WRITING AT THE THRESHOLD OF THE HIVE

Today we planned to extract honey, but after a couple of days with moderate summer weather, it is suddenly raining continuously with heavy wind blasts now and then. When relying on natural events and phenomena, one can never predict how and when things will happen. So far nothing new, since Henri Bergson already dedicated almost his whole philosophy to that, and even the most popular book on new science, chaos and complexity will tell you the same. But still we were counting on working with the beehives today… So, let's sit down and sublimate our position: we will write and we want to write about writing and bees. Like, who was doing this, and why, and how? First of all, we won't bother you with a full overview of who ever mentioned a bee in literature since antiquity. Besides, in 2001 Cristopher Hollingsworth published the remarkable literary study The Insect Metaphor in Literature. There, he explores from old Greek times to former postmodernism how famous authors like Homer (the wild bees), Virgil (the domestication), Dante (ascent to heaven), Milton (the fallen angels) to Conrad, Wells, Huxley, Sartre, Delillo and many more, were treating the idea of bees and more specifically the hive within their works. It is an outstanding overview of evolutionary stylistics, exploring relevant analogies and metaphors, highlighting special meanings and unique literary functions. Here are some lines from John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667)

Thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air,
Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings.  As bees
In spring-time, when the Sun with Taurus rides.

Interestingly, Hollingsworth analyzes the theme across history as an active rhetorical medium, a visual language tool bringing out different attitudes about 'otherness' and the position of the (writer as) observer. Of course the hive represents mostly the relationship between individual and whole within the historical contexts of the prevailing social order and ideal state models, the hive being the dramatic form that symbolizes the differences and analogies. Ok-ok, I guess only a few of you reading out there will still be interested by now. And soon the weather will be better anyway, and then we can stop writing to make honey anyway. But in the meantime…

Lately, we came across an astonishing fact that immediately was met with a lot of scepticism. Somehow the American Museum of Natural History in New York has a collection of 5 million gall wasps, donated by the late Alfred Kinsey. Other sources mention an extravagant 7.5 million. Someone immediately started to calculate that in the former case he must have sampled over 40 years more than 300 insects a day. Interestingly the man became famous with another part of his career and not as an entomologist. In 1948 he published the first of the so-called Kinsey reports Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, followed by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. These were rigorous scientific works, with field interviews and statistics, for sure foundational to the modern field of sexology. In fundamentalist religious and cold-war USA they provoked a storm of controversies which certainly had their influence on the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. It seems that his work as a taxonomist, specifically investigating the ecological relations of organisms rather than adaptation and domestication issues, had not only triggered the interest in the diversity of one species, the gall wasp, and their diversified sexual behaviour. It would also lead to quite an innovating approach when researching and observing the similar behaviour of the human species. The reports showed that men and women in their sexuality were more equal than generally thought, and moreover that the social and cultural environments were shaping rather than repressing sexuality for both. Definitely this was breaking many taboos and prejudices at the end of the 1940s, and probably for the next 20 years to follow. Kinsey would be associated forever with his notorious popular reputation, a strange mix of scientific rigour, popularity, suspicion and scandal.[footnote 1]

Reading through the reports, we find a conventional 'scientific' style: dry language, unimaginative accurateness, statistical graphs as illustrations. The zealous taxonomist seemed to be just continuing his work like he had done with the gall wasps. For instance, for the second book he would personally interview almost 6000 women about their sexual behaviour. And just like he analyzed each insect by 26 parameters, he had an extensive list of different parameters for each interviewee. It is strange that these works could ever become popular bestsellers. Still we believe there is more to it than just the astonishing news about sexual orientation, pre- and extramarital sex, promiscuity, etc… But maybe, is there a scientific style and a popular one? Do they really exist?

Here comes a hypothesis. Suddenly it is raining even harder now. So we cannot turn to the garden and the bees themselves. Let's continue to write. Do we see here something like a new paradigm? Something aesthetic, emerging in between the literary, the arts, and the exact/natural sciences. Maybe due to the growing disciplinarity of each, the specializations, and the birth of new (sub)sciences like psychology, anthropology, cybernetics, computer science, and others in the long 20th century.  Maybe the birth of hybrid expressive forms, with their own stylistic features, joining closer the poetical and philosophical traditions with a more exact and realistic language potential. Is this still reflected nowadays on one hand in the bulk of popular scientific writing, some ghostwriting for scientists and on the other hand in the writing of horoscopes and gardening articles, books for TV cooks, or travel diaries? Maybe we don't have to see this - from within literature itself - as a popular “divertissement” or escape strategy for not having to write the “true” great works… but rather as an experiment by the writer, making a new genre, a new textual expressivity, like sonification in music and visualization in movies and interactives. Playing with scientific data: interdisciplinary, multimodal, another content than expected, another imagination.

Browsing through history and writing seems to support the wild hypothesis. From recent history, the best known writer - increasingly popular in current new New Age times - is definitely Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915). Definitely both a teacher and writer, and an amazing autodidact in entomology, he became famous for his works on insects. Darwin would call him “the inimitable observer”, though Fabre rejected evolution in favour of creationism, not in the biblical sense but rather because he simply mistrusted systems and big theories. Reading through 'Les Insectes' and 'Souvenirs entomologiques' one encounters a special style: a perfectly balanced, very clear language in-between accuracy and lyrics. Here no difficult scientific terms, no dramatic rhetorics either. His accounts of bees and wasps, spiders and ants, are a questioning observation of the species within their natural environment, related sometimes to a story on how he found it (on a walk, on a school trip, ..). He definitely is no Darwin, investigating the hexagonal shapes of the honeycomb, fruitlessly trying to find the answer where to place nature's instinct vs. intelligence. No big research agenda for Fabre. He is just looking at insects, trying to find out what they are doing, building a narrative and explaining. Without decoration, except for the writer/observer, people seem to be absent.. Here is when he finally talks about Paris:

The Dung-beetle, sated with days, becomes a patriarch and really deserves to do in consideration 
of the services rendered.There is a general hygiene that calls for the disappearance, in the shortest 
possible time, of every putrid thing. Paris has not yet solved the formidable problem of her refuse, 
which sooner or later will become a question of life or death for the monstrous city. 
One asks one's self whether the centre of light be not doomed to be extinguished one day 
in the reeking exhalations of a soil saturated with rottenness. What this agglomeration of millions 
of men cannot obtain, with all its treasures of wealth and talent, the smallest hamlet possesses 
without going to any expense or even troubling to think about it. Nature, so lavish of her cares 
in respect of rural health, is indifferent to the welfare of cities, if not actively hostile to it. 
She has created for the fields two classes of scavengers, whom nothing wearies, whom nothing repels...
(The Life and Love of the Insect p. 113)

And when he acquires a property (called “harmas”) in the remote Provence region where he will retire and continue his research undisturbed, he describes it as follows:

See here is a Tailor-bee. She scrapes the cobwebby stalk of the yellow-flowered centaury, 
and gathers a ball of wadding which she carries off proudly with her mandibles or jaws. 
She will turn it, underground, into cotton satchels to hold the store of honey and the eggs. 
And here are the Leaf-cutting Bees, carrying their black, white, or blood-red reaping brushes 
under their bodies. They will visit the neighbouring shrubs, and there cut from the leaves 
oval pieces in which to wrap their harvest. Here too are the black, velvet-clad Mason-bees, 
who work with cement and gravel. We could easily find specimens of their masonry on the stones 
in the harmas. Next comes a kind of Wild Bee who stacks her cells in the winding staircase 
of an empty snail-shell; and another who lodges her grubs in the pith of a dry bramble-stalk; 
and a third who uses the channel of a cut reed; and a fourth who lives rent-free in the vacant 
galleries of some Mason-bee. There are also Bees with horns, and Bees with brushes on their hind-legs, 
to be used for reaping.
(Book of Insects p. 8)

The Belgian (but most of his life he was living in France) Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), had a successful career as a symbolist writer. He is mostly remembered for the fairy-like L'oiseau bleu. All his life he had a controversial personal record - he was politically active by supporting the early socialist trade unions and publicly opposing both world wars. Interested in nature, by the 1920s he turned to writing several books about insects. Already in 1902 he had published La Vie des Abeilles (The Life of the Bee). In 1926 he was accused of academic plagiarism for his La Vie des Termites (The Life of the White Ant). It became a political issue which would not prevent him from writing other books about ants and spiders afterwards. In his Life of the Bees, he would summarize the until then existing research in the field, done by Reaumur, Huber, and others. Maeterlinck formulated this in clear language without much scientific or personal excursions. Here and there we find a more philosophical reflection, pointing out how different bees are from humans. In the introduction, called 'On the Threshold of the Hive', he explains his style:

My facts shall be as accurate as though they appeared in a practical manual or scientific monograph, 
but I shall relate them in a somewhat livelier fashion than such works would allow, shall group them 
more harmoniously together, and blend them with freer and more mature reflections. The reader of this 
book will not learn there- from how to manage a hive ; but he will know more or less all that can with 
any certainty be known of the curious, pro- found, and intimate side of its inhabitants. Nor will this 
be at the cost of what still remains to be learned. T shall pass over in silence the hoary traditions 
that, in the country and many a book, still constitute the legend of the hive. 
(The Life of the Bee, p. 5)

Definitely a new way of writing about science, from science, within literary forms is being revealed. It shows clearly the writers' interests in the scientific paradigms, assigning to themselves a role to enlighten, explain and aestheticize the information. An anecdote: when Maeterlinck was invited by Goldwyn to Hollywood, he seemed to have written two scenarios. It is reported Goldwyn rushed out of his office, screaming. “My God, the hero is a bee!”.

So now we had an autodidactic scientist-teacher, and a renowned writer. Another crossover historian, writer and activist avant la lettre is, for sure, the Dutch/English Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733). He started with translating some of Aesop’s fables, for instance ‘The Wasps and the Bees’. He then published a strange combination of texts, called The Fable of the Bees (1714). It starts with the poem/fable ‘The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn’d Honest’ from 1705, adding a discussion in prose and some essays to it. As late as 1732 he wrote a second series of comments. The Fable of the Bees combines a number of socio-political, religious and economic ideas that caused a lot of offense in England at the time. It uses the fable of the hive as a starting metaphor for an economic theory that later would influence Adam Smith. In the poem a bee community is trying to achieve honesty and virtue through cooperation. But, they lose the hive, suggesting that personal luxury and consumption benefits the community more than for instance common savings. He also disagreed on the fact that virtue would be added by education, observing that evil existed as much among the rich and educated, who are even more crafty. The texts are written in a pamphlet-like style with a very direct and open opinion. In these older works the aesthetic programme seems to be missing. He defends his opinions. The hive is a mere metaphor for society. The first historian who would attempt to embellish science would probably be Jules Michelet (1798-1874). He published a first successful edition, L'Oiseau (1856), but then wrote a dull and naive, sometimes very inaccurate and superficial work L'insecte (1857). His motives are inspired by the wish to write a poetry of science, by adding poetry and philosophy to science. A noble initiative but exaggerated metaphoric and bombastic, and for that reason almost unreadable now. How different from the subtle Fabre, the skillful Maeterlinck and the earlier impassioned Mandeville:

The bee and the ant reveal to us the lofty harmony of the insect. Both, in their high intelligence, 
are of superior rank as artists, architects, and the like. The bee is more, a geometer; the ant is 
before all remark- able as an educator. The ant is frankly and strongly republican, having no need 
of a living and visible symbol of the community, lightly esteeming and governing with suficient 
rudeness the soft and feeble females who perpetuate the race. The bee, on the other hand, more tender 
apparently, or less reasoning and more imaginative, finds a moral support in the worship of the common 
mother. For her community of virgins it is, so to speak, a religion of love. Among both the ants and 
bees maternity is the social principle but fraternity also takes root, nourishes, and springs to a 
glorious stature.
(The Insect p. 335)

Outside the rain is drizzling. Looking out of the window, the beehives show almost no activity. Should we take a look?
One of the most sensitive accounts perhaps ever written about research on bees, is the mesmerizing The Dancing Bees (1953) by Karl von Frisch (1886-1962). While he was suffering from the Nazi takeover of the academic agenda, he continued his research about the perception and behaviour of bees in his parents' remote cottage on the border between Austria and Germany. The book is an enchanting account of almost DIY-style research into the senses (smell, sight, colour, light, touch, taste, …), orientation, time awareness, emotions and consciousness, etc.. of bees. One of the most fascinating pages was written about the discovery of the language of the bees. Accurately but tenderly he describes how he set up the initial test sites, how wrong and right hypotheses were made, and how finally the language of the bees was discovered by deciphering their movements and 'dances'. Interestingly, von Frisch's writings combine many stylistic features of the authors mentioned before. Through his writings and further research, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, together with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. It was remarkable that they all three got this prize at the same time. Von Frisch had been a victim of Nazi policies (he was also 1/4 Jewish), while Konrad Lorenz had been a contributor to the attempt to create a racial and eugenic science. Tinbergen had been a member of the Dutch resistance at the end of WW2. An account of this controversial assignment and the quite different background of each of the three winners can be read in the recent publication Insectopedia, by the anthropologist Hugh Raffles (2010), under the section ‘Language’. Raffles is interested in our relationship to insects and provides us an intriguing account of the dedicated work of many artists and researchers, and some of the writers mentioned above. Actually, the work by Raffles, the style and treatment of the content could fit into our hypothesis because the work is not only about creativity between the arts and sciences, it also is an attempt in itself to match original approaches to a research question with an original and fitting style of writing. It is a perfect introduction into a new kind of art forms that attempt to fuse the natural and nurtured within the creative; creativity that provokes a change of paradigm. Lured in by the title, a publication of the same year, Insect Media: an Archaeology of Animals and Technology by Jussi Parikka, landed on our desk. In this collection Parikka tries to discuss ethology as well, basically starting with Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) and his concepts of Merkwelt and Umwelt, later used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Though he tries to bring in most of the media philosophy heroes of the last decades, he sort of loses himself in a post-postmodernist account and is getting stuck in references and brilliant ideas but with a rather superficial impact. It is a pity, because we were looking forward to new relationships that still seem to be unexplored today between the issues mentioned above and, for instance, current media technology, biorobotics, complexity, ecology, etc…

Maybe there is more around, and this is only a modest attempt to see what is to be learned from more than a century of interdisciplinarity and literature. As we mentioned above, speech and language, together with for instance sonification and visualization, could yield an original and combined contribution to the arts. Provided it develops the appropriate tools, communication styles, open and diverse forms with original points of view. The different things that really make a difference, and not only promise to. But, every hypothesis here has to remain a little utopia too. The hope is that more original works will emerge, and new genres will develop before they can be pinpointed and attached to norms, only to evolve into a creative myriad of possibilities. Contradictions and differences, dissonance and noise, new patterns and structures, new languages… But definitely, the experimental exploration of a new artistic activity, related to scientific paradigms can be realized with more verve than we hear, see, and read nowadays.

Back to some fiction. In 2009 the Canadian author Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood. It is an apocalyptic and yet hopeful chaotic story about ecosects, posthuman society, genetic technology, or whatever is now at hand that will run out of hand. The Gardeners are central to the events. And the bees.

Suddenly jumps up and goes to the window. ‘Ah, reminds me of my work today’ … ‘Yes! The rain has stopped, have to go’.. ‘So, bye, and better read the book when you have time’ … ‘Really have to go now, it is getting dry outside!’ … ‘Cannot spoil the fun by telling you the end of the story anyway’ … ‘Ciao’… (standing in front of the window) ‘Euh… oh no, now it is getting dark, so no chance today to open the hives and centrifuge the honey’ … ‘Damn!’… goes back to the desk and sits down…
Ok, I am back, so let's end in beauty. Let's sing a last song before we part. And who better to voice it than the distinctive Sylvia Plath, who wrote 5 poems shortly before her tragic suicide, dealing with bees, other people, her own fears and vulnerabilities,… All of a fragile beauty.
From the poem THE BEE MEETING [Footnote 2]:

   Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the
   villagers----
   The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
   In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
   And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
   They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.
   
   I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
   Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
   Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my
   knees.
   Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
   They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Footnote 1.
Even Cole Porter would jump on the hype in the song “Too Darn Hot” for the musical 'Kiss Me Kate' (1948):

  According to the Kinsey report ev'ry average man you know
  much prefers to play his favorite sport when the temperature is low
  but when the thermometer goes way up and the weather is sizzling hot
  Mister GOB for his squab, a marine for his queen, a G.I. for his cutie-pie is not
  Cause it's too too too darn hot, It's too darn hot, It's too darn hot

Footnote 2.
For the complete sequence:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16664854/Bee-Poems-by-Sylvia-Plath

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gívan belá 20110723