Violation (30 page)

“It is horrible,” he adds, “most horrible.”

I have been a Buddhist for more than twenty-five years, since I was a young woman. My avid urge to understand bodies didn't stop at the bodies themselves; I sought for a way to think about the fact of life, the deepest query. Buddhism in its heart is
an answer to our questions about suffering and loss, a response to the inexplicable; it is a way to live with life. Its explanations, its particular vocabulary and shorthand, its gentle pressures—they have been with me throughout my adult life; they are part of my language, my thought, my view. Buddhism saved my life and controlled it; it has been liberation and censure at once.

Buddhism is blunt about suffering, its causes and its cures. The Buddha taught that nothing is permanent. He taught this in a great many ways, but most of what he said comes down to this: things change. Change hurts; change cannot be avoided. “All compounded things are subject to dissolution”—this formula is basic Buddhist doctrine, it is pounded into us by the canon, by the masters, by our daily lives. It means all things are compounded and will dissolve, which means I am compounded and I will dissolve. This is not something I readily accept, and yet I am continually bombarded with the evidence. I longed to know this, this fact of life, this answer—that we are put together from other things and will be taken apart and those other things and those things we become will in turn be taken apart and built anew—that there is nothing known that escapes this fate. When one of his disciples struggled with lust or felt pride in his youth or strength, the Buddha recommended that the follower go to the charnel ground and meditate on a corpse—on its blossoming into something new.

We feel pain because things change. We feel joy for the same reason. But suffering is not simply pain: it is our peculiar punishment that we know things change and we want this to be otherwise. We want to hang on to what is going away, keep our conditions as they are, people as they are, ourselves as we are. In Buddhist terms this is variously called thirst or desire or attachment or clinging. It means that we hold on to the hope that something will remain, even as it all slides away like sand in running water, like water from our hands. Knowing the answer does not stop the question from being asked.

Desire is not always about holding something close; it has a shadow, the urge to push things away. Buddhists usually call this
aversion—the desire for the extinction of something, for separation from it. The original Pali word for aversion,
dosa,
is various and shaded, translated sometimes as anger or hatred, sometimes as denial, as projection, aggression, repulsion, and now and then as disgust or revulsion or distortion. Aversion has as much force and fascination as the positive desires we know. It may be simply a reflexive flinch, a ducking for cover; it may be much stronger. Like desire, aversion is a many-colored thing, flavored by circumstances. It is a kind of clinging—clinging to the hope of
something other than this.

When I began to study flies, I couldn't seem to stop. Fabre wrote, “To know their habits long haunted my mind.” I think of the violence with which we describe such prurient obsessions—we say we cannot tear our eyes away. My eyes are glued to flies and it is as though they are stitched open against my will. I feel revulsion, I flinch, I turn away, I duck for cover. I get squeamish, which is a rare feeling for me. But I also feel curiosity and admiration and a kind of awe. The buzz of a fly's blurred wings is one of the myriad ways the world speaks to us; it is one of the ways speech is freed from our ideas. I feel that if I could listen, if I could just listen without reacting, without judgment or preference or opinion—without reaching for a dream of how things might be otherwise—there is something I would understand that I have yet to know.

Compassion in all its flavors is woven through the enormous canon of Buddhist thought. Its root meaning is
to suffer with
. We are able to feel compassion toward those beings who look like us and those who are most familiar. (These are not the same thing; dissimilar creatures can be deeply familiar, as we know from our time spent with dogs, with horses—even with lizards.) At what point do we extend this circle past what is known, past what looks like us? At what point do we suffer with what is completely strange? And how far must that circle extend before it includes the sheep bot fly?

This mix of push and pull I feel when I look at insects is akin to the way the tongue longs for an acquired taste. The first time one
tastes certain complex flavors they are unpleasant, even offensive. But in time it is that very flavor, its complexity—the bitterness or acidity mingling with other layers—that brings you back. Whether it is wine or chili powder or
natto—
a Japanese delicacy of soybeans bound into a sticky, cobwebbed mold—one returns in part because of the difficulty. We are sharply, pleasantly excited by the nearness of rejection, by skirting along the edge of things, the dank and sour things that instinct reads as dangerous. These shadings of flavor ever so briefly evoke poison and rot—the urine scent of beer, the lingering oily bitterness of coffee, the rank tang of certain cheeses (and I will return to cheese; it factors here). There is a brief shrinking away, perhaps very brief, minuscule, but there nonetheless.

This is a little bit of what I feel toward flies. Let us give a glance inside—a glance, a gasp, a shiver, the briefest reactivity: and then another look, a bit sideways though it may be, and then another. Then there follows the need to look: interest turning into inquiry into passion; the desire to know, to see, and something more, something crucial—the need to bear it, to be able to bear it, to be able to look as closely and thoroughly as I can.

FLIES HAVE LONG
been considered the shells and familiars of gods, witches, and demons. They are associated with reincarnation, immortality, and sorcery. They are so unutterably strange, all swarming and speed and single-mindedness, and they cannot be avoided. I really mean that; we eat flies every day.
^2
2
The FDA permits
thirty-five fruit fly eggs in every eight ounces of golden raisins, up to twenty maggots “of any size” in a hundred grams of canned mushrooms, and a fair number of both eggs and maggots in tomato products. Last night's mushroom pizza? A womb of flies.

Flies sense the world in every way, its faintest textures: minuscule currents of shifting air, the vibration of a bird's approaching wings, the scent of decaying flowers or a mouse's corpse a half mile away. Some flies have a complex and unique ear, a flexible tympanal membrane in a structure behind the neck. A few parasitic flies listen for the distinct sound of their selected prey; one imagines a head carefully cocked.

They taste and smell in ways far more subtle than ours. There is no profound difference between the two senses anyway; both are a way of identifying chemicals, defining them, discriminating. They sense the sex pheromones released so hopefully by their prey, and follow; they smell the prey's feces, its breath, or the small damage done by other hunting insects. Biting flies are sensitive to stress chemicals, including the higher levels of carbon dioxide emitted when mammals exert themselves. The black flies respond directly to the scent of human sweat. Many flies have taste and smell receptors on their complex mouthparts, their antennae, their delicate legs, and their fine-clawed feet. Walking, they sample the coming meal; instantly, the proboscis unwinds. Flies are sensitive to minute differences in the world's chemistry, and its surprising similarities: One of the parasitic
Lucilia
flies is attracted, according to one text, to “wild parsnips and fresh meat.” One molecule attracts the male to the female; another causes the male's ritual courtship flight; a third causes the female to relax and hold still. Their world is a superdimensional pheromonal architecture, a mingled and vaporous mist multiplied by sight and sound and space.

Consider the compound eye, common to all insects, variously evolved in flies. A fly's eyes may be huge: the eyes of horse flies are bulging black caps filling the face. Other flies may have tiny eyes, and some flies have no eyes at all. (The pyrgotid flies have strangely shaped heads that protrude in
front
of their eyes, an evolutionary
development hard to comprehend.) The eye may be flat or bulging, round or triangular in shape, shining like jewels. A deer fly's eyes are brightly colored, green or gold with patterns and zigzags. Tachinid flies have reddish eyes; dance flies have orange ones. Each facet of a compound eye is held at a unique angle, independent of all the others. They are capable of differentiating between the wavelengths of light and can distinguish the angle at which sunlight falls, allowing them to navigate off the surface of water. A fly has a thousand eyes, four thousand eyes, side by side without gap. The fly cannot focus on a single form, but sees each form from many angles at once. Each single thing is multiplied, the object broken like a mirror into shocks of light, and remade like water into a single lake, a prism, a drop of dew.

Flies eat blood and meat and feces and other insects and each other, but also pollen, nectar, algae, decaying seaweed, and fungi. Bulb fly maggots are tiny dilettantes, seeking only the inner tissue of hyacinth, tulip, narcissus, and lily bulbs. Fruit fly maggots are picky: one species eats walnut husks, another eats cherries. Pomace flies live on rotting fruit, but they don't eat the fruit; they eat the yeast that grows on rotting fruit. (This is a brief world indeed; a new generation is born every ten days or so.)

Flies bite, suck, slice, lap. Bee lice live in the mouths of bees, eating nectar. Stiletto fly larvae sometimes live in wool blankets and decaying wood. Among the black flies, which plague cattle, each species specializes in a cow part—one sucks blood from cows' bellies, one from cows' ears, and so on. The flat-footed flies, which run in a zigzag pattern across plants, include a variety called smoke flies; they are attracted to fires and eat the burned wood afterward. Eye gnats are drawn to tears, sweat flies to sweat, face flies to eyes and noses.

Flies hurt us, but only in passing; sleeping sickness, malaria, yellow fever, river blindness: mere accidents. The sheep bot fly can live in many places, including human eyes if eyes are more convenient than the sheep—but it prefers the sheep. We are simply
more food, more warm and meaty beings among endless beings. But what food!—palaces of muscle and blood, rich and fertile fields.

I read otherwise sober and mechanical descriptions of flies and trip over the anthropomorphic complaint. Both Pliny and Plutarch complained that flies were impossible to train and domesticate. Among modern thinkers, one fly is “good” and the other is “bad,” one is a “pest” and another a “bane” and another a “benefit.” The tachinid flies are parasitic on destructive caterpillars, and snipe flies eat aphids, so they are described with kind words. Their predation does us good, but all predation does something good and not just the predator. Predation makes way. It makes room.

Even entomologists hate flies, on principle. Edwin Way Teale, who wrote of the natural world his entire life with reverence and cheer, hated the housefly. He obsessed over the number and variety of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites they carried from place to place, and finally seems to have simply flung his hands into the air and given up, declaring the housefly “an insect villain with hardly a drop of redeeming virtue.” Leland Howard, a USDA entomologist, wrote an encyclopedic account of insects in 1904 that is still quoted today. He called the harmless saltwater flies “sordid little flies,” and the wingless bird tick “apparently too lazy to fly.” Of the bluebottle, which sometimes has parasitic mites, he wrote, “It is comforting to think that the house-fly has these parasites which torment him so. Such retribution is just.”

Humans are a nightmare; we tear the earth apart. We trepan mountains and pour them into rivers, take the soil apart down to its atoms, sully the sea, shred our world like giants rutting after truffles. We poison our nest and each other and ourselves. We eat everything, simply everything, but we turn away from flies.

The circles of compassion can suddenly expand. Federico Garcia Lorca wrote that he rescued flies caught at a window; they reminded him of “people / in chains.” And of course I've done the same. I often do—catch flies and crickets and spiders and let them go, careful of their frailty. This brief moment of the widening circle; it is easily challenged by the maggot, by the swarm. The larvae
of the fungus gnat sometimes travel in great masses, for reasons no one can guess—huge groups called worm snakes piled several deep, squirming along about an inch a minute. I know why Beelzebub is Lord of the Flies; is there any other god who would slouch so towards Bethlehem?