One morning in late August, not long after we'd moved in to our first house in Staunton, my British roommate, Anna, came down to breakfast looking especially haggard. "Couldn't sleep?" I asked her.
"How could anyone," she replied, "with all that bloody noise!"
"Oh, you mean the barking dogs?" I asked.
"No, those insects," Anna said, and grimaced. "The ones that…whir and screech like that! How can you stand it?!"
It had never occurred to me that there were people who had grown up without the sound of crickets and cicadas as the constant accompaniment to their late summers, for whom the sound would be noticeable, even obtrusive. Having lived all of my life in the Southern U.S., in small cities with plenty of trees and grasses, I am so used to the undulating buzz, whir, and chirp of cicadas that I only notice when it starts or stops.
Except, that is, sometimes, in very late summer, when the insects sing their loudest in one last dash towards mating before the frosts of fall come. At this time of year, I almost always notice the cicadas, at least a little bit – and the sound always makes me melancholy.
Part of it, I'm sure, is simply that the sound of cicadas in late August is firmly attached to the end of the dubiously fun freedom of summer vacation. It's back to school, and structured responsibilities, and ostensibly more difficult tasks. As my adjectives suggest, though, there's little reason for me, as a person, to feel particularly melancholy about the start of the school year. I am the type of person who has always been excited about the first day of school, even with normal attendant anxieties. I like the promise of a fresh start at something old, I like the assumption that I will learn and therefore change in discrete packets during this time. Most of all, I like structure and order – I do not thrive, and never have, during the free-wheeling emptiness of long summer vacations. Moreover, as an adult, even though my career still entails an academic schedule (and believe me, I appreciate this), summer means less lack of schedule than a different schedule. Summers are still for work, though they demand a different type of work. (I had some trouble with this this summer, making me especially glad, despite normal attendant anxieties, to be back to class time).
It's less change of human season, I think, than the implied instinctual knowledge of natural season that makes the cicadas seem melancholy to me. Cicadas call loudest at the end of summer because fall is not far off, and with it, the death of the entire extant cicada population. (To be renewed, of course, when the new eggs hatch in the spring.)
There are a number of animal myths that are frequently used in Renaissance literature as tiny little exempla, or fables (most of them taken from that master of scientific misinformation, Pliny, or at least credited to him) – the idea, for instance, that the mother bear, a sort of elemental sculptor, must lick her cubs into shape, or that the pelican feeds her offspring, Christ-like, with her own blood. One of the most often cited – or at least, most often noticed by me – is that of the swan-song, a notion that still endures, of course. The idea is that the swan sings only once, producing a melody of divine sweetness right before its death. Uncannily, it knows, even if an observer cannot tell, that the end has come, and its response is to produce music. An allelulia? A psalm? Maybe, to the religious observer. To one less piously inclined, the swan-song could be a measure of the hopeless and yet unfathomably compelling need to create: in the very face of annihilation, still living creatures produce a type of offspring that is between life and death, or beyond it; still they sing. All three of the myths I've listed, actually, trade on this borderland between the living and the dead, the realm of story and of song – the sculptor-bear, the sacrificial pelican, the orphic swan. They're stories about birth and death, and their primary lesson is the proximity of the two. Living form is inches away from the confusion (worse, always worse, in Renaissance literature, than Hell) of unformed Chaos. Birth and rebirth entail the consistent sacrifice of life, a trade of death for life that is always already uneven. And song? Is it a consolation for death? A signifier of rebirth to come? A memorializing of the unborn future, of the life that will happen after the individual has vanished?
The thing about the noise the cicadas make is that it is so very alive. It's not joyous or beautiful or even melodic – sometimes you can discern the more musical chirp of crickets amongst the larger din, but mostly it's an alternating chorus of buzzing, whirring, and shirring noises, one group wheeling up as soon as another winds down. It's simply loud, present, alive. It's wordless (birds sometimes seem to have phrases or sentences, but cicadas have none), and signifies only presence. HERE. HERE. I don't have any sense that cicada song is melodic or enlightening. It simply sounds, and sounds more stridently, because death is coming. There is this peak of life, insistent, constant, loud, undifferentiated living, in the late summer because soon the potential for such loud living will cease. It is as if, in preparation for the lifting sky and thinning air that happens when the weather turns cold, some other thing has lifted, and what is revealed underneath is the buzz of things as they are, but not as they will always be.
In the sense that the cycle of birth, mating, death, rebirth is continuous and seasonal, the cicada's song is hardly melancholy. I do not attribute to the sound any individual knowledge of person or of impending extinction. If anything, the sight of an inset that has lived beyond its fellows, like the drugged-seeming bees who sometimes crawl inside to buzz faintly in the last days of autumn, is horrifying. Things should follow their seasons, and when they do not, everything becomes confused. (There is chaos, on the edge again.) But what is melancholy is when I compare human life to cicada life, human song to that of the whirring insects. It takes me back to that equivocal swan-song. What we wish is that things were like the cicada, or even better, like the swan. We wish, or hope, that there is a concentrated burst before a necessary end, and that something of it – volume or beauty – endures. One of my favorite poems by Mark Doty, "A Green Crab's Shell," phrases it like this, examining the iridescent colors on the inside of a crab shell found on the beach:
But Doty's "if" is also my own. Is death like this? Do we iridesce, or can we? Can we, or more importantly, do we always produce a swan-song, or at least a cicada-like rise and fall even if, like the cicadas, we neither know for sure what end is coming, or what it means? Swans, after all, do not sing before their deaths, and as it turns out, no swan has a particularly pretty call anyway. The story expresses, like all stories, a wish or a need -- the need to place life, enduring life, right up against death.
But all too often, it seems to me, that need is not fulfilled for us. We experience little of the unthinking loud exuberance of the cicada, none of the melody of the swan, and instead sink with silence into our lives, middle and end. Of course, that's a grim view – but that's precisely my point. It is all too easy to be grim, to find no comfort in the unmelodious whir of life.
In the end, I think the unmelodious, melancholy loudness of the cicadas in late summer helps me. I value structure, as I've said. The cues I get to the change of the seasons, the passing of time, are important to me. More than that, though, the cicadas, and the melancholy I feel when I hear them, remind me that life is noisy, and can continue to be so, if I listen for it, right up to the last moment. It isn't, necessarily, pretty or precious in the way a swan-song would be; nor does it always entail obvious sacrifices or monumental constructions, though it can be read that way with only a little effort. But it is always, at least, loud. And that, as it turns out, is a comfort of its own sort.
"How could anyone," she replied, "with all that bloody noise!"
"Oh, you mean the barking dogs?" I asked.
"No, those insects," Anna said, and grimaced. "The ones that…whir and screech like that! How can you stand it?!"
It had never occurred to me that there were people who had grown up without the sound of crickets and cicadas as the constant accompaniment to their late summers, for whom the sound would be noticeable, even obtrusive. Having lived all of my life in the Southern U.S., in small cities with plenty of trees and grasses, I am so used to the undulating buzz, whir, and chirp of cicadas that I only notice when it starts or stops.
Except, that is, sometimes, in very late summer, when the insects sing their loudest in one last dash towards mating before the frosts of fall come. At this time of year, I almost always notice the cicadas, at least a little bit – and the sound always makes me melancholy.
Part of it, I'm sure, is simply that the sound of cicadas in late August is firmly attached to the end of the dubiously fun freedom of summer vacation. It's back to school, and structured responsibilities, and ostensibly more difficult tasks. As my adjectives suggest, though, there's little reason for me, as a person, to feel particularly melancholy about the start of the school year. I am the type of person who has always been excited about the first day of school, even with normal attendant anxieties. I like the promise of a fresh start at something old, I like the assumption that I will learn and therefore change in discrete packets during this time. Most of all, I like structure and order – I do not thrive, and never have, during the free-wheeling emptiness of long summer vacations. Moreover, as an adult, even though my career still entails an academic schedule (and believe me, I appreciate this), summer means less lack of schedule than a different schedule. Summers are still for work, though they demand a different type of work. (I had some trouble with this this summer, making me especially glad, despite normal attendant anxieties, to be back to class time).
It's less change of human season, I think, than the implied instinctual knowledge of natural season that makes the cicadas seem melancholy to me. Cicadas call loudest at the end of summer because fall is not far off, and with it, the death of the entire extant cicada population. (To be renewed, of course, when the new eggs hatch in the spring.)
There are a number of animal myths that are frequently used in Renaissance literature as tiny little exempla, or fables (most of them taken from that master of scientific misinformation, Pliny, or at least credited to him) – the idea, for instance, that the mother bear, a sort of elemental sculptor, must lick her cubs into shape, or that the pelican feeds her offspring, Christ-like, with her own blood. One of the most often cited – or at least, most often noticed by me – is that of the swan-song, a notion that still endures, of course. The idea is that the swan sings only once, producing a melody of divine sweetness right before its death. Uncannily, it knows, even if an observer cannot tell, that the end has come, and its response is to produce music. An allelulia? A psalm? Maybe, to the religious observer. To one less piously inclined, the swan-song could be a measure of the hopeless and yet unfathomably compelling need to create: in the very face of annihilation, still living creatures produce a type of offspring that is between life and death, or beyond it; still they sing. All three of the myths I've listed, actually, trade on this borderland between the living and the dead, the realm of story and of song – the sculptor-bear, the sacrificial pelican, the orphic swan. They're stories about birth and death, and their primary lesson is the proximity of the two. Living form is inches away from the confusion (worse, always worse, in Renaissance literature, than Hell) of unformed Chaos. Birth and rebirth entail the consistent sacrifice of life, a trade of death for life that is always already uneven. And song? Is it a consolation for death? A signifier of rebirth to come? A memorializing of the unborn future, of the life that will happen after the individual has vanished?
The thing about the noise the cicadas make is that it is so very alive. It's not joyous or beautiful or even melodic – sometimes you can discern the more musical chirp of crickets amongst the larger din, but mostly it's an alternating chorus of buzzing, whirring, and shirring noises, one group wheeling up as soon as another winds down. It's simply loud, present, alive. It's wordless (birds sometimes seem to have phrases or sentences, but cicadas have none), and signifies only presence. HERE. HERE. I don't have any sense that cicada song is melodic or enlightening. It simply sounds, and sounds more stridently, because death is coming. There is this peak of life, insistent, constant, loud, undifferentiated living, in the late summer because soon the potential for such loud living will cease. It is as if, in preparation for the lifting sky and thinning air that happens when the weather turns cold, some other thing has lifted, and what is revealed underneath is the buzz of things as they are, but not as they will always be.
In the sense that the cycle of birth, mating, death, rebirth is continuous and seasonal, the cicada's song is hardly melancholy. I do not attribute to the sound any individual knowledge of person or of impending extinction. If anything, the sight of an inset that has lived beyond its fellows, like the drugged-seeming bees who sometimes crawl inside to buzz faintly in the last days of autumn, is horrifying. Things should follow their seasons, and when they do not, everything becomes confused. (There is chaos, on the edge again.) But what is melancholy is when I compare human life to cicada life, human song to that of the whirring insects. It takes me back to that equivocal swan-song. What we wish is that things were like the cicada, or even better, like the swan. We wish, or hope, that there is a concentrated burst before a necessary end, and that something of it – volume or beauty – endures. One of my favorite poems by Mark Doty, "A Green Crab's Shell," phrases it like this, examining the iridescent colors on the inside of a crab shell found on the beach:
Not so bad, to die,
if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers
of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.
But Doty's "if" is also my own. Is death like this? Do we iridesce, or can we? Can we, or more importantly, do we always produce a swan-song, or at least a cicada-like rise and fall even if, like the cicadas, we neither know for sure what end is coming, or what it means? Swans, after all, do not sing before their deaths, and as it turns out, no swan has a particularly pretty call anyway. The story expresses, like all stories, a wish or a need -- the need to place life, enduring life, right up against death.
But all too often, it seems to me, that need is not fulfilled for us. We experience little of the unthinking loud exuberance of the cicada, none of the melody of the swan, and instead sink with silence into our lives, middle and end. Of course, that's a grim view – but that's precisely my point. It is all too easy to be grim, to find no comfort in the unmelodious whir of life.
In the end, I think the unmelodious, melancholy loudness of the cicadas in late summer helps me. I value structure, as I've said. The cues I get to the change of the seasons, the passing of time, are important to me. More than that, though, the cicadas, and the melancholy I feel when I hear them, remind me that life is noisy, and can continue to be so, if I listen for it, right up to the last moment. It isn't, necessarily, pretty or precious in the way a swan-song would be; nor does it always entail obvious sacrifices or monumental constructions, though it can be read that way with only a little effort. But it is always, at least, loud. And that, as it turns out, is a comfort of its own sort.
Labels: death/mourning/corpses, liminality, nature
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