A fly hangs outside my window. Borne here on filigree wings and
driven by an unthinking need he is seeking something, but it’s not me.
Nonetheless he has caught me unawares, feet on desk, paddling
distractedly through the stuff of revenue recognition and manpower and
milestones. Surfacing slowly I am drawn to his insectile insistence.
I
can only guess that he is embarked upon those mindless pursuits that
satisfy a biological imperative, and in this he simultaneously engages
and releases with the seamless action of a Bentley clutch, bringing me
to him and disconnecting me from my pursuits of organizational
imperatives sufficiently removed from basic need that they require
framing in lofty allusions to eagles and leaders and motive and mission
and printing in vibrant colors and hanging on my walls, lest I forget.
These reminders having sufficient insubstantiality to focus my attention
that I also need a motivational supplement and Money is this most
satisfactory of metaphysical unguents that keep body and soul intact,
gives me that which I need to sustain that which I do, and is once again
another human abstraction whose basic substance, at once too vulgar for
inclusion in those gaudy frames is by all measurable means a superior
motivator, since it not only weighs my efforts in that most stratifying
of social scales but also puts food on my plate.
The
pursuit of an abstract goal for an abstract reward is the flypaper of
human commerce, and the twin agents of money and job are for the moment
sufficiently tacky that they relinquish their grip and allow me slip
through the glass and visit with my fly. I say that he is mine now for
just as he has me, I have him: a necessary quid pro quo. A reality that
is itself an ephemeral indulgence given the intersectional vagaries of
Hominidae and Calliphoridae. Anticipating this release quickens my
perception and I see that he is indeed a healthy specimen of an
unhealthy species, sporting a metallic splash of bottle blue-green that
slides in photo-chromic synchronicity as he stalks his vitreous plane;
his bodily phenomenon incidental of the interaction between
electromagnetism and the microscopic strata of his carapace. In
capricious pursuit of flighty needs, he is unconscious of his pleasing
impression; that magical dance of photons, polysaccharide scales, rods,
cones, axons and synapses requiring of me no effort other than elevation
of consciousness and the granting of entry. This consciousness of mine a
phenomenon incidental of the interaction of electromagnetism and the
strata of a cerebral complement nine million times larger than this fly.
The prize of this massive investment is consciousness itself.
As
flight is to the fly thought is to me, and those wings that grant a
freedom accorded only in my dreams join now with his other aspects and
transport me into a mind distinct from mine in every measurable
magnitude. Although we are morphologically dissimilar, a gulf magnified
by this intellectual inequity, he marshals his cognitive faculties much
as I do, but for imperatives more direct than those of abstract
fungibility. For this creature also sees and smells and feels and thinks
and eats and shits; similarly, only different.
Most
recently seeking that which sustains him and approaching a surface on
which to alight, his orbital and cognitive processes trigger a landing
response, the latest movement of this symphony bringing him to me.
Unlike me though, he tastes his surroundings with his feet and using
analogous cerebral structures to generate his worldview, casts thither
and yon for that which he needs - carrion and shite; the disgusting
domain of the dead and the defecated. On finding this, and wanting the
sophisticated mouthparts and consciousness that enable higher organisms
to do such things as say ‘eeeeewwwww’ and chew food, he barfs some
proteolytic puke onto his target and waits for the digestive enzymes
from his guts to liquefy his din-dins sufficiently for him to suck it
all back up through a pseudo-tracheal mop. Having flown, the fly now
flows.
This little emissary from the realm of shit, on
finding it will paddle around in it, puke on it, and after sucking it
all back up like a pint of rancid snot, be off on his merry way in
search of more shit. That he is presently on a substrate that is neither
dead nor shit cannot deny the possibility that this is whence he came
and given my way, is where he will be headed shortly. So, of all these
equally necessary components of this animal, there is precious little
taken as whole for me to glean a single shining gem, but all of him is
accessible to me in a manner that is separable in my mind into that
which has an undeniable pleasance, and that which constitutes his filthy
feeding and scatological domain. Combined, these twin poles of morbid
magnetism pull my feet to the floor and my face to the glass. Closer now
there is more of him available to me, and I see that languid stroking
of plumose aristae – seeking, sensing, seeing. Part of an alien optical
instrumentation, the intricate geometric expression of compound
structures, brown and tough like woven kevlar, as impassive as my own
reflection on those processes going on below. Does he regard me equally,
I wonder?
Distinct as we are, I can never know. Simple
as he is, I can only assume that he cannot separate what he does from
what he thinks about.
I certainly hope so.
For
if I could, I would crush this little bastard, my fingers being
altogether too squeamish for such a task, I know, and with the precision
of experience, that I would use a wooden ruler, their plastic and metal
counterparts possessing a compliance that frustrates the fine control
needed post-entrapment to apply finite and delicate angular pressure in
continuously increasing increments that transmit those tactile
sensations that my consciousness interprets as satisfying crunch and
crackle that accompany the mechanical deformation of it’s nasty little
body to that point of ejaculatory rush where it’s internal viscous
constituents, and hence consciousness, escape their fibrous integument,
and thereby the constraints of mortality, dispatching him as an
unfeeling contributor to the world of his existence.
Most satisfactory.
That
this would feel good, like other equally delicious aspects of this
little animal that I can manifest and manipulate as a consequence of my
superior brain, selecting those that I arbitrarily clothe with the
qualities of good and bad that direct my actions in an accord measurable
with same, this is a guiltless pleasure; for unlike other targets of
the will of man there are no support groups for blowflies. Such is the
rationalization that encapsulates expression of that most visceral human
urge.
But denied access to his little body by the
glass that both supports him and separates him from the exercising of my
will, the little bastard has flown off. Embarked, no doubt, on the
mindless pursuit of the shite that makes up his little world, this
simple act of a puny consciousness releases mine once again to me, and
dispatches me back to the mindless shite that makes up my little world.
Volition:
Were I able to use this prize to swoop and mount abyssal skies, but by
my use condemned instead to walk with earthbound feet of lead.
Peter Yarrow Monday May 11 2009
