Monster Ants, Commie Ants, Ants
Commie Ants, Monster Ants, Ants
Back for a final, late fall on the old side porch of my childhood home. The gait of the ant on the porch floor recalls your 1960’s High School Social Studies teacher, Mr. Wilson, in a homicidal slapstick .22 skidoo around the backyard after his screaming wife, then fleeing from her knife-brandishing counterattack, then back again. Now the ant stops. Goes. Its progress neither scurry nor march nor meander, but a compound of halt and drive, improvisation and plan, straight ahead and double back. Me and art. Me and life and love. Or maybe like Mr. Wilson's distillation of Marxism in class as “two steps forward, one step back." Or his halting long dialectic of paranoia and shyness climaxing in his own Bolshevik murder spree. Years later, on the third season of this three-season porch afternoon the floorboards, made of a hay-colored material neither wood nor plastic, (“composite”), stretch beyond in all directions. It must look Sonoran bleak, arctic blank for the ant traversing it. But that’s your imagining, something out of The Incredible Shrinking Man. The ant sets out, perhaps indifferent or insensible to the terrain. Look now: the ant shows a Lenin’s cunning at the precipice between boards, sees it’s not such a chasm at all, that the boards curve-cut gentle, easily straddled onward to the wall, five feet away on two sides and ten to twelve on the others. There’s life force here, surely, in delicate steps to Virginia Woolf’s moth in the window reel, yet equally unanswerable to her or your idea of what the hell for. Oh sure, the ants have their collective plan, in trance of pheromones, multitasking burrow, feed, fight and breed, nature’s pure communist utopia tunneled underground, busy with the dialectics of this way and that, trial and error until the river is forged on leaves and twigs, and the army Ho Chi Minh’s a trail to the Marxist queen. This solitary ant must be on a mission to rejoin its own, and the image of the ants riding leaves and twigs to cross streams takes them and you to the other side, and movies: Charlton Heston battling ants in something imperfectly remembered but demanding, like an ant up your ankle, your scratch or flick that goes quick wiki search: The Naked Jungle, 1954, telling the story of “Leiningen and Ants,” where a plantation owner in the Amazon battles a rebellious mail order bride and an invasion of army ants that overwhelm his every defense. It takes you to another story of alien ants and horror, one of the scariest stories you have ever read, by the pre-Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings.” You note, perhaps, that The Naked Jungle was directed by Byron Haskin, and produced by George Pal, the famous filmmaking team that also made Conquest of Space, War of the Worlds, The Power, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Haskin directed scores of other effects-laden films, like From the Earth to the Moon, and episodes of The Outer Limits, which did a very bad adaptation of Sandkings. Finding such associations with movies, science fiction, and fantasy comes effortlessly. After thinking about any subject at all, even something as small and incidental and spontaneous as the sight of this ant across the floor of this deck, or as inexorable and overwhelming as the death of a parent, movies seem an inevitable two or three degrees of separation away. But this can’t be truly inevitable, or especially rational. Surely it must be a reflection of personal tastes, history, obsessions, defenses. Maybe you’ve known for a long time that you are a “cinephile,” “movie nut,” “film buff” or whatever you want to call someone that thinks, talks, reads, writes and watches movies in autonomic key. Yet the monikers sit uneasy because with you there seems so little in common with others who glory in the names. You have never felt quite so lonely as in a room full of cineastes, perhaps in between showings at a film festival or during intermission, or at a lecture by and about a director you especially like, but is becoming alarmingly popular, as Richard Linklater, David Lynch or Guy Madden once were, and did. There is a sense of deepening loneliness: this passionate connection with a world can still not be something recognizably human, in the social, everyday sense, but rather a longing for a realm that is realer than real, like matte painted landscapes in Hitchcock films. Like love. This may sometimes depress you, like the Sunset Boulevard Gloria Swanson trapped in the movie past, or an old episode of Twilight Zone where the silent star melts into her old film of eternal movie youth, and you bemoan the epistemological quandary of describing movie-inflected experience in movie metaphors. Is it mere nostalgia for a past time that animates absorption with movies? But the movies aren’t all old, often aren’t any good, are boring to watch and boring to think about, not to mention write about, and, you suspect, to read about. You would like to find other associations from this ant, which is well on its way to disappearing into the far crack between floorboard and baseboard to be gone from your life forever. “Nevertheless, the present specimen with his narrow, hay-colored wings, fringed with a tassel of the same color, seemed to be content with life…
…one is apt to forget all about life.” Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth,” 1942.
I want another look at that ant. I look up, and it's gone.