PEOPLE ARE FUNNY #3: THE MOTH LADY

The Lady and The Case of the Missing Moths

 "You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!" 

OR IN THIS CASE, CINCINNATI, OHIO and the strange case of the lady moth thief. Arrested in late April of this year, she has pleaded not guilty to the charge of stealing a number of exotic moths from a local conservatory hothouse.

     So, what to make of someone who would go to all the trouble of going into the Krohn Conservatory and taking moths home with her? Why? I'm sure she must have given her reasons during her court proceedings: compulsion; the love of beautiful things; a lapse in judgement (though she appears to have done this more than once, so...lapses in judgement?) 

In a further news item we read with rapt attention that she is a horticulturalist and photographer, and is "drawn to colour" as inspiration for her art. So I'm guessing she’s going for the 'my art made me do it' plea. Nice! Most people think artists are half-crazy anyway, so she might just get away with it. The moths she stole were from Madagascar, and apparently didn't survive in her chilly, Cincinnati apartment. You know, we live in very silly times.

Question: What is the difference between an institution importing foreign moth pupa and hatching them for display in their conservatory and a woman taking home several of the creatures to use for her photography? The short answer is there's not as much difference as you might think. If those moths ("exotic Blue Morphos") could speak they might just say: "What the Fuk!? Why are we here? Who the fuk are you? Yeah, we're lovely to look at and nice to hold, but if you break us, man, we're dead!" I'm sure they would have more to say on the subject if they could.

     My point is: what are we doing? I understand the need to experience the beauty of the natural world (‘natural’ includes us, by the way), and to share such beauty with others. But I can’t help thinking that by ‘capturing’ nature—either in our museums, zoos, aquariums, or in our art we do it violence. We diminish it don’t we? We hold it apart from ourselves and examine it. We pick it apart until there’s nothing left. We dissect it down to the last gene, to the very constituent molecules, then say: “There! Now I understand!” But what have we learned? When we break nature apart, we are no longer part of nature ourselves. We become the scalpel, the electron microscope, the killing jar—tools and not compatriots, if I can put it this way.

     I may be overstating the case; I think of the wonderful work done by eighteenth and nineteenth century naturalists to understand our world and its myriad lifeforms, and I imagine Aristotle walking through the tide pools of Lesbos in the mid-fourth century BC, looking at the creatures living there. But I can’t help feeling there is a difference between what Aristotle and those pioneering naturalists (and those who followed them) were trying to accomplish, and the way in which we moderns view and treat the living world and its inhabitants today. The world is seen as object (for study, manipulation, art, or for purposes we deem to be of current importance or necessity); the world is seen as ‘other’. It is us and the world, and not us with the world....

Well, this rant has gone on long enough. I hope Moth Lady has her day in court and pays her fine, and returns to her photography with a little more sensitivity to how she captures the colours of the world. And I hope the Krohn conservatory gets on with the business of conservation, but with less exotic exhibits in the future. And finally, I hope that Aristotle doesn’t look up from examining his tide pool, and frown at a future he glimpses darkly.

The song, “Putting Down” by The Tragically Hip, comes to mind. In it, the singer expresses, in part, a growing dissatisfaction with writing about, sketching, recording, or otherwise documenting  the natural world and what he calls the “indigenous”, perhaps referring to First Nations people. The singer is becoming “unimpressed” with the process of “putting down” (in some record or writing) the world and in the end, “fail[s] to know what is best” Does the ending phrase, “I’m putting down”, repeated several times, suggest that the singer feels he is ‘putting down’—denigrating—what he is trying to capture in a sketch or painting, or in words? 

Cheers, Jake. 



 

Putting Down

by The Tragically Hip

Held a bird's egg between her breasts
There's reasons for the road, I guess
To document the indigenous,
To paint and sketch
Paint and sketch
I'm starting to fail to be impressed.

United state of ricochet
From the boardwalk to the Appian way
The diamond files, the corporate raves
You'd practically kill
Not to be afraid
And I'm starting to choke
On the things I say.
Putting down. I'm putting down.
I'm putting down.
I'm putting down. I'm putting down.
I'm putting down.
I'm putting down. I'm putting down.
I'm putting down.

Browbeaten out from underneath your dress
The documented indigenous civilization
Flipped its desk
You know the rest, there is no rest
And I'm starting to fail to know what's best.

Putting down.I'm putting down.
I'm putting down.
I'm putting down. I'm putting down.
I'm putting down.
I'm putting down. I'm putting down.
I'm putting down.

Songwriters: Gordon Downie / Johnny Fay / 

Joseph Paul Langlois / Robert Baker / Robert Gordon Sinclair

Gordon Edgar Downie

Born: February 6, 1964 –

Died: October 17, 2017. R.I.P.