Extract 6

Ants and Psychobabble:

The microworld of insects is a bit of an obsession for me. When I was a child, I would often spend hours on a Saturday or Sunday just staring at insects, particularly ants. I remember many a sunny day when I would go outside to be around my dad as he gardened, or washed the car, or did something in the garage, and just sit there on the driveway, in the baking heat, surveying the minuscule creatures.

The top section of our driveway, nearest the garage and our house, is a hard strip that has always been strewn with mottled leaves, little brown peduncles, invisibly bristled, painful yellow leaves and big, hard, furry flower buds. This arboreal detritus falls from two large trees that hang over and adumbrate (shade) the driveway. Strangely, until a few minutes ago, when I did some investigation in order to preclude descriptive error, I always thought this detritus came from just one tree. I now realise there is a simple reason for this error: when you look up from the top section of our driveway, you only see a complex 3-D network of polymorphous, tangled, unispecific branches. I know this network of branches to belong to the tree growing out of the garden bed adjacent to this top section of the driveway, approximately seven metres from the garage. I just tried to find the name of the species on Google by describing its appearance, but to no avail. Whatever it’s called, it has a hard, brown, relatively narrow, seemingly barkless trunk; dark green, ovate leaves; and big flowers which (as far as I’m aware) never blossom, instead just dropping their immature, hard, furry buds all over the driveway. Until just a few minutes ago, I always assumed that this tree was also responsible for both the invisible, bindi-like burrs that would penetrate into one’s sole and then lodge there, causing a nasty sting; and the club-like gumnuts and white-bellied leaves that also littered the drive. It turns out this was a false assumption. A combination of the internet and my own observations (more specifically, me deciding to look out onto the driveway through the window in my parents’ room) has led me to the conclusion that these other depositions come from the massive Turpentine tree whose trunk stands much farther away from the driveway, roughly aligned with the garage but a number of metres away, near the other edge of the garden bed and our isolated front lawn. One of the bigger arms of this immense and magnificent organism hangs over the driveway above the limbs of the smaller, aforedescribed tree. From below, this arrangement almost entirely disguises the driveway-hanging branches of the Turpentine, which explains my misconception.

While I’m on the subject, I should mention that we also have a massive and impressive Turpentine at the back of our house, behind our veranda, a few metres in front of the forest. The Syncarpia glomulifera is a very unusual and beautiful tree. A Hornsby Shire Council informational document I found on the internet testifies to this with its excellent description, resplendent with the lovely, Latinate language of botany: “A variable tree, often multi trunked from exposure to wildfire or if in proximity to closed forest a tall single trunked tree to over 25m, much taller outside of HSC (50m+). The trunk is covered in thick spongy bark in long fissured or stringy flaky strips extending to smaller branches. Foliage is dull green and very pale on the underside- white, often hairy, ovate to narrow-ovate, 7–11 cm long, 2.5–4.5 cm wide. Leaves are often parasitised by moth larvae giving a pimpled appearance. They are oppositely arranged in pairs and often crowed into whorls at the end of branchlets, thick and stiff in texture. Peak flowering reliably occurs in October inflorescences are arranged prominently in clustered heads at the ends of branches. Fruit are a woody aggregate persisting on the tree for several years.”

Below the layer of botanical degradables, the driveway is traversed by veins of some kind of hard, black sealant. I remember these veins were often filled with dirt and moss, and that ants had made many holes in this soft matter.

Ants are constantly moving. They are tiny little robot things that just scurry around like mad, constantly. Have you ever thought about an ant’s mind? How does it work? What’s it like to be an ant? How do they make decisions? I used to think these thoughts as I watched them scurrying and darting, dashing along the superhighways, or carrying little white particles into their holes, or just moving. They were always moving. Always guided by some sense we humans have no access to, and always with a purpose, whether it be some crumb or morsel, or the communication of a signal of danger. Have you ever noticed how quickly ants can transmit a signal of danger? One touches another and another touches another, and then there’s rapid cascade, and soon they’re all scurrying about like mad, all in a complete frenzy, a panic. All is chaos. The pattern of ants changes in an instant, a bit like when you rotate a toy kaleidoscope and the crystals instantaneously arrange themselves into a brilliant, architectonic form. It’s kind of beautiful the way the ant dynamics would so rapidly shift, though eerie.

Ant nests are arranged in really elaborate networks. I used to trace the paths of ants, and they would just lead you on endlessly. You’d never stop. From one ant hole to another, to another. You could follow the ants for metres and metres and metres if you wanted to. I did always want to. There was something so mesmerising about it.

One time, much more recently, when I was in year 11, I was with my family camping on this grassy, overly suburban-looking campsite at Yengo National Park. My half-nieces had been there, and I had spent much of the time playing with them. But I also did some fairly childish things myself. Indeed, since I had lots of downtime, I spent much of the trip staring at the multitudinous ants that covered the ground. At one point, I decided to see how far I could follow an ant on a journey, to see where it would finish up, whether at another ant hole or what. I remember just walking along as this one ant scurried through the grass, periodically disappearing from sight. It was hard to keep track of him, but I made sure to keep following at least some ant near him along the highway for as long as it would take me. The highway took me to one giant ant hill, then another, and soon I found myself wandering into the bush. Yet another hill appeared. The infinity of the network reminded me of the world wide web. It seemed as if all of these little ants in Australia might be connected. Of course, once I was in the bush, I had to stop following the highways, but it was a fascinating discovery. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the ants. So many ants! How could you fail to be entranced by all these tiny, complex, beguiling creatures all around you?

I think it’s fair to say that not many people are that interested in ants, or at staring at bugs in general. But I know for myself it’s a profound pleasure, if a frustrating one, because when I’m doing it I’m constantly aware of how nobody else understands the magic of staring at bugs. When I was a child, thankfully, I don’t think I was nearly so self-aware.

Seriously, though, how can you fail to be amazed by the exciting world happening around you on the level of the really small? There is an entire world going on there, entirely independent of you. Black ants, bull ants, Daddy Long Legs, Funnel-webs, cockroaches, worms, Christmas beetles, citrus bugs, slaters, snails. These are living things, and they’re wonderful to watch, dancing in their intricate ballet, caught up in their manic little lives, forever on the move. And always totally oblivious to you as you now bring down your giant hand and manipulate the world. Here’s a leaf, now it’s gone. Why don’t I try to pick you up onto this leaf? Climb onto it, you fool!  

Of course, as a child, I never did leave the world of the insects alone. It was never a passive experience, being with the ants or the bugs. Instead, it was a bit like playing with toys. I was their God, and I could do anything I wanted.

Regrettably, I remember being something of an Old Testament God.

One example of this was my behaviour towards the citrus bugs that used to live in our garden. Many years ago, we had an infestation of that species around the front of our house. They were these slender, pretty, red bugs that spent their time scuttling about and eating leaves. They also seemed to mate very often. The way they did this was to join up to one another via their bottom, thereby essentially making themselves an extra-long, bicorporeal chain, with heads at either end, a bit like Catdog. For some reason, I was obsessed not with killing these creatures, but splitting them. Every time I saw a couple, I would smite it. Over and over again. I was a divorce mogul, a magnate of misery. It gave me great pleasure. The power was really intoxicating.

At other times, my dad would be washing the car or otherwise using the hose, and there would be rivulets of water running down the driveway, collecting debris. I knew then that an enthralling spectacle was imminent. I’d watch as the ants were taken by the irresistible flood, swept up in its inexorable advance, carried rapidly down the driveway until the water hit an organic wall of some kind, maybe a clump of dirt and some leaves, or a gumnut, or whatever. I would often try to remove the obstacle, or try to direct the flow of the water in other ways. I can’t tell you how fun it was.

Another time, I remember attacking the veins of dirt into which the ant holes were drilled. I would dig at them with my fingernails, pulling up giant clumps of dirt, and just watch as the ants ran around in bewilderment and horror, their entire home obliterated, everything they had ever known gone.

When water was involved, I remember wondering if being in that flood was, for an ant, a little like being in a swimming pool for us. After all, the depth of the water seemed roughly commensurate. Obviously, though, unlike a human in a swimming pool, the ants were not having a good time. They always seemed to be in a state of terror. Indeed, it was like their entire life was terror, and I was just crouching above them, playing with their world, deified, magnificent, and yet myself also so small.

It’s hard really to capture how profound and epochal this all used to be for me, and seems to be now. It’s impossible to convey the silence and stillness of the experience, the serenity of it, the sense I always had when I was out with these insects that the world was just unfathomably immense and unfathomably wonderful – far greater than either of us could comprehend. Even just one individual session of doing this contained more wonder and mystery than anything that I could possibly articulate, and I have tried to summarise my entire life of staring at the miniature in a few pages! It’s almost heretical. And I keep resorting to the same literary technique here: long, sprawling, asyndetonic sentences interposed with short, fractured ones. I’ve found myself doing thing many times before when trying to sound really deep.  But none of this ever quite works. Words cannot capture the immensity of what I am trying to say. I guess it is more a feeling than anything – though even that doesn’t seem quite right. It seems to be one of those things that resists rational analysis, and probably couldn’t survive it. Indeed, the fundamental problem with trying to state any of this non-mystically is that the profundity immediately dissolves. It’s like the feeling or thought or enigmatic, ineffable thing – whatever it is – just kind of vanishes. But I will beat on now, with more mysticism.

Do you know the infinite time of childhood? How on certain days, everything seemed so still, how the world seemed so stable and static and fixed? How everything was so slow? Do you remember the indescribable boredom you felt? The sense that there would be time for everything? It was literal hours that I used to spend staring at the ants, hours would pass with the sun warming my back, my heart beating, my blood flowing, my synapses firing, my toes curling, my muscles stirring. The ants were moving all the time. Everything was alive. It seemed as if things would never end, like I would forever be the age I was then, like nothing ever changed except the insects on the ground and my body. It’s impossible to explain. I feel like this is psychobabble, and has to be psychobabble. But it feels really profound. I know other people know what I’m talking about, because people often try to say profound things about the weirdness of childhood from the benighted perspective of maturity, even if they so often fail and sound trite and cliché. And I don’t know how to do it. But I can see myself sitting there in the sun on an endless, turgid Sunday afternoon, and I can see the air around me flowing by my cheeks, and I can see the insects dancing in front of me, and there seems to be such a purity to me in that moment that I can’t explain, some kind of exquisite unself-consciousness as I gazed upon a beautiful thing, as the world spun round on its axis on some specific date, 60,000 years after my ancestors left Africa, 540 million years after the Cambrian explosion, 13.8 billion years after the start of the universe, and I had no sense of any of this, or anything at all, and all was just still.