BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, THURSDAY AUG. 18, 2016) — All life is amazingly complex, capable of more awareness and intelligence than people can know. For example, this week, THE PLANET saw three simple yet defining instances.

First, in this Floridian summer, have you noticed an unusual number of ants milling about? THE PLANET doesn’t know what all the antivity is about, but the ants do. Are they aware? They have to be.

In “Communication,” Lewis Thomas talks about the messages that have to be composed, sent, received, and understood in all insect colonies. Insect societies stratify into different functions.

“Some serve as soldiers, for defending the anthill or hive,” Lewis writes. Others build nests, ventilate and clean, gather food, scout, and so on. “Automatons, we call them, tiny genetic machines with no options for behavior … They communicate with each other with chemical signals.”

This description described but devalues insect behavior. True, they have no choice in the human sense, but that is their strength and beauty. They only have to be what they are, which they do to perfection. They have no decisions to make. People, on the other hand, are “condemned to choose,” as the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre observed. A bee doesn’t have to decide on its beedom. Even a catepillar doesn’t “decide” whether or not be become a moth. THE PLANET sees that as infinitely superior to humans, who are born as nothing.

Ah, that word. Philosophical “nothing” isn’t the same as the every-day “nothing.” The joke about Sartre helps here. He goes into a cafe’ and orders coffee with two sugars but without cream. The waiter comes back with the drink and says, “I’m sorry. We are all out of cream. Will you take your coffee without milk instead?”

Humans are “nothing” in the sense that we aren’t destined to “be” anything in particular. Humans must choose to be this instead of that, to go here rather than there, to do one thing as opposed to another. No wonder life slams us so hard.

The second example came from some humble plants that camped on our stone patio. We have been battling them all summer. The plants have learned. Saturday, getting ready to grill, we noticed how the patio itself was free of grass, sorrel, or plantain shoots. Then we discovered why.

The plants figured out if they root on the patio, they’re going to get plucked. Underneath the Weber, however, they’re safe. There we found a few prepossessing stems, each one making a statement about the “will” to live. We let them be.

Our third case came from a simple house fly. Whenever we see a fly trapped inside, we do our best to free him. Nothing is more pathetic than a fly trying to fly through a pane of glass. It can’t figure out what’s happening.

THE PLANET had been tracking a fly in the dining room. It would buzz frantically around and against the screen door that leads to the kitchen patio. Each time it landed on the screen, we tried to grab it with a sideways swoop. Each time the fly, sensing our move, escaped. After a number of times, we gave up and went into the kitchen.

An awe-inspiring thing then happened.

The fly followed us. It landed on the screen of the sliding door. Gently, we opened the slider. The fly found the opening and freedom.

We had communicated, somehow, with the fly. And no jokes about Vincent Price or David Heddison (“Help me! Help me!”). The fly’s survival mechanism conveyed a form of understanding — which leads us to an action of our Right Honorable Good Friends on the city council.

Councilors voted to ban exhibiting animals for entertainment purposes, with that barbaric antiquity called a circus in the center of the bullseye. Critics lamented that the council “wasted” time on a “trivial” issue when so many other pressing problems awaited (finances and crime).

THE PLANET understands the objection. Nonetheless, given the council’s inability to take up serious matters in ernest, we applaud an issue upon which the right action could be, and was, taken.

Here’s our favorite quote on this matter. We’ve lost track of the author:

“We need another and wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and see thereby the creature magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having form far below ourselves.

“And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

“They are not brethren. They are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

—————————————————————————————-

“The maple, moss, and phlox / down on Cedar Lane / circled soothing river rocks / to take away her pain.” — Dan Valenti, from “Down on Cedar Lane”

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL

The views expressed in the comment section or opinions published within the text other than those of PLANET VALENTI are not those of PLANET VALENTI or endorsed in any way by PLANET VALENTI; this website reserves the right to remove any comment which violates its Rules of Conduct, and it is not liable for the consequences of any posted comment as provided in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and PLANET VALENTI’s terms of service.