Insouciance Über Insecticide (Another Moth Post)

 

'I've always preferred moths to butterflies. They aren’t flashy or cocky; they mind their own business 

and just try to blend in with their surroundings and live their lives. 

They don't want to be seen, and that's something I can relate to.' 

- Kayla Krantz, The OCD Games (2020)

 

 

I. 

 

And so ends National Moth Week; an annual (and global) event designed to celebrate 'the beauty, life cycles, and habitats of moths' and to collect much needed data about these fascinating (mostly nocturnal) creatures, which are among the most diverse and successful of all organisms, ranging in size from as tiny as the head of a pin to as large as an adult human hand.

 

I have to admit that I didn't officially register to participate in the event. However, I did take some photos of the moths in my backgarden, including the one above (don't ask me what species it is, as I've no idea, but it was about an inch big and reminded me of the moths I used to regularly encounter as a child, but which now, sadly, are hardly ever to be seen). 

 

 

II. 

 

Readers familiar with this blog will know that I've written before in praise of moths and why they appeal to me more than butterflies, which, in evolutionary terms, they long predate (some moth fossils have been found that are thought to be 190 million years old); they just seem to me so much more punk rock in comparison to the latter. 

Readers might also recall that I recently published a post on the necessity of killing carpet moths, in which I adopted a Lawrentian argument to justify why it was the right thing to do to reach for the insecticide in order to safeguard one's clothes and home furnishings from the hungry mouths of moth larvae. 

 

Some readers will be pleased to know, however, that, in the end - even though I bought a spray - I didn't have the hardness of soul needed to use it. Ultimately, it transpires that moths mean more to me than even a relatively expensive pure new wool carpet: I simply don't care if they eat holes in it.

 

Insouciance über insecticide!

 

 

Punk Moth (Or How the Cambridge Rapist Motif Haunts the Natural World)

Fig. 1: Pretty little moth in my front garden / Fig. 2: A colour enhanced detail from the wing

Fig. 3: Jamie Reid God Save the Cambridge Rapist (poster design for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, 1980)

There are, apparently, around 2,500 species of moth in the UK and I'm no lepidopterist, so don't expect me to identify the very pretty little moth in the photo above which seems to like living in (or on) my front garden privet. 

 

Perhaps its most striking feature, to me at least, is the marking on the wing which reminds me of the Cambridge Rapist [1] mask that so fascinated Malcolm McLaren and which he and Vivienne Westwood incorporated as an image on shirt designs sold at 430 Kings Road [2]; an image which Jamie Reid later used in one of his God Save ... series of posters produced for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980) [3]. 

 

Does this serve to illustrate Oscar Wilde's anti-mimetic contention that life imitates art? [4] Or does it prove that even an insect can be a sex pistol? 

 

 

Notes

[1] Peter Samuel Cook - known in the press as the Cambridge Rapist - attacked several women in their homes between October 1974 and April 1975. He quickly entered the public imagination due to the distinctive leather mask with the word rapist painted in white letters across the forehead that he liked to wear whilst carrying out his crimes. 

      The 46-year old delivery driver was arrested following one of Britain's largest police manhunts. He was convicted at his trial in 1976 of six counts of rape, as well as assault and gross indecency. Cook was given two life sentences with the recommendation made that he never be released. He died, in jail, in January 2004 (aed 75).   

 

[2] A long-sleeved muslin shirt by McLaren and Westwood with the Cambridge Rapist motif is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum: click here.  

 

[3] A version of this work (produced in 1978) by Jamie Reid can also be found at the V&A: click here.

 

[4] See Wilde's essay 'The Decay of Lying', Intentions (1891). Note that an earlier version of the essay was published in the literary magazine The Nineteenth Century, in January 1889. 

 

For a related post on cultural entomology entitled 'Insectopunk', click here.    

On the Necessity of Killing Carpet Moths

Trichophaga tapetzella [1]

 

 

I.

 

I have always liked moths. Indeed, I once wrote a post in praise of them: click here.

 

And even when they ate holes in my favourite Vivienne Westwood jumper, I didn't complain and figured it was not only in keeping with a punk aesthetic, but ethically the right thing to allow these little winged creatures the right to feast freely; they've got to live, after all.    

 

However, a £200 piece of knitwear is one thing and a £2000 pure new wool carpet is something else, and I fear that my fondness for moths and wanting to do the right thing by them won't stop me reaching for a spray gun should they start to munch away at my Axminster ... 

 

 

II.

 

Now never in my life have I sprayed a living thing: I never wanted to. I always felt insecticides very repugnant: sinister, mean. Other people could spray if they wanted to. Myself, individually, it was repugnant to even try. 

 

But something slowly hardens in a man's soul. And I know now, it has hardened in mine. One must be able to spray carpet moths if they threaten one's home. For wherever man establishes himself  upon the earth, he has to fight for his place, against other forms of life. [2]

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Once common, this species of moth is now quite rare in the UK. The larvae feed on naturally-occurring fibrous material such as hair, fur, or feathers and are typically found in birds' nests (or carpets). The picture is a modified version of a photo of an adult specimen located at the Mississippi Entomological Museum.

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing D. H. Lawrence writing in 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 353-54.

 

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Sex Appeal and the Beauty of Flames

Image: Desktop Nexus

I. Sex on Fire 

Just as for Lawrence sex and beauty are one and the same thing, so too is being something he always conceives in terms of fire, or what he calls the god-flame, burning in all things. Indeed, Lawrence ultimately conflates terms so that his erotico-aesthetic and ontological speculations form a unified metaphysics.

Thus it is, for example, that Mellors characterises his illicit relationship with Connie in terms of a little forked flame that they fucked into being.

And thus it is that Lawrence asserts in a late article that whilst he doesn't quite know what sex is, he's certain that it must be some sort of fire: "For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty."

This communicating of warmth and beauty is what Lawrence understands by the term sex appeal, something which he believes to be a universal human quality and not just something belonging to the young and conventionally attractive. In a typically Lawrentian passage, he writes:

"We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.

      Nothing is more ugly than a human being in whom the fire of sex had gone out. You get a nasty clayey creature whom everybody wants to avoid.

      But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns in us. In youth it flickers and shines; in age it glows softer and stiller, but there it is." 

I quite like this (re)definition of a golem as a human being in whom the fire of sex has been extinguished and who communicates only a cold, ugly deadness (unfair and as meaningless as it may be). 

And I like the idea of fire calling to fire and of sex appeal kindling a sense of joyful warmth and optimism. Lawrence is right, the loveliness of a really lovely woman in whom the sex fire burns pure and fine not only lights up her whole being, but transforms the entire universe. Such a woman - extremely rare even in a world of numerous good-looking girls and cosmetic enhancement - is an experience.  

Lawrence concludes:

"If only our civilization had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or flowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we might, all of us, have lived all our lives in love, which means we should be kindled and full of zest in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things …

      Whereas, what a lot of dead ash there is in life now."

II. Light My Fire

I don't know if Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran read Lawrence when young - his obsessions led him towards German and French thinkers, rather than English novelists - but there are certainly quasi-Lawrentian resonances in his early work for those of us familiar with the writings of Lawrence.

Thus, like Lawrence, Cioran was interested in love in all its forms, particularly the concrete and monogamous love between man and woman which he took to be the quintessential form; not only in its sexual aspect, but as a "rich network of affective states". Love, born not of suffering, but of sincere generosity, is what Cioran most cherishes.

And, like Lawrence, Cioran ties his idea of love to beauty, being, and to fire. Man's sensitivity to beauty, he writes, intensifies as he approaches the joy that love brings. And in beauty "all things find their justification, their raison d'être".

Further, beauty allows us to conceive of things as things and to accept existence as is: "To place the world under the sign of beauty is to assert that it is as it should be [...] even the negative aspects of existence do nothing but increase its glory and its charm." This, of course, is a profoundly Nietzschean as well as a Lawrentian idea.

Beauty, concludes Cioran, may not bring salvation, "but it will bring us closer to happiness" and to the point where we can make a total affirmation of life. And what is more beautiful than the nakedness of flames, dancing in darkness:

"Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. [...] The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn."

It's not only moths, it appears, that are transfixed by candlelight and dream of a fiery climax to their lives ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). See the famous letter from Mellors to Connie with which Lawrence closes the novel.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Often known as 'Sex Versus Loveliness', this article can be read online by clicking here. 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (the University of Chicago Press, 1992). See: 'Enthusiasm as a Form of Love' (75), 'The Beauty of Flames' (88), and 'Beauty's Magic Tricks' (119). All lines quoted above from Cioran are taken from these three sections.

Readers interested in earlier posts that compare and contrast Lawrence's work with that of Cioran on questions to do with becoming-animal and becoming-ash, can click here and here.

Musical bonus #1: click here. Musical bonus #2: click here. I must admit that I don't much care for either of these (hugely overrated) songs, but readers of a more hippie-persuasion will doubtless enjoy listening to them once more.    

In Praise of Moths

A very pretty mint moth (native to the UK)

Photo by Mark Parsons / Butterfly Conservation

Everyone loves butterflies: but not moths. People seem to regard the latter as an inferior version of the former.

Indeed, even Virginia Woolf writes about the moth's lack of gaiety in comparison to the butterfly, although she does concede that the moth has a sombre beauty all of its own, arousing pleasant thoughts of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom. Mostly, however, she experiences a queer feeling of pity for the poor moth, whose life, to her, appears meagre and pathetic and whose death is insignificant.

Other people complain about the destructive feeding habits of moths. But, even though they left holes in my favourite Vivienne Westwood jumper, I like moths. And I was pleased, therefore, to read that although overall their numbers are in serious decline, thanks to climate change and the global horticultural trade there are several species making their home here for the first time.

Indeed, according to a recent report, almost 30 species of tiny, often inconspicuous micro-moths - known as pyralid moths - have arrived in Britain during the last 30 years; either flying in of their own accord, or transported here with human assistance. Hopefully, at least some of these will be able to establish themselves in the UK. 

For love 'em or loathe 'em, moths comprise a substantial part of Britain's biodiversity and play an important role as pollinators. They also, of course, provide a vital food source for many birds, bats and other mammals. If you care about these larger creatures, then you have to also learn to care for insects of all kinds - even the creepy and uncolourful ones that sleep in the shadows ... 

See: Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, (University of Adelaide, 2015). This is a web edition of the work that can be read online by clicking here.