I have many times tried to be an insect. I am a brown haired man with blue-gray eyes, a voice that is impotently masculine for my child’s face and a body of paperish skin unbecoming humanity. The other George, for whom I write, has the great mandibles of the praying mantis, the guttural speech of a being content with incoherence, and an elongated thorax fresh from molting. Life - the function of death - christens the insect with the change of body. I am left as a thing defined. 
   The firmament that divides the ichorous water above and below are of no concern for the insect. Nor is the evening and morning; the dubious march of vivacity; the good and the bad; the naming of the beasts of the world. It is named and does not name. The insect, now carrying my worn title as a burden, will soon shed its titular body made young. This discarded shell will be my sepulcher. 
   As much demon as god, I am a convoluted thing, twisted and defined. The insect follows a path predetermined by instinctual hope. We are similar in this regard. However, confined by one name, body, mind, human nuance is the nuisance of my path. Each day, walking between the corner of Vassar street where I teach kids how to know, and the end of Clinton where I try to remember what it was to be so unknowing, I lose myself in these constructions. In walking my hope is that of the insect, but unlike him I think all the way. I am given many little pills of all colors to keep these thoughts alive. I do not want this rainbow. It loses me in an entropy of labels so that I will not shed humanity, so that I will know George for George and only George.
   The insect lacks conception of self. I lack the conception of an identity confined in my one syllable title. Waking to sleep, chewing the time down alongside a fine china dish of uppers and downers as hours seem to never pass, but always I am George, and always I must name my next task. It would be better to be unnamed, driven by hunger, pain, and hope. It would be better to lack these amphetamine-shaky hands, pupils dilated, and circular senscience chasing its own tail at the prospect of its next chemical fix. I, again and again, have wondered: in the moment after the mantis loves and then tears its unloving mate apart, is that joy different? Different from whatever my body could produce or the doctor inject? Then, again and again, I have decided: it would be better to be the insect.
   Then I would know which nameless one of us wrote this page. That would be very good.

 

  5/19/23