant park, where they could not possibly have found a route back).
The thrust of the Nietzschean argument, however -- the voice of despair finding its way into the words of Lessing and the rest -- is that even this would not be enough to solve the problem. And it really is The Problem. The fundamental one. The problem of Original Sin, under one of its many guises.
The Problem is this: it is not just the deliberate destruction of other life that is an expression of the struggle for existence, but existence itself.
This is the frightening possibility of life. This is the Problem that Lessing and the rest are wrestling with. What if me simply occupying the space that I do is depriving other cluster flies of their food and livelihood? What if any gain for one living thing comes at the expense of another?
Suppose any prolongation of life is won at the destruction of other lives. That all organic matter is sustained only through the consumption of other organisms. Suppose any happiness is wrested through power divesting some other person or creature of power. That's the Problem. That's why Reinhold Niebuhr decried pacifism as a kind of "idolatry." It forbids one manifestation of the will to power -- violence -- without recognizing the multitudinous forms in which this destructive impulse manifests itself among human beings.
Whether this strikes you as at all a possible interpretation of reality will probably depend greatly on whether or not you have struggled in the past with depression or its kindred ailments. It bears all the marks of the kind of thought process that is known as "rumination."
Like most of the fundamental philosophical problems, it may not have or need an answer. And also as with most of the fundamental philosophical problems, if you do not already see the force and strength of it as a problem, you probably cannot be brought around to doing so by any argument or words.
All I know is that throughout my life, lived in commitment to various egalitarian projects, it has haunted me as the underbelly of my thought. The one possible truth that -- if true -- would make all the rest I do and believe in meaningless.
I have encountered The Problem under different names and in diverse reading. John Davidson's poem "Thirty Bob a Week" is consumed with it -- I recall reading it as a teenage socialist and imagining then that it was a straightforward piece of egalitarian social commentary -- only to discover years later that it is far from that. It is the Problem that Philip Roth refers to in The Human Stain when he describes a vision of the world as "the battle for advantage that is ongoing, the subjugation that is ongoing, the factional collisions and collusions, the shrewd jargon of morality[.]" A vision he opposes to the simple-mindedly egalitarianism of a pair of anarchists.
It is the Problem as well to which Zola's protagonist Étienne refers in Germinal. Zola recounts his conversation with the dogmatic anarchist Souvarine as follows (Ellis trans.):
Étienne was now studying Darwin [...] and out of this ill-understood reading he had gained for himself a revolutionary idea of the struggle for existence, the lean eating the fat [...] But Souvarine furiously attacked the stupidity of the Socialists who accept Darwin, that apostle of scientific inequality, whose famous selection was only good for aristocratic philosophers. His mate persisted, however, wishing to reason out the matter, and expressing his doubts by an hypothesis: supposing the old society were no longer to exist, swept away to the crumbs; well, was it not to be feared that the new world would grow up again, slowly spoilt by the same injustices, some sick and others flourishing, some more skilful and intelligent, fattening on everything, and others imbecile and lazy, becoming slaves again? But before this vision of eternal wretchedness, the engine-man shouted out fiercely that if justice was not possible with man, then man must disappear. For every rotten society there must be a massacre, until the last creature was exterminated. And there was silence again.
Souvarine's solution to The Problem, however -- that of destroying humanity -- makes no more sense than that of Roth's anarchists, or Lessing's Willi. The whole motive that prompted the quest for justice in the first place was that life might reign in place of death. To propose that the only path to "justice" is therefore universal annihilation is a contradiction. If the proposed solution to end destruction is to destroy everything, then what was the moral objection to the original destruction?
All through college and divinity school and after I was haunted by the Problem. I will never forget my feelings reading Davidson's poem for that second time -- I was on an Amtrak train -- and realizing what it meant; and feeling the full force of the argument.
I will never forget -- a few years after -- when I read Strindberg's preface to his play Miss Julie. There, in so unexpected and odd a place, is perhaps the most succinct and cogent statement of The Problem I have found anywhere -- more horribly compelling even than the Problem as it appears in the works of Nietzsche, who may perhaps be credited as its inventor, or at least its most prolific and devoted exponent.
Though Strindberg wishes to pretend that the Problem is no problem at all, however unconvincingly.
Strindberg's Preface was -- to me, when I first read it -- perhaps the most frightening piece of prose I had ever encountered. The worst few paragraphs to ever confront my awareness. Among other things, Stringberg writes in it (Robinson trans.): "The fact that the heroine [Miss Julie] arouses our pity merely depends on our weakness in not being able to resist the fear that the same fate might overtake us. [... T]he man with faith in the future will probably insist on some positive proposals to remedy the evil, some kind of programme, in other words. But in the first place there is no such thing as absolute evil, for after all, if one family falls another now has the good fortune to rise, and this alternate rising and falling is one of life's greatest pleasures, since happiness is only relative. And of the man with the programme who wants to remedy the unpleasant fact that the bird of prey eats the dove and lice eat the bird of prey, I would ask: why should it be remedied?"
Hear the echoes with Garland's melancholy. Note that "the man with with programme" is the same as Willi, as Souvarine, as the anarchists. The same, most likely, as you and me. And to him Strindberg offers the same cold answer as our other authors have done.
See how the obsessive spirals and eddies in which depression swirls are so alike across all time and place.
For a long time I could not bring myself to write about The Problem on this blog or anywhere else. I did not have an answer for it, and I have found that to raise it is often to draw upon oneself the outrage or annoyance of the Souvarines of the world (as Étienne discovered). A few times in conversation did I, like Étienne, try to "reason out the matter" aloud with another, and with much the same result. I have not yet found another who grasped the full force of the difficulty -- or at least, who was willing to admit they grasped it.
--
At some point more recently, however, the Problem seemed to dissolve. With the melancholy. With the panic. With the other symptoms that -- for a long time now -- no longer seem to trouble me.
As with the cluster flies, too, for that matter. Contrary to the horror stories of the internet, they were in fact eventually extirpated. I have not found another one now for a month or longer.
Perhaps this is why I am now finally at liberty to write about it. The Problem, that is. Wordsworth famously observed that poetry is "emotion recollected in tranquility." Perhaps the same is true of blogs.
By why have I reached tranquility, with respect to the Problem? Why did it go away? Did I solve it, or did I accept it?
Some of both, I believe. I eventually found that, within the bounds of our everyday rationality, The Problem has no solution. Because our concepts of egalitarian morality -- the holy words of the Sermon on the Mount -- require an ethic that is in fact transcendent -- an ethic that is not only very difficult for human beings to live up to, that is to say, but something conceptually impossible. Because it asks at once both for the denial and the affirmation of life. As Souvarine's mental contortions show -- as the logical difficulty with trying to destroy destruction without destroying life inevitably serves to illustrate.
And for a long time, I assumed that if something was transcendent, it could not exist -- or at the very least, we could have no knowledge nor concept of it, if it did.
I have discovered since, however, that the structure of reality as we know it inescapably compels us to the use of transcendent concepts. Avoiding them is no more of an available option than using them.
The structure of reality in which we live and reason is riddled throughout with transcendentals and unthinkables that nonetheless have to be thought -- whether it is the concept of the continuum or the concept of discrete space (both of which are conceptually impossible, but happen to be the only available options), or the concept of non-existence or eternal existence (both of which are equally absurd, from without our conceptual apparatus -- but then, what other options beside them are there?)
In which case, a transcendental morality is no more absurd. As unthinkable as it may be, it may be as useful and necessary a concept as those others. It may point us in a direction -- as does the potential infinite -- even when we know it cannot -- by definition -- be reached. We can get closer to it -- just like infinity -- even when it is forever infinitely far away.
--
Which means that I really ought to have let those flies go, now that I think about it.
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