The Sick Little Caterpillar: A Parable
[Another version of this story was published in a 1984 issue of David Nestle’s Popular Reality, and one in a 1983 issue of Rubindium Crystal fanzine]
Once upon a time, there was a very neurotic young caterpillar named Alexander, called “Alec” by everyone who knew him. Immature and divorced from the realities of the world, he lived in a fantasy world much of the time. As the lovely, warm days of Summer went by, and June and July were succeeded by August and September, instead of going industriously to work and then relaxing at tennis or golf the way that all his well-adjusted friends and relatives did, Alec began to spend most of his time in bed, dreaming his life away. After a couple of months of this, more and more often he was heard to declare he wished that he had never left the womb.
As time went by, and Summer passed into the first days of Autumn, Alec became schizzier and schizzier. When he wasn’t sleeping - which he was, most of the time - he began to create weird works of “art,” what he referred to as his “Womb-Cycle.” Called “Womb I,” “Womb II,” and so on, they represented his ever-growing preoccupation with what he called “The Alchemical Womb,” in which, he said, one could “return to the Source” and become “transmuted” into a “Magickal Child,” the “Inheritor of the Future.” He churned out these nasty, lumpishly amorphous productions, done up in eye-blasting psychedelic colors like something turned out during recreational therapy by the whackos in the back wards of the local state hospital, in ever-increasing numbers, each one uglier and stranger than the last. And he began to insist that his friends and family call him “Aleister,” scorning his rightful name in favor of something he’d dreamed up as part of his rapidly evolving fantasies, in which he was a wise and powerful wizard, Magickally transported from world to world by the grace of beautiful wings sprouting from his back, where he paid court to lovely princesses, drank nectar from fantastic, rainbow-colored chalices, and sired a thousand thousand children, all across the world. It was very sad. No one was sure what to do about it, but everyone agreed that if it didn’t stop soon, Alec was surely headed for disaster.
They weren’t wrong. By the end of September, he had finally produced his masterpiece: “Womb 40,” a huge, horrible lumpen thing that looked for all the world like some Brobdingnagian, purple-chartreuse-and-yellow plastic tear dripped from the eyes of a sequoia-sized Tom O’ Bedlam, hollowed out in the middle with a space just large enough to hold one good-sized caterpillar . . . say, one about Alec’s size.
Sure enough, bare moments after finishing “Womb 40,” Alec, yelling that he was now going to “return to the Womb of the World to be reborn in Light,” dove head-first into his latest creation and quickly rammed a plug into place behind him, covering the hole and concealing himself from those outside. A violent stench of Superglue leaked outward from the edges of the plug, filling his studio, followed by the sound of hammering from within the thing. Then, the odor of glue dissipating rapidly, silence fell. Only a note, pasted to the outside of his studio door, which was bolted shut from the inside, was left to let others know what had happened to him.
Now, all this time, Alec’s poor friends and relatives, industrious, sober, well-adjusted citizens who paid their taxes, worked hard at their jobs, voted regularly, and otherwise upheld their responsibilities in life, had thought that Alec was little more than a lazy bum. But when, about an hour after Alec had finally made his resoundingly artistic exit from reality, his friend Somerset, coming by the studio to see how Alec was doing, found Alec’s note, and frantically began to call up everyone to tell them what Alec had done, they realized that, rather than being just a ne’er-do-well shirker, Alec was actually a very sick caterpillar, his outrageous behavior really a clear cry for help. So they all raced down to Alec’s studio as fast as they could, many of them even leaving work to do so. There, they quickly broke down the studio door and began prying open “Womb 40,” using the crowbars chisels, and other tools handily spread out across the big trestle-tables along the studio’s walls, which Alec had been using as work-benches.
They had to admit that while Alec may have missed his calling when it came to art, he was a sheer genius at engineering. Though fear for Alec’s safety - after all, how much air could there be in there for him to breathe? - leant them enormous strength, it took what seemed to be hours before they were able to open up a large enough hole in the side of “Womb 40” to pull Alec out. Exhausted, but overjoyed to find him still alive, they were stunned and horrified to find that Alec, though breathing slow, shallow, regular breaths, was as unmoving as a doll. Eyes closed, he lay in a fetal curl, his limbs displaying the waxy immobility characteristic of profound catatonia, moving only when re-arranged by others’ hands, remaining in whatever position they put them in.
Appalled, his friends and family immediately called an ambulance. They followed the wildly wailing ambulance all the way to City Hospital in a caravan moving at dangerously high speeds, careless of road conditions and cops alike, concerned only for Alec. Somehow avoiding both crashes and the Highway Patrol, the long caravan roared into the hospital parking-lot just yards behind the ambulance carrying Alec, which had stopped right next to the doors to the hospital’s emergency room.
Anxiously they stood by while the paramedics gently, carefully lifted Alec, now wide-awake and raving, tightly strapped into supine near-immobility on his stretcher and covered from toes to chin with a heavy red blanket, out of the ambulance and carried him through the doors of the emergency room. As Alec babbled on and on about flying away on Magickal wings and finding the woman of his dreams, the emergency-room attendants, shaking their heads sadly, injected him with a massive dose of Thorazine and watched over him until, his eyes suddenly rolling back in his head and glazing over, Alec passed out. “Vee are going to have to keep him here for a few weeks,” Dr. Joy, the doctor on duty that night in the emergency room, solemnly told the crowd of anxious friends and relatives who had come in with Alec. “He iz vun sehr krank caterpillar. Chust listen to him - delusions of vlying. Vimmen mit regn-boygnenden vings. Ach - boor lad! It’s zecks, you know. Zecksshual rebression - it’s gone to his kopf. Sehr umetik - zuch a patern . . .” he said, tsk-ing sadly.
Randi, one of Alec’s brother’s, tears in his eyes, told Dr. Joy, “Do what has to be done, Doc - I want my brother to have the best. - Oh, God, why couldn’t I see - why wasn’t I able to tell he was sick? I feel so guilty! Please, Doc - I’ll do anything to have Alec well again!”
Stephen Jay and Martin, Alec’s other brothers, agreed. “Please, Doctor Joy,” said Martin, “as long as Alec gets well again, nothing else counts! Don’t spare anything to help him!” He looked around at all the others, who quickly agreed, muttering, nodding, adding their own comments.
“Okay - vee put him on the Haldol, he’ll be right as rain in no time, don’t worry, don’t worry . . .” Dr. Joy soothed them. “Chust let’s get him into his own room, start him on a Haldol brotocol, he’ll be a new man bevore you know it!”
Everyone rushed to assure the doctor that he should begin whatever treatments were most likely to help as soon as possible. So the doctor rang for the doctor on duty in the psyche ward upstairs, who dispatched orderlies to bring Alec up to his floor and put him in an empty room, where they could begin treatment at once. Kind Dr. Joy then sent everyone home again - after all, there wasn’t anything they could do here, beyond what they had done already, other than lose sleep and get in the doctors’ and one another’s way. So his family and friends, with anxious backward looks, quietly filed out and made their way home, to wait for word about Alec.
That word wasn’t as long in coming as they had feared. Fortunately, Alec responded quickly and well to the standard treatments. After a couple of weeks on alternating courses of Haldol, Stellazine and Thorazine, Alec had calmed down considerably. Within a few more weeks, finally well once more (if somewhat sluggish, and now wholly and a little unsettlingly devoid of that enormous, rainbowed libido that had so plagued him with those sick fantasies of flying and oversexed alien women), he was released from the hospital, at last well-adjusted and ready to take his rightful place in society as a responsible citizen and member of the community.
Upon his release from the hospital, he was appalled to learn that at the time of his own catastrophic breakdown, many other young caterpillars, all about his age, had also exhibited exactly the same syndrome: delusions of flying, satyriacal obsessions with beautiful, alien, rainbow-winged females, Magickal thinking, the whole nine yards. Indeed, just as he himself had been, the majority of them had had to be routed out of one or another variety of horrible, self-created nest (eerily, like him, not a few of them had even referred to their nasty creations as “wombs”, and raved of being “transmuted into Magickal children”!)
But, as in his own case, all of them had been successfully treated and returned, well and productive once more, to society - that is, except for a few who, rather than trying to seal themselves into one sort or another of nest indoors, had managed to escape into the wood before they could be taken, and disappeared. They were few and far between, though; and the unique epidemic had finally been stamped out, to everyone’s overwhelming relief and joy.
But now society had two new worries.
Here and there, reports were coming in of strange flying beasts flitting about, high above the city. So far, there hadn’t been many of these - but almost certainly they had to potential threats, possibly the heralds of some terrible invasion of the things to come, one that could wreak havoc, even destroy civilization. Some of these had been shot down, and the rest, seeing what happened to their comrades, had fled. So maybe they weren’t such a threat, after all.
But the other threat remained, and was potentially much worse in import: unlike previous years, almost no new caterpillars were coming in from the woods as Spring spread across the land. This was bad news. The caterpillar population now had a very narrow age-base, and was rapidly declining in numbers. Without a constant supply of young new caterpillars coming in each year to replace the older ones who had either died or, even now, though in a diminishing number of cases, suddenly gone insane and fled to the woods to make that strange, obsessive pilgrimage in search of “the Womb of the World,” there were fewer and fewer workers to carry out all the tasks necessary to the healthy functioning of a complex, progressive society. It might not be long before their numbers fell below the critical limit, and civilization began to fall apart at the seams for sheer lack of the material necessary to hold it together - ending not with the bang of an alien invasion, but rather with the whimper of extinction.
Already the cranks were beginning to preach that these growing problems were the result of the increasing urbanization of life. There were even a number of religious nuts - unfortunately, some of them with large, dangerously vocal followings among the citizenry - who claimed that the abandonment of the older, more primitive and pagan ways of life of their forebears, now of course shown to be erroneous and outmoded by science and the wonderful life which the wonderful modern high-energy technology and the progressive culture necessary to sustain it had brought to all, was responsible for these problems.
Some, mostly middle-aged or even elderly citizens, even went so far as to dress up in long linen robes and carry signs saying “THE END IS AT HAND - ARE YOU PREPARED TO MEET GODDESS?” and similar nonsense, picketing banks, shops, and places of entertainment all over the business district. By and large, insofar as it was possible, these were treated in much the same way as the delusional younger caterpillars had been: detained for treatment in the form of integrated protocols of Haldol, Mellaril, Stellazine, and other strong, effective psychotropic agents in the hospital, then released for continued out-patient treatment in clinics. But this wasn’t nearly as successful as it had been in the case of the younger ones. Unfortunately, many of these older caterpillars developed weird, even potentially life-threatening side-effects as a result of this form of treatment, and had to be taken off the drugs in order to save their health or even their lives. The CCLU was threatening to bring a class-action suit on behalf of these religiously manic oldsters, and the NAACC was already preparing go before the public with claims that the drugs used in the treatments were often used discriminatingly and illegally, to control or suppress dissent among members of minority groups, rather than to aid in the restoration and maintenance of mental health, as the Caterpillar Medical Association and the Caterpillar Psychiatric Association claimed. Led by Dr. Joy, who had become a sort of medical hero for his work in trying to stem the tides of epidemic insanity which periodically rolled over civilization, threatening everything built up for so long, by so many, which such care, the CMA and CPA worked day and night to defend their actions and efforts before the public - but it was becoming a losing battle. No matter what they tried, it all seemed to go for naught - and meanwhile, the situation, and with it, civilization, continued to deteriorate.
Well, the now well-adjusted caterpillar, older but wiser, thought as he thoughtfully read the latest issue of Barron’s over his morning capuccino at his club one Saturday, at least we really whipped the problem of mass psychosis! Only the senile and the unreconstructed pagan religious nuts are getting sucked into those ghastly delusions, any more . . .
But then he blushed as he recalled his own delusions of returning to the womb, of flying, of those gorgeous, oversexed women from another dimension . . .
Thank God Dr. Joy got to me in time! he thought. Otherwise, it might be me out there, holding up those signs and ranting with the other nuts . . .
- END -
Once upon a time, there was a very neurotic young caterpillar named Alexander, called “Alec” by everyone who knew him. Immature and divorced from the realities of the world, he lived in a fantasy world much of the time. As the lovely, warm days of Summer went by, and June and July were succeeded by August and September, instead of going industriously to work and then relaxing at tennis or golf the way that all his well-adjusted friends and relatives did, Alec began to spend most of his time in bed, dreaming his life away. After a couple of months of this, more and more often he was heard to declare he wished that he had never left the womb.
As time went by, and Summer passed into the first days of Autumn, Alec became schizzier and schizzier. When he wasn’t sleeping - which he was, most of the time - he began to create weird works of “art,” what he referred to as his “Womb-Cycle.” Called “Womb I,” “Womb II,” and so on, they represented his ever-growing preoccupation with what he called “The Alchemical Womb,” in which, he said, one could “return to the Source” and become “transmuted” into a “Magickal Child,” the “Inheritor of the Future.” He churned out these nasty, lumpishly amorphous productions, done up in eye-blasting psychedelic colors like something turned out during recreational therapy by the whackos in the back wards of the local state hospital, in ever-increasing numbers, each one uglier and stranger than the last. And he began to insist that his friends and family call him “Aleister,” scorning his rightful name in favor of something he’d dreamed up as part of his rapidly evolving fantasies, in which he was a wise and powerful wizard, Magickally transported from world to world by the grace of beautiful wings sprouting from his back, where he paid court to lovely princesses, drank nectar from fantastic, rainbow-colored chalices, and sired a thousand thousand children, all across the world. It was very sad. No one was sure what to do about it, but everyone agreed that if it didn’t stop soon, Alec was surely headed for disaster.
They weren’t wrong. By the end of September, he had finally produced his masterpiece: “Womb 40,” a huge, horrible lumpen thing that looked for all the world like some Brobdingnagian, purple-chartreuse-and-yellow plastic tear dripped from the eyes of a sequoia-sized Tom O’ Bedlam, hollowed out in the middle with a space just large enough to hold one good-sized caterpillar . . . say, one about Alec’s size.
Sure enough, bare moments after finishing “Womb 40,” Alec, yelling that he was now going to “return to the Womb of the World to be reborn in Light,” dove head-first into his latest creation and quickly rammed a plug into place behind him, covering the hole and concealing himself from those outside. A violent stench of Superglue leaked outward from the edges of the plug, filling his studio, followed by the sound of hammering from within the thing. Then, the odor of glue dissipating rapidly, silence fell. Only a note, pasted to the outside of his studio door, which was bolted shut from the inside, was left to let others know what had happened to him.
Now, all this time, Alec’s poor friends and relatives, industrious, sober, well-adjusted citizens who paid their taxes, worked hard at their jobs, voted regularly, and otherwise upheld their responsibilities in life, had thought that Alec was little more than a lazy bum. But when, about an hour after Alec had finally made his resoundingly artistic exit from reality, his friend Somerset, coming by the studio to see how Alec was doing, found Alec’s note, and frantically began to call up everyone to tell them what Alec had done, they realized that, rather than being just a ne’er-do-well shirker, Alec was actually a very sick caterpillar, his outrageous behavior really a clear cry for help. So they all raced down to Alec’s studio as fast as they could, many of them even leaving work to do so. There, they quickly broke down the studio door and began prying open “Womb 40,” using the crowbars chisels, and other tools handily spread out across the big trestle-tables along the studio’s walls, which Alec had been using as work-benches.
They had to admit that while Alec may have missed his calling when it came to art, he was a sheer genius at engineering. Though fear for Alec’s safety - after all, how much air could there be in there for him to breathe? - leant them enormous strength, it took what seemed to be hours before they were able to open up a large enough hole in the side of “Womb 40” to pull Alec out. Exhausted, but overjoyed to find him still alive, they were stunned and horrified to find that Alec, though breathing slow, shallow, regular breaths, was as unmoving as a doll. Eyes closed, he lay in a fetal curl, his limbs displaying the waxy immobility characteristic of profound catatonia, moving only when re-arranged by others’ hands, remaining in whatever position they put them in.
Appalled, his friends and family immediately called an ambulance. They followed the wildly wailing ambulance all the way to City Hospital in a caravan moving at dangerously high speeds, careless of road conditions and cops alike, concerned only for Alec. Somehow avoiding both crashes and the Highway Patrol, the long caravan roared into the hospital parking-lot just yards behind the ambulance carrying Alec, which had stopped right next to the doors to the hospital’s emergency room.
Anxiously they stood by while the paramedics gently, carefully lifted Alec, now wide-awake and raving, tightly strapped into supine near-immobility on his stretcher and covered from toes to chin with a heavy red blanket, out of the ambulance and carried him through the doors of the emergency room. As Alec babbled on and on about flying away on Magickal wings and finding the woman of his dreams, the emergency-room attendants, shaking their heads sadly, injected him with a massive dose of Thorazine and watched over him until, his eyes suddenly rolling back in his head and glazing over, Alec passed out. “Vee are going to have to keep him here for a few weeks,” Dr. Joy, the doctor on duty that night in the emergency room, solemnly told the crowd of anxious friends and relatives who had come in with Alec. “He iz vun sehr krank caterpillar. Chust listen to him - delusions of vlying. Vimmen mit regn-boygnenden vings. Ach - boor lad! It’s zecks, you know. Zecksshual rebression - it’s gone to his kopf. Sehr umetik - zuch a patern . . .” he said, tsk-ing sadly.
Randi, one of Alec’s brother’s, tears in his eyes, told Dr. Joy, “Do what has to be done, Doc - I want my brother to have the best. - Oh, God, why couldn’t I see - why wasn’t I able to tell he was sick? I feel so guilty! Please, Doc - I’ll do anything to have Alec well again!”
Stephen Jay and Martin, Alec’s other brothers, agreed. “Please, Doctor Joy,” said Martin, “as long as Alec gets well again, nothing else counts! Don’t spare anything to help him!” He looked around at all the others, who quickly agreed, muttering, nodding, adding their own comments.
“Okay - vee put him on the Haldol, he’ll be right as rain in no time, don’t worry, don’t worry . . .” Dr. Joy soothed them. “Chust let’s get him into his own room, start him on a Haldol brotocol, he’ll be a new man bevore you know it!”
Everyone rushed to assure the doctor that he should begin whatever treatments were most likely to help as soon as possible. So the doctor rang for the doctor on duty in the psyche ward upstairs, who dispatched orderlies to bring Alec up to his floor and put him in an empty room, where they could begin treatment at once. Kind Dr. Joy then sent everyone home again - after all, there wasn’t anything they could do here, beyond what they had done already, other than lose sleep and get in the doctors’ and one another’s way. So his family and friends, with anxious backward looks, quietly filed out and made their way home, to wait for word about Alec.
That word wasn’t as long in coming as they had feared. Fortunately, Alec responded quickly and well to the standard treatments. After a couple of weeks on alternating courses of Haldol, Stellazine and Thorazine, Alec had calmed down considerably. Within a few more weeks, finally well once more (if somewhat sluggish, and now wholly and a little unsettlingly devoid of that enormous, rainbowed libido that had so plagued him with those sick fantasies of flying and oversexed alien women), he was released from the hospital, at last well-adjusted and ready to take his rightful place in society as a responsible citizen and member of the community.
Upon his release from the hospital, he was appalled to learn that at the time of his own catastrophic breakdown, many other young caterpillars, all about his age, had also exhibited exactly the same syndrome: delusions of flying, satyriacal obsessions with beautiful, alien, rainbow-winged females, Magickal thinking, the whole nine yards. Indeed, just as he himself had been, the majority of them had had to be routed out of one or another variety of horrible, self-created nest (eerily, like him, not a few of them had even referred to their nasty creations as “wombs”, and raved of being “transmuted into Magickal children”!)
But, as in his own case, all of them had been successfully treated and returned, well and productive once more, to society - that is, except for a few who, rather than trying to seal themselves into one sort or another of nest indoors, had managed to escape into the wood before they could be taken, and disappeared. They were few and far between, though; and the unique epidemic had finally been stamped out, to everyone’s overwhelming relief and joy.
But now society had two new worries.
Here and there, reports were coming in of strange flying beasts flitting about, high above the city. So far, there hadn’t been many of these - but almost certainly they had to potential threats, possibly the heralds of some terrible invasion of the things to come, one that could wreak havoc, even destroy civilization. Some of these had been shot down, and the rest, seeing what happened to their comrades, had fled. So maybe they weren’t such a threat, after all.
But the other threat remained, and was potentially much worse in import: unlike previous years, almost no new caterpillars were coming in from the woods as Spring spread across the land. This was bad news. The caterpillar population now had a very narrow age-base, and was rapidly declining in numbers. Without a constant supply of young new caterpillars coming in each year to replace the older ones who had either died or, even now, though in a diminishing number of cases, suddenly gone insane and fled to the woods to make that strange, obsessive pilgrimage in search of “the Womb of the World,” there were fewer and fewer workers to carry out all the tasks necessary to the healthy functioning of a complex, progressive society. It might not be long before their numbers fell below the critical limit, and civilization began to fall apart at the seams for sheer lack of the material necessary to hold it together - ending not with the bang of an alien invasion, but rather with the whimper of extinction.
Already the cranks were beginning to preach that these growing problems were the result of the increasing urbanization of life. There were even a number of religious nuts - unfortunately, some of them with large, dangerously vocal followings among the citizenry - who claimed that the abandonment of the older, more primitive and pagan ways of life of their forebears, now of course shown to be erroneous and outmoded by science and the wonderful life which the wonderful modern high-energy technology and the progressive culture necessary to sustain it had brought to all, was responsible for these problems.
Some, mostly middle-aged or even elderly citizens, even went so far as to dress up in long linen robes and carry signs saying “THE END IS AT HAND - ARE YOU PREPARED TO MEET GODDESS?” and similar nonsense, picketing banks, shops, and places of entertainment all over the business district. By and large, insofar as it was possible, these were treated in much the same way as the delusional younger caterpillars had been: detained for treatment in the form of integrated protocols of Haldol, Mellaril, Stellazine, and other strong, effective psychotropic agents in the hospital, then released for continued out-patient treatment in clinics. But this wasn’t nearly as successful as it had been in the case of the younger ones. Unfortunately, many of these older caterpillars developed weird, even potentially life-threatening side-effects as a result of this form of treatment, and had to be taken off the drugs in order to save their health or even their lives. The CCLU was threatening to bring a class-action suit on behalf of these religiously manic oldsters, and the NAACC was already preparing go before the public with claims that the drugs used in the treatments were often used discriminatingly and illegally, to control or suppress dissent among members of minority groups, rather than to aid in the restoration and maintenance of mental health, as the Caterpillar Medical Association and the Caterpillar Psychiatric Association claimed. Led by Dr. Joy, who had become a sort of medical hero for his work in trying to stem the tides of epidemic insanity which periodically rolled over civilization, threatening everything built up for so long, by so many, which such care, the CMA and CPA worked day and night to defend their actions and efforts before the public - but it was becoming a losing battle. No matter what they tried, it all seemed to go for naught - and meanwhile, the situation, and with it, civilization, continued to deteriorate.
Well, the now well-adjusted caterpillar, older but wiser, thought as he thoughtfully read the latest issue of Barron’s over his morning capuccino at his club one Saturday, at least we really whipped the problem of mass psychosis! Only the senile and the unreconstructed pagan religious nuts are getting sucked into those ghastly delusions, any more . . .
But then he blushed as he recalled his own delusions of returning to the womb, of flying, of those gorgeous, oversexed women from another dimension . . .
Thank God Dr. Joy got to me in time! he thought. Otherwise, it might be me out there, holding up those signs and ranting with the other nuts . . .
- END -