A Question Mark for the Crematogasters
No. 151
The eclipse brought rain to Austin. A frustration for those who had flown here from far away to be in the path of totality, but a welcome stimulant to spring life in this increasingly arid and volatile climatic interzone. And it made room for glimpses of the celestial event, the fast-moving cloud cover thinning enough at moments for you to see the Sun and the Moon hooking up. We watched it from the banks of the urban river, at the edge of an expansive patch of bluebonnets, and found it to be a beautiful experience. The long minute of darkness in the middle of day was amplified by the intermittent light rain, and the sounds and signs of confounded birds.
Monday night the rain came in strong, clearing out in the morning, a more authentic morning than the one the birds had announced the previous afternoon. The butterflies had already been in evidence the weekend and hours before the eclipse, many of them in aerial courtship, including a gorgeous pair of tiger swallowtails we watching dancing outside our window as we ate grilled cheeses and home-grown sprouts with our in-laws. So I shouldn’t have been surprised at lunchtime Tuesday when, walking to the gym from my law office, I came upon an especially cool butterfly in a remarkably uncool location.
It was the second time in my life I have encountered a member of Polygonia interrogationis, commonly known in English as the question mark butterfly. The name comes from the white marks you can see on the underwing in the photo above, which is how I identified it (turn it upside down to better see the question mark). The first time I noticed one was a couple of years ago in the pocket prairie we made out of our front yard, on a tall wildflower. This one was on the wall of a mixed-use development they made from an old power plant at the west end of downtown, hanging out there between Malibu Poke and Trader Joe’s as if that were a perfectly normal place for a freshly hatched holometabolous insect to dry its wings—and as if its incredible camouflage, evolved to resemble a wet brown leaf that has fallen in the rain, was working against the silver-painted pillar of the retail block. Remarkable evidence that, even in the shadows of all the towers technocapital has built here in the past two decades, pockets of wild nature persist.
Fifteen years ago, when the power plant had been mostly decommissioned and the water treament plant next door was about to be demolished, I saw a coyote on that same path, early on a Sunday morning crossing the tracks behind the Amtrak station. Several major creeks cut deep channels through there, some of them buried and paved, others still too wild to tame when the big rains come. In summer I see lots of green herons coming and going past our office windows from the mouth of one of those creeks. Two blocks from there is the Treaty Oak, the last tree still standing from what was, at the time of Anglo settlement of Austin, a sacred grove of more than a dozen majestic old oaks where the Comanche and Tonkawa would parley, somehow rendered invisible to the cars backed up at the light in front of the AT&T Store and West Elm.
The Whole Foods Market occupies the next block, surrounded on every side by office buildings full of Amazon employees who spill out midday with their ID badges and workplace whispers for lunch from the hot bar. I usually join them for a quick bite after my run, revealing my age with the anachronistic company I keep: a print copy of the New York Times tossed to my driveway every morning from a passing car. Tuesday when I stepped out of there to walk back to work in the lovely spring sunshine, I hadn’t gotten far before I was impeded by flying ants in my face.
When I stopped to deal with the situation, I saw the source—a metal landscape grate protecting a much younger oak tree and the little square of dirt it was afforded there amid the acres of concrete with which we paved the sacred grove. Hundreds more ants were there atop the grate, which had been wrought in the image of the grocer’s corporate logo, and you could see how their mass emergence exposed the top tunnels of a deep mound that had taken advantage of the grate’s protection from predation and elemental threats. Acrobat ants, with their heart-shaped abdomens and chocolaty colors. All males, I assumed, preparing to take to the air in search of the new queen they were programmed to inseminate on her nuptial flight.
The ants’ scientific name, Crematogaster, made me think of Cremaster, the Matthew Barney art film series I was always slightly scared to watch, as if its confident transgressions would rewire my square Iowa boy brain in some dangerous way, Bjork’s wholesome alien influence notwithstanding. But the ants are so much sexually weirder than any human could imagine, the queen storing huge quantities of sperm in a special chamber in her abdomen, to be drawn from as needed over the course of her lifetime to fertilize and birth new members of the colony. The entry on “Nuptial Flights and Mating” in the AntWiki reads like some Ballardian inversion of an epic fantasy novel:
The vast majority of virgin queens die within hours after leaving the mother nest. Most are destroyed by predators and hostile workers of alien nests, with the others being variously drowned, overheated, and desiccated. In species with large nest populations, such as the leafcutter ants (Atta) and fire ants (Solenopsis), it is not uncommon for one colony to release hundreds or thousands of the young winged queens in less than an hour. If the surrounding area is dominated by stable, mature colonies, only one or two of the queens might become the progenetrices of new colonies. Most of the rest will die before they can construct a first shelter--or even before they can find a mate. The few individuals that navigate all the dangers must also avoid breeding with males of other species, thus producing inviable or sterile offspring.
It follows that the brief interval between leaving the home nest and settling into a new, incipient nest is a period of intense natural selection among queens, a dangerous odyssey that must be precisely timed and executed in order to succeed.
Reading that everyday urban nature vignette as a storybook of the mythic lives of myrmecological matriarchs got me thinking about the story of Unn the Deep-Minded, one of the handful of exceptionally powerful female leaders who show up in the Icelandic sagas. As related in Laxdæla Saga, Unn, the daughter of Ketill Flat-nose, a Viking military leader, and bride of Olaf the White, son of the Viking king who ruled over the shire of Dublin for a time, became the leader of her band when her husband and then son were killed in battle. She built a ship in secret in the middle of the Scottish forest, and managed to escape in it, loaded with valuables and a large retinue of fighting men under her command—first to Orkney, then the Faroe Islands, and finally to build a new community in western Iceland, where she famously landed men who had formerly been unfree. I read Magnus Magnusson’s 1969 translation of that story in the fall of 2016, and its enigmatic relation of the power of matriarchal leadership encoded a valuable promise of future possibility in a darkening year.
Tuesday’s paper was dominated by stories of the eclipse, including several of the many insipid pieces I saw this week about how the cosmic event united an otherwise divided American people. Just in time for this weekend’s release of Alex Garland’s Civil War, a movie about Kirsten Dunst leading a group of journalists through a USA that has degenerated into 21st century sectarian conflict zone. I have a soft spot for speculative fictions that explore that territory, having written one myself (or three, depending on how you count). From the reviews, it sounds like Garland makes the usual Hollywood move of evading the question of what it is the disunited Americans are actually divided by, as is often the case in popular fictions about uprisings—witness how George Lucas killed his mojo when he tried to explain what it was the heroic rebels of Star Wars actually stood for.
The day before, the print edition of the Times included a much more powerful piece: a story by Ben Hubbard and Bilal Shbair about the wild plant that is sustaining many residents of Gaza as they are cut off from the supply chain. Khobeza is a native leafy mallow that flourishes in the empty lots and roadsides after spring rains, described as having “a taste and texture somewhere between spinach and kale,” and reportedly quite tasty when sautéed with olive oil and lightly seasoned with whatever is available. I found myself recalling my mother’s stories of how, when she was the age of our four-year-old daughter, she and her mother, sister and brother learned to forage for wild food in the region around Salzburg when they were displaced at the end of the war that led to the founding of the modern Israeli state.
The special glasses I had on hand to enjoy the brief workday distraction of staring at the sun were printed with an American flag design, complete with bald eagle hilarious spread in front of the total eclipse of the bridge of my nose. What I learned when I undertook a book-length imagining of an America truly at war with itself is that most of our conflicts as modern humans, here and in other nations sustained by agriculture and commerce, are rooted in the damaged relationship we have with the land on which we live. The system of surplus accumulation that started with our domestication of grain crops thousands of years ago and ends, at the moment, with electronic accounts that store the accumulated surplus value of your own labor and that which you may have been able to extract from others through exploitation, whether bargained for or coerced.
I don’t wish for a world where those of us that remain must live off the wild food we can hunt and forage in the ruins. But in springtime, when the native plants come up in the drainage ditches and medians with leaves that are as good to eat as baby spinach, while the city belches and sprawls its way toward the summer that will never end, their quiet lessons feel more urgent every year.
After Eclipse Reading List
There are two surprisingly common North American butterflies that have underwings that resemble tree leaves and identifying spots that look to some eyes like punctuation marks: the question mark butterfly and the comma butterfly. There are many good guides out there that explain how to tell the difference depending on which wing sides you can see in the moment. I liked this one from the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C. (I would suggest the question mark of Polygonia interrogationis often looks more like a semicolon, but that isn’t as cool as question mark.)
For more on the nuptial behavior of ants, see my June 2020 post on the “Flight of the Fire Ants.”
On the subject of things worth rising up to fight for, the April 5 issue of the Times Literary Supplement has an interesting Bill McKibben essay (behind the TLS paywall for now) on why violence is not justified by the urgency of the climate crisis. A review of Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s new book The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, it also touches on the work of Andreas Malm, author of such provocative works as How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Important material to grapple with, especially for those of us who see environmental justice as the root issue underlying political economy and social struggle.
Slate has a fascinating article by Richard Kreitner about the long history of American novels imagining other civil wars, which includes a kind reference to my 2017 book Tropic of Kansas (he calls it “harrowing” twice in the same sentence).
For some examples showing the weirdly apolitical nature of science fictional uprisings, my 2019 piece on the subject is still up at B&N Reads, as is my piece at Locus about truth and reconciliation in speculative fiction.
For a deeper bite into the copper wire exposed by our pop fictions, and what it reveals about human labor systems, check out this amazing keynote Field Notes reader and Murderbot author Martha Wells delivered Friday as the guest of honor for the annual Jack Williamson Lecture, noting how most sentient robot stories are really about slavery, and how disturbing it is how few people give that self-evident truth any thought.
And for one more Corona that evokes thoughts about environmental survival, there’s the prescient and beautiful one the Minutemen sang about, which came up in my feed this week, and made me wonder what D. Boon would have gone on to do had he not been killed so young:
A Natural History of Empty Lots
As previously mentioned here, my new book A Natural History of Empty Lots is coming out this fall. As a preorder promotion I’m going to be sending out a print version of this newsletter with content not available elsewhere—outtakes from the book, both text and photos, entirely new material, and probably a map and some drawings. If you’re interested in getting a copy of that, just email me your preorder confirmation at chris@christopherbrown.com along with your preferred mailing address. The response thus far has been so enthusiastic I think I’ll do the first installment sooner than I had planned, and follow it up with one or two issues before publication day on October 15.
Have a great week. Field Notes will be off next Sunday, as I will be in the field.
I used the word "harrowing" for CIVIL WAR as well. Speaking as a long-ago photojournalist (but never a war guy. Also, you may have seen me write about this and more on Blue Sky), to me this was more about the ethics of distancing yourself from the horror and violence with the barrel of a lens AND with the barrel of a gun.
I always thought the insignia on the wing of a question mark butterfly looked like a semicolon because that's what a question mark in ancient Greek looks like, and the species was named by the sort of Oxford don who would know that sort of thing. But I've just spent half an hour googling to find confirmation of this, and I can't seem to, so maybe it's just me who thinks that way.