The Fly

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