The tymbals of cicadas can still be heard, filling fading heat with their static. Gradually, you begin to see them too. Tepidly at first, then, in abundance as September’s cooling hands ease in. They sit motionless, fossilizing on sidewalks, in need of canes, heavy, always bigger than I remember.
A scattering of solidifying bodies; prehistoric, somehow reptilian, fulfilling whatever natural purpose they have at the season’s end. I’ve never seen one during the longest days; they only expose themselves in dying, a reminder to my sundown eyes that all is finite.
Yes, yes, I know, you are right; I am projecting a lot onto unassuming insects.
It happens naturally. My sensitivities flare up with every seasonal change; I doubt I am unique in this experience.
Remembrance is at its most potent in clairvoyant infancy, the wind gently raising a t-shirt sleeve, hyperborean breath mazing through sun-bleached arm hair, raising braille from my flesh with a harbingering chill. Air from the future, announcing in a whisper:Â change is coming. Then,
Slam.
I’m 14 in April, the soaked branches that line our neighbourhood sidewalks are hanging cracked and low like broken fingers. I’m so terribly lonely, without the vocabulary to know it.
I’m 6 in October, my Dad and I on the train, clacking towards another psychologist appointment. The sun is stamping perfect white squares on an empty row of crimson seats across from us; a beam blinds me every time one of the aluminum partitions is struck. There won’t be a conclusive result. Again.
I’m 24 in November, administering whisky to my lips trailing the mouth-pop salutation of cork leaving glass. Medicine to sleep. I am devastatingly angry with life, and devastatingly oblivious to it.
The simple fact that the world continues to march off its ever-expanding cosmic cliff is enough to dredge up nostalgia in anyone. For those, like myself, who have a proclivity to feel the anti-drama of stagnancy, watching shadows shift about unmoving objects is easily perceived as an attack from nature itself. A reminder of an inability to move forward, of futile stridulations.
Why Gods, do you smile on only others? Angels, why do I need crises to see you? Around and around myself, the universe revolves.
Dog Day Cicadas, the genus that live in Ontario where I reside, have a lifespan of up to 5 years. I thought it would be more like 5 weeks; learning of their extended existence bothered me. Eat sap, sing, become crushed dust in the canals of fresh white Nike treads; it’s a life not so far removed from my own.
During our summer, through road-baked heat, their voices snuck through the foam around my ears, filling the gaps between songs while I ran, a metallic taste in my mouth, my blotchy brow painted orange with glow from the sun’s backward walk.
They accompanied me as I sat on empty benches, on a downtown corners, my beginner crows feet splashed in buckets of Rembrandt light as sparse weeknight, midnight cars passed. I was watching holograms of my skinnier self, drunk, loud, avoiding yes, but with a sense of hope beneath the bravado that has receded (among other things) with age.
These Ravel-like insects belted high-pitched whines, a supporting vocal as I attended weddings of friends, tours of could-have-beens.
The past can wrap so tightly around you that tomorrow and now vanish, cremated in the gravitational force of before. Other hands are necessary for us to be pulled back to the living. Gratefully, I’ve had a village.
My therapist, a kind man with a beard the monochrome mix of newspaper, also happens to be a Rabbi. He brought to my attention that often, the idea of a punitive God, a retributive universe, a life lived in permanent atonement for committing not deadly sin, but commonplace human shortcoming, stems from the relationship between child and parent. We then transpose that presence up the flagpole of universe hierarchy, and voila, this world is out to swallow us adult offspring in dirt.
If my entire worldview is skewed, how can I begin to know what I want? How can I find the right direction to walk in?
Venturing into the shit show of internet self-help, you will at some point happen upon the theory of jealousy as a guide; a shining green north star pointing towards what you truly desire in life. Though there can be a morsel of validity in this, I have found it often incorrect, and at best shallow (how often have I wanted what would destroy me?)
The work of Irish poet John O’Donohue has been a blessing this year, as I’ve stumbled about, cobbling together a new higher power, birthing a warm and welcoming manger of interiority within myself. In O’Donohue’s view, jealousy does not exist to show us what we want, but instead occurs when we become so focused on the gifts of others we forget our own. When this happens, he urges to recalibrate, to remember we have gifts to offer that no one else can.
Weeknights, during the peaks of mid-July, I watched the breeze sift through dancing reeds by a trickling river, a mother massaging fingers softly through their child’s hair. It was a comforting break between pages of Sontag’s seminal On Photography. In it, she speaks on the language used around the act: “shootâ€, “captureâ€, “freezeâ€. I began to ponder language surrounding other areas of living, the ways harshness seizes them. With art, reduction to “content,†to “consume,†with relationships, “on the market,†“emotional investment,†with nature, to “conquerâ€, to “developâ€. Her words were for me, a tangible example of Wittgenstein’s thesis “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.â€
The incisions of modernity and its craving for infinite expansion, like our universe, demands perpetual “growthâ€. Forever. Until the end (or whatever we conceive as an end). I –
Stop.
I ask bone-like carcasses this autumnal shift the same request of Touch Me by Stanley Kunitz:
“Remind me who I am.â€
September as a return is embedded in all who grew up here. For all that is wrong, colonial, capitalist, and hierarchical in our educational systems, there is a scaffolding of safety it provides, a track painting mile markers; you know where you are, where you have been, and where you are supposed to one day arrive.
Then you are spit out, and issues are more complex than “forward†and “backwardâ€.
This year, as the young march toward a future that can still be whatever they want it to be, I begin to notice the walls of mine closing in. I do not believe in wasted time, nor what is briefly held between the hands of a clock as a resource of scarcity. Yet, just because I do not believe in these concepts does not mean I do not feel failure and relinquishment for my shortcomings within the prescribed rubric.
I disagree with much of the world, I still feel its weight all the same.
Are we bound to act in systems we are opposed to? I wonder, do we get to sit out of the game? Or are we forced to play, whether we accept the terms or not.
As I conclude writing for the day, I run my right hand down my semi-trim beard. I can’t see myself, but I would wager I appear comical, the exaggeration of a mall Santa raking along my thin, coarse ginger hair. It is almost unreal to believe this is the same face I pressed to foggy school bus glass, the same pools beneath my eyes that have been well fertilized with tears of goodbye, the same flushed cheeks that have rested upon the chests of a faded few, the same jaw that I fight to believe has the ability to smile the same smile, before weariness burrowed itself, unannounced and unnoticed but ever-effecting, somewhere shifting and resilient in the recesses of my ribs.
I let out a bowling ball breath. A window is open, and the hum of electricity is beginning to overpower my diminishing alleyway insect choir. They get 2 to 5 years. I’m capable of near 90; a long way to go, a long way to try.
I don’t understand the purpose of cicadas, but I don’t doubt that they have one.
So it is possible, I guess, that it is the same with me.
Seeing.