FIFTEEN
AIR AND ANGELS
WHY DO WE LOVE BUTTERFLIES?
Our pleasure often seems rooted in childhood. Beauty passes by on the wing. We are lucky if no one suggests, casually, that this is inconsequential, that beauty is just a passing thing, and the beauty of butterflies too brief, too frail to be of much use, that beauty is not power.
In any event, if we were to notice all the beauty of the world, what would become of us? The sunflower would stop us in our tracks, the cloud-tossed sky delay us for hours. We’d never get to school. We’d never get in the car.
We are lucky, in childhood, if we have good hearing: if we hear beauty and love and uselessness shouting in our ear, all the time, from every corner of the natural world.
We are lucky if, for just a moment, we feel that “radical interchange of separate identities.” We are lucky if we can walk through secret dimensions as naturally as we walk from room to room.
Few of us would say that childhood is a simple time or a safe one. Certainly, butterflies are not about safety or lost happiness.
We grow to admire the caterpillar, that bag of goo, its blood like a clock ticking time. We watch it navigate a perilous world. We understand its fierceness, its need for deception. No matter our religious beliefs, we accept the miracle of metamorphosis. One thing becomes another. The Queen emerges, brilliant, heartbreaking, and we follow the course of her brief, obsessive days until her colors are faded and her wings torn. Now we lift up leaves, in search of eggs.
We have learned that beauty is not about comfort.
Because we are human, we probe the mystery. Genitalia have eyes. Swallowtails can remember. Evolution dodges to avoid a bat. Butterflies evolve ears on their wings. Wings pretend to be a head.
Evolution expresses itself so generously, in so many forms, and we become obsessive ourselves, wanting to know them all, to own them all, to put them in order. Like the gods in our myths, we name the creatures of the world: the White Admiral, the Mourning Cloak, the Silver-spotted Fritillary, the Great Copper, the Cloudless Sulphur, the Eastern Comma, the Field Crescent, the Paradise Birdwing, the Palos Verdes Blue, the Wood White, the Southern Festoon, the Purple Emperor, the Snout, the Brimstone.
We put them in drawers. We put them on our walls.
We could spend our lives counting butterflies.
Why do we love butterflies?
I think we have a physical response to color.
Flowers evolved color to attract the bee, the humming-bird, and the butterfly. Flowers, passionately, want to receive and send out pollen. Come to me, the flower shouts. Yellow is language. Purple is advertising.
Animals use the same strategy. Look, the gibbon says, I have a big blue bottom. The peacock spreads his ridiculous tail.
Color also warns. The red berry tastes bad. The gold beetle is poisonous.
Love and fear. Attract and repel. This all means something in the multitudinous greens and browns of the rainforest, the monotonous conifers and prairie grasses, the pastel desert. Color is an exclamation we once understood and still exploit. Look up from this page and you will see color, not greens and browns, but the red Coke can, the orange wallpaper, the pink dress, the purple hairbrush. Come to me! Buy me!
Inured as we are, surrounded by melodrama, we respond still to the flap of the Painted Lady, to the blue morpho.
The writer Annie Dillard says, “We teach our children one thing, as we were taught, to wake up.”
Butterflies wake us up.
We are storytelling animals. We add a story. We add a thousand and one.
A single butterfly is a vain woman, a geisha, a fickle lover.
Two butterflies mean marital happiness.
Four butterflies are bad luck.
Red butterflies are witches.
The butterfly is the Creator who flew over the world searching for a place where humans could live.
At night, butterflies bring us dreams.
Rice has a butterfly soul.
Butterflies came from the tears of the Virgin Mary.
A butterfly will show you your true love.
Migrating sulphurs are pilgrims on their way to Mecca.
Butterflies are hu dieh, stemless flowers.
Butterflies are the souls of children.
Butterflies steal butter.
A dye of butterfly wings will make your pubic hair grow strong.
The spirit of the butterfly is in a Hopi kachina.
A black butterfly means death.
Hordes of butterflies predict famine.
White butterflies mean a rainy summer.
Butterflies bring the spring.
A man in love has butterflies in his belly.
Butterflies are stray, familiar thoughts.
Butterflies are air and angels.
Butterfly kachina
