I really enjoyed a recent post by the great illustrator Eleanor Davis (1/7/11). She made an image that allowed her to delve into her interest in “in plants, and parasites, and our ability to remain human.” In the post she shares some of her inspirations, including a video about a fungus that grows on/desiccates insects. The video adds a layer to my appreciation of her image.
It also reminded me of a series of images I’d seen of another insect parasite. I came across it while I was researching images for my recent Santa illustration. I was looking at images of cloaca, both the sewer kind and the body part kind, as well as images of drainage stains and coral polyps and burrowing parasites. If you read Freeman Ng’s story, you’ll understand why.
The story was difficult to illustrate because the writing itself was largely a re-imagining of familiar images: Santa, his reindeer and his helpers. That’s the experience the story offered the reader; I was initially trying to be careful not to over-illustrate and step in the way of the transformation the reader would experience in their own imagination. Then I found the image above which is of a “false faced caterpillar” and my scruples scattered. I really liked the idea of illustrating something I didn’t want to show by having it wear a mask. Especially since, if I am understanding this correctly, the false face is on the creature’s rear end. That really fell in with what I was thinking about cloaca and polyps…
But Eleanor Davis’s illustration really reminded me of another insect parasite I’d encountered google-image-searching. I went looking for it again. The one I had in mind spends part of its life cycle in the brains of certain caterpillars. It eventually breaks through the head with two horn-like structures. These structures, it turns out, function as lures. Suddenly the imposed upon caterpillar more closely resembles the favorite prey of some bird (I think it was). The bird is fooled, gobbles the wrong caterpillar, and the parasite is perfectly adapted to live the next part of its life in the intestines of this bird.
Well, I never did find those images again.
What I did find, however, answered a question that has haunted me for probably more than 35 years. Calling it a question hardly covers the experience. It was a moment where I saw something that seemed so totally wrong but was so undeniably true that I had to shift my whole understanding of life in order to accomodate the fact of what I saw. It was like asking a child to reverse an essential bit of learning: no, some monsters are real.
This paradigm shift was never quite complete — my world was opened and the bounds were never quite reset — because for decades I had no firm identity for the thing I saw. What I retained of what I saw was exactly my first impression, something that was wrong, something that seriously challenged my notion of the possible.
It was a July 4th party at my parent’s house sometime in the seventies. Almost the whole neighborhood was there, adults in the backyard, kids out front. I was sitting on the front step with friends . I retain no memory of what we were doing before I happened to look under the rail at the side of the step. And there, clearly distinguished from the brick of the step, the dirt and leaves, the berried hedges, clearly moving on its own, animated, alive, was … something.
What it looked like was what I was politely taught as a child to call “dog dirt.” Precisely like a fresh moist average length of dog dirt except that it appeared to be equipped with googly eyes — those craft store googly eyes I used to covet as a child. I think it was the combination that unnerved me. It appeared to be something “unclean” — animal waste –and at the same time, it appeared to have a face with eyes that looked like cutesy representations of eyes, false eyes, cartoon eyes, and then finally that this thing was clearly crawling up the step toward me, that it was clearly alive! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! But there it was!
My parameters of the real blew apart like a depressurized fuselage and I went into free fall. That was it exactly: there are things that can so ferociously challenge your ideas that the bottom of your stomach drops out. I ran for the adults. The others may have come with me but I didn’t care. I needed help.
Among the adults was a biology professor who lived down the street in a house by the woods and the stream. He was the only one who showed any interest. He came around to the front, looked at the thing that was there and said, “ah, that doesn’t belong there.” He went around back, returned with a container or a napkin or I forget what, and carried the thing off down the street toward his house. I always imagined he let it free in the woods. I don’t know, the incident was never spoken of again.
I never asked him what it was — who knows, he might have even said at the time but the answer was meaningless — the vision of this thing that shouldn’t be had penetrated so deeply, the tremors it caused shook everything into question.
Well, I have told the story of that thing more than once in the time in-between. And now, thanks to Eleanor Davis, the story has an ending. In searching for the caterpillar brain parasite, I came across the image below. The image of the very thing! There it was, the drop in my stomach made it unmistakable. It is called a Sphinx Moth Caterpillar. The googly eyes I saw were indeed false, though they fooled me as thoroughly as they fool any creature. I searched independently for a picture that more strongly showed the dog dirt quality and indeed I found some, but I think this picture is adequate for my purposes.
Thank you, Eleanor, and thanks to the internet, because of them, one of the great mysteries of my childhood has been confirmed.
