by Stanley
What’s the similarity between falling in love and a passion for collecting beetles ? The answer is that in both cases, when it happens, you give yourself over. In spite of anything you may have originally intended, you find that you’re hooked! You are dedicated, devoted! Well yes, this makes sense when you fall in love with a person - everyone knows you don’t fall in love unless, in some sense, you’re already prone to giving yourself over. You surrender and find yourself cheerfully attached. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens to you. It’s the same with collecting beetles – but I mean more than just collecting beetles, I mean being a passionate entomologist. I mean being in love with bugs.
In his autobiography the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov speaks of his fervent love affair with butterflies, “From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender”.[1] And in an essay, Strong Opinions, he wrote “My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting”. In spite of this, Nabokov knew all about obsessive human love affairs. After all, he wrote Lolita.
An anonymous writer cries, “It was the mantra that kept repeating in my head, It hummed in my head, and seemed to be said by multiple voices, of multiple sexes, voices of women, voices of men, voices of children, and no voice at all. " I love all insects... I love all insects... I love all insects.
I knew what entomophobia means, so I wondered if there was such a thing as entomophilia; and yes, there was. It means sexual arousal involving insects – although it is never stated how this is achieved; Google and the medical dictionaries were all modestly sparse on details.
When he was at Oxford my old friend Charles Darwin spent too much time out in the countryside collecting beetles. He once surmised that “the Creator must be inordinately fond of beetles: the earth is home to some 30 million different species of them.” He was somewhat smitten with them himself. His girlfriend Fanny Owen scolded him and announced that he had to choose between her and chasing after insects. She finally broke up with poor Charles because he apparently he couldn’t break his attachment .
*
Most of the activities that engage me have a personal agenda, a purpose, a goal. There are very few things that interest me of which I can say I have no selfish interest. But my agendas are quite unreliable and change like the weather. And as my mind wanders so too do my interests.
Being a dabbler I never quite digest what I happen to be eating, for my appetites move on. I can’t seem to settle down. To give up dabbling and be really unswerving you have to be a specialist. You can’t really open your heart fully unless you hone in on the singular. Being a specialist is very hard for anyone who is afraid of missing out. It’s hard to commit oneself to one thing because something better might come along and I’ll miss out. In any case, there are so many avenues that beckon. I buy a promising book of study, intending to read it from cover to cover. But half way through some luring reference leads me elsewhere.
So I tend to be a professional dilettante, frivolously drifting from one thing to another. It is the style of an intellectual decadent; I want to know everything. So, as a consequence, I’m a Jack-of-all-Trades and master of none. I envy people who have managed to be specialists, who can devote their lives to a single study or cause. I comfort myself with the idea that if you hone in on the single grain of sand you miss the beauty of the beach. This romantic idea makes me out to have a larger vision, in touch with the mystique of the cosmos. In any case, specialist are boring and opinionated.
William Blake was a funny fellow. He was a romantic mystic who hated science. He poured scorn on the scientific aspirations of his day and demonised Newton,“ Pray God us keep From Single vision & Newton's sleep!” he wrote. In a little poem he proclaimed,
To see the universe in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
He didn’t see the paradox. He uses the small as the window to the larger vision. I mean, if you can see the universe in a grain of sand you are a specialist like a physicist studying atomic structure; like Newton and his apple. But Blake saw the specialist as missing out.
It is precisely the single vision that the specialist has. Being a specialist in beetles or butterflies or physics can take you to the wonder at the heart of things. I think of Nabokov prancing about in shorts with his butterfly net. Of his book on butterflies, someone said that it, “…glistens like a rainforest: swarming with sap and colour, with love and death.” His speciality opened up the rainforest of the cosmos. In that he was the perfect combination of the specialist and the poet.
There are other reasons why I cannot be a specialist: the million and one things that have to be done, that have to be thought about, duties that demand my care. And the next thing to be done is always a little more important than what I am doing now.
To specialise means to neglect all other claims and possibilities. I can’t even specialise in myself – I’m too busy. I’m a multitasker. That’s a nice way to put it. But when I meditate I ask myself a crucial question: why does my mind always have to go somewhere else?
Somewhere else always calls me; and I can never make up my mind whether this is a terrible disadvantage or a gift.
No comments:
Post a Comment