butterflies

Butterflies

Thirty-five years ago if you had told me I would be writing about butterflies in 2011, I would have scoffed -- one of our principal pastimes back in the Ironic Age.
But the butterflies. This summer we had a steady population of white admirals darting around the yard, in between some uncommonly huge dragonflies. These white admirals are actually deep black with a white band on their wings. When you catch one resting you can also see dark red dots at the bottom of the wings under the band. The sharp symmetry of the wings and their satin markings strike the eye with a sort of planetary force. It's hard to avoid the idea that some kind of planning governs these markings.
My lepidoptera identification skills are still in their infancy, but we had viceroys, sulphurs, azures, a red admiral or two and possibly a monarch this summer, along with all kinds of moths as well as skippers. Butterflies, skippers and moths are distinguished mainly by their antennas: butterfly antennas are swollen at the tip; skippers' are "hooked"; and moths' are "feathery or threadlike," according to one field guide. In general butterflies are active during the day and moths at night, though there are exceptions. Most butterflies hold their wings upright when perched, while moths fold them over their backs.
These details are a lot more interesting to me now than when I was a kid. Butterflies weren't my hobby, but I remember being curious about their colors and their breeze-born erratic flight. My childhood - weird as it was, to my recollection, with maps on the evening news showing what parts of the East Coast could be destroyed by Castro's missiles (the circles reached almost to Portland) - was marked by the kaleidoscopic, almost stupefying sense that beauty was endlessly boiling up out of the natural world. I did not call it "beauty," of course, because to a 9-year-old it's not a thought, it's an experience, like the first thing you see when you wake up in the morning. Everything seemed alive, I remember. Beyond butterflies, there were stars in inky blackness, hay fields, snapping turtles. The smell of cut grass could create a momentary trancelike state. My mother's hollyhocks fascinated and annoyed me, like bees. I spent parts of many summer days between about 1962 and 1966 hypnotized by the glitter of sunlight on ocean waves.
That was then. Sometime around 1967 or '68 I awoke to a sort of dejected cynicism in which the natural world grew far away, like images in the wrong end of binoculars. The news from Vietnam was horrific. Kids I knew were rumored to have stolen their family cars. It was impossible to tell what was real from what was fake. Nobody loved us, or more importantly, me. All good writers were ironic, I figured out, which indicated how I should shape my own ambitions, and thought could and should eradicate emotion. (In fact, in retrospect it appears I took all feelings for inferior, dangerous kinds of thought.) Something about wanting to get high. The world was a smothering, soporific weight. It was all downhill from there, like they say, sunglints and all.
By college, the word "aesthetic" took on a certain philosophic meaning, but the idea that a white admiral's markings sprang from any design would have met with dismissal from us. God, if he exists, does not work like that, we would have said with phenomenological confidence and gone on to the next topic. Which might have been the superiority of John Berryman's poetry to Robert Frost's because it gave an unvarnished depiction of real inner life. A butterfly was an emblem of sentimental weakness. Berryman jumped off a bridge in 1972.
One hot August afternoon when I was 25 after a bad day at work, I stopped my car in Scarborough at a roadside stand that sold cut flowers. You left a quarter in a rusty coffee can and took a bunch. I did not know much about flowers then, but there were asters among them. I brought them home thinking my roommates would appreciate them and put them in a glass of water on the kitchen table.
Then something unbelievable happened. The flowers made me feel better. It was as if the blossoms themselves were cheerful, like the ingredients of a restorative broth. My own gray matter was transformed by that cheer.
Cheerfulness not being one of my often-mentioned traits, the mood lasted only that evening. But I carried around the image long after the flowers were no more. You might say it was all uphill from there - steep and rocky, but upward nonetheless.
In the last two or three decades, the child who was hypnotized by glittering waves has had progressively more to say to the man. Hayfields are mesmerizing again. The meanest hawkweed bending in the wind can transfix me in the yard for minutes extended and warped almost to the limit of my wife's patience. I dream stitchwort flowers are field galaxies, and am not sure afterward if I dreamed of the stitchwort or the stitchwort is dreaming of me. Stars, like some cats and dogs, almost speak.
And the butterflies. The symmetry of their wings, their black, white, orange, blue, red and yellow markings. They transform from crawling things, apparently by design, into prisms that channel some glinting radiance too deep for thought or tears or any other expressible feeling. If I could only wake up for the golden years.

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