Stalking the Reader...a curtain of grasses

A bevy of notes (2000)

Watching, "...Then I saw something dark like an engorged leech rummaging over the spittle, and then I saw the praying mantis.

She was upside-down, clinging to a horizontal stem of wild rose by her feet which pointed to heaven. Her head was deep in dried grass. Her abdomen was swollen like a smashed finger; it tapered to a fleshy tip out which bubbled a wet, whipped froth. I couldn't believe my eyes. I lay on the hill this way and that, my knees in thorns and my cheeks in clay, trying to see as well as I could. I poked near the female's head with a grass; she was clearly undisturbed, so I settled my nose an inch from that pulsating abdomen. It puffed like a concertina, it throbbed like a bellows; it roved, pumping, over the glistening, clabbered surface of the egg case testing and patting, thrusting and smoothing. It seemed to act so independently that I forgot the panting brown stick at the other end. The bubble creature seemed to have two eyes, a frantic little brain, and two busy, soft hands. ...

The male was nowhere in sight. The female had probably eaten him. Fabre says that, at least in captivity, the female will mate with and devour up to seven males, whether she has laid her egg cases or not. The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says, in effect, "No, don't go near her, you fool, she'll eat you alive." At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, 'Yes, by all means, now and forever yes'" (57-58).

...

"I find it hard to see anything about a bird that it does not want seen. It demands my full attention. Several times waiting for muskrats, however, I have watched insects doing various special things who were, like the mantis laying her eggs, happily oblivious to my presence. Twice I was not certain what I had seen.

Once it was a dragonfly flying low over the creek in an unusual rhythm. I looked closely; it was dipping the tip of its abdomen in the water very quickly, over and over. It was flying in a series tight circles, just touching the water at the very bottom arc of each circle. The only thing I could imagine it was doing was laying eggs, and this later proved to be the case. I actually saw this, I thought--I actually saw a dragonfly laying her eggs from not five feet away.

It is this peculiar stitching motion of the dragonfly's abdomen that earned it the name "darning needle"--parents used to threaten their children by saying that, if the children told lies, dragonflies would hover over their faces as they slept and sew their lips together. Interestingly, I read that only the great speed at which the egg-laying female dragonfly flies over the water prevents her from being 'caught by the surface tension and pulled down.' And at that same great speed the dragonfly I saw that day whirred away, downstream: a drone, a dot, and then gone" (188).

Portable Identity : "Watching Them Grow Up" by Laura Fokkena, Al tufle taht al siara. The baby is under the car.

It was the first sentence I learned in Arabic. I was in Egypt taking classes at the American University in Cairo, where my instructor was teaching us prepositions. As first-semester students we had to make do with the limited number of nouns we'd already learned, ergo the creation of improbable constructions such as "the elephant is on top of the sink" and "the rose is next to the airplane." I have always loved and remembered "al tufle taht al siara," because the monotone in which my instructor chanted it was a perfect reflection of Egypt's total inattention to the myriad dangers faced by young children. This was a country that raised its kids haphazardly, nonchalantly; heavy on trust, low on panic.

Egypt is not a society that has safety boards just for elevators, nor one particularly concerned about catching bilharzia from the water. In contrast to the United States, a country in which the phrase "but it's for the children!" is used to justify every inane political agenda, Egyptians don't even enforce drunk-driving laws, much less regulate bumper cars at the amusement park. Infant car seats are considered to be more hassle than they are worth, and precautions on the underside of buckets warning that a two-year-old could tip them over and drown--well, that is just out of the question. 'The baby is under the car. Repeat. The baby is under the car. Repeat'" (120-121).

Susan Sontag, who has been in love seven times in her life--Five women. Four men.--means:

"Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. More beautiful, by modern taste. Recall that it was Breton and other Surrealists who invented the secondhand store as a temple of vanguard taste and upgraded visits to flea markets into a mode of aesthetic pilgrimage. The Surrealist ragpicker's acuity was directed to finding beautiful what other people found ugly or without interest and relevance--bric-a-brac, naïve or pop objects, urban debris.

As the structuring of a prose fiction, a painting, a film by means of quotations--think of Borges, of Kitaj, of Godard--is a specialized example of Surrealist taste, so the increasingly common practice of putting up photographs on living-room and bedroom walls, where formerly hung reproductions of paintings, is an index of the wide diffusion of Surrealist taste. For photographs themselves satisfy many of the the criteria for Surrealist approbation, being ubiquitous, cheap, unprepossessing objects. A painting is commissioned or bought; a photograph is found (in albums and drawers), cut out (of newspapers and magazines), or easily taken onself. And the objects that are photographs not only proliferate in a way that paintings don't but are, in a certain sense, aesthetically indestructible. Leonardo's "The Last Supper" in Milan hardly looks better now; it looks terrible. Photographs, when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look better. (In this, as in other ways, the art that photography does resemble is architecture, whose works are subject to the same inexorable promotion through the passage of time; many buildings, and not only the Parthenon, probably look better as ruins.)