adrift and assailed

[ashcanprobably]

It's a hot day, the kind that makes an uncomfortable task out of laying about and in time produces a layer of sweat between your body and clothes like pus under a bulging scab. Remove your shoes, your socks, if you're wearing any, but for the sake of this experiment, it's preferable that you don't hinder the natural breath of things with any

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[ashcanprobably]

Luis de Góngora, a 17th century Spaniard, wrote that dreams are a literary construct of the unconscious mind. There exists the crude uncomfortable feelings that are aroused during sleep, as a result of whatever experience had during the day, and dreams go about dressing these nameless "shadows in beautiful bulk". The most bedraggled of outfittings are the ones that must become nightmares. There are large objects like abusive fathers, black horses, aliens, crowds of people, etc. that execute substantial fears. Perhaps, insects, which are very small, are supposed to faintly outline and give shape to a large imperceptible anxiety. You can perceive the creepy coverings, but never the feeling underneath, which is like a nude body groped by webs in a spider's nest, or a smiling face masked with bees.

A legion of ants can never hope to dream, even if they work together. It must never cross their puny nerve centers as much as the enticements of a bread crumb. They are matter of dreams, each a loose thought of the same intent. Every authentic ant is as inconsequential as the fictional ants in this post, the same ant.

[uberdionysus]

Which is what is frightening about insects (and esp. ants) - they are a visible metaphor for everything we fear: the loss of the self in a crowd or system, the spread of uncontrollable disease, the march of the tiny grievances of time that we can stomp at but never eradicate.

[ashcanprobably]

I remember this one time I found a woozy bee on the ground and I was carrying it around on a postcard. I don't know what the hell was wrong with it. Maybe it was just a lazy drone. It got kicked out of the hive for shirking its beat. When I showed it to a friend, he got this bright idea and he proceeded to direct me to an elaborate web that he had noticed on his front porch. A successful web, it featured the husks of many past meals, all irrecognizable, the spider had really licked them clean. He suggested that we should entangle my little slacker bee in the web in order to instigate conflict. Nothing happened. The spider must not have appreciated our Roman bloodlust, it stayed put. We quickly lost patience and, the next day, the bee was gone.