The Insects

I sense it, see it, feel it. Everywhere, in everyone, in every place.

A hardening.

People I used to call friends make little excuses. People that used to curiously ask, read, gladly chat with me resent me. But it’s not merely me, or them, or us. It’s a tide, a movement, a sea change in a troubled world.

The summer of love is over. This is war. A new cold war. Side against side. Black, white, left, right. Choose or be chosen. Friends are enemies, allies adversaries, acquaintances opponents. The gods laughed. Fortune became tragedy. Now each of us is an antagonist. Man against man against the world against the world.

And so I look, I watch, I know. But I say nothing.

And I think, silently, with a sudden sharp sorrow like an eclipse.

The insects were once the most fragile creatures of all. Just naked flesh, jelly and guts. They were easy meat for jaws as vast as the sky. The predators strutted, their teeth gleaming. What could the insects do? Evolve. And so, death by death, life by life, the insects grew their carapaces. Their shells.

Evolution. They hardened.

Now, today, eons later, they’re as close to invulnerability as life can be. Step on an insect, and it will shoot out from underfoot tauntingly. Try to catch one, and it will elude you. We foolishly think: the earth is our dominion. But they’re our masters in number, in place, and in time.

Or are they? Their hardening had a great and terrible price.

They never became us. They stayed senseless things that scutter in the darkness. We became us. We chose a different way. We took a different path. We never hardened. We stayed vulnerable, fragile, cowering mammals scurrying from the glittering teeth of the monsters. Ripped apart. Death by death. And yet, we became, at last, somehow, something greater than merely invulnerable creatures scuttering in the moonlight.

We became human. We became grace, mercy, truth, knowing, rebellion, dreams, forgiveness, wisdom, love. We and we alone became all those things. Not the insects.

The miracle of us was this. We conquered death not by hardening ourselves against it. But by opening ourselves to love. Until, at last, the light poured out of us like a mighty river. And that light was all that swept away the darkness that we so trembled in fear of.

The insects hardened, closed, retreated, waged war against death. And so they never swept away the darkness. What was left to them? They enfolded themselves in it.

And yet. Here we are. You and I. We make our excuses. We scorn the people we once called friends and resent the people we once loved. We choose our sides, waging our little cold wars. And hope that the gods will grant us if not salvation, then at least consolation. Relief. Indifference.

We haven’t yet learned the greatest lesson of all.

This is an age of decline. The world is crumbling. The predators that once were kept in its dark dungeons? Now they roam free amongst the ruins, cackling and grinning. Hunting. Us.

And now we are the insects. Just like they did before, scurrying away from the predators, so we are evolving our shells. Our shells: bitter irony, triumphant cynicism, gloating cruelty, indifference, dispassion, passivity. To bury our grief and hurt and disappointment and pain. The dead living in us. We are developing our carapaces. Death by little death, insult by insult, slight by slight, wound by wound. We are hardening.

Evolution? No. Devolution.

Yes. Our shells may keep the predators out. But it will also keep the light in us from ever spilling out. Like a mighty river that runs into the great sea of being.

And that light is all that has ever kept out the darkness. The very consuming darkness that we so tremble in fear of. The darkness not of ending, finality, burial. But the true darkness in which nothing is. The abyss of meaninglessness, insignificance, futility, despair. Not that our deaths are inevitable. But that our lives have counted for nothing. Our shells, our carapaces, our hardening. That is their price.

All that is good and true and noble and timeless in being must be naked. As naked as we once were. If it is to grow mighty enough so that, at last, it may drive the darkness out, instead of ever cowering and scurrying and dwelling in the darkness.

We haven’t learned the greatest lesson of all. The lesson of us.

And so I watch, silent, and I observe. A sorrow like an eclipse, sometimes, flares across the blue skies in me.

But I say nothing.

Umair
London
April 2016