#15 / The Anxiety Issue
Hey y’all,
I’m a bit anxious. We’ve gone from having five radiant caterpillar children to one.
I’ve been watching them all week, trying to work on the porch as much as possible to keep an eye on them. It’s not like they need intense supervision. They have everything they need: plentiful parsley to eat, cover from the elements, and… actually I think that’s it.
The only thing I was worried about was the robins that keep grabbing berries from the juneberry bush next to the porch. But they don’t seem to pay any attention to our herb garden. Now that the caterpillars are mature, they’ve turned a pale green that blends in really well with the plants. And I read that they’re not tasty for birds, so maybe the robins have instinctually learned to avoid them. Dang, they’ve gotta be nutritious though.
The caterpillars also have a little orange appendage that emerges from their foreheads when they feel threatened. It looks like a little forked snake’s tongue and it emits a foul smell that discourages predators from coming near. I saw this once, when I was watering the garden and the water started rushing too close to one of them. The orange just appeared out of nowhere.
But basically they just eat and rest. They’re accessible pets. The only problem is that the more they eat, the bigger they grow, and the bigger they grow, the more they need to eat.
So when you have five full-grown caterpillars devouring a single clump of parsley, it’s not going to last long.
On Friday night, as Ashley and I were relaxing on the porch, we realized that our spindly, picked-over plant was nearing its demise as a fuel source. We know the caterpillars prefer members of the carrot family, so we weren’t sure if they’d switch to the thyme next door. We still had some supermarket parsley in the fridge, so I laid that down in the garden. But at two weeks old—don’t judge—it was pretty gross and definitely not human-edible.
Saturday morning, er, afternoon—don’t judge—I’d just finished getting ready when I heard Ashley call me in a sad voice to come to the porch.
She pointed to a single caterpillar sitting on a Post-It note at the base of our pansies.
“I didn’t see them in the planter, and so I started looking all over. And I found this one crawling around on the rug. But I don’t know where the others are.”
They had vanished in the night. They didn’t like the gross parsley or the thyme (one of which is more understandable than the other). And maybe they felt vulnerable now that there was nothing to hide under.
I hope they found solace and something nice to eat.
But no time to grieve. Our thoughts quickly turned to our remaining cater-baby. We were desperate to keep him happy. Alas, we had nothing to offer.
We had two options: buy some parsley at the grocery store, or get hold of another plant at the garden center. The latter seemed a wiser choice, since we can’t confirm that the caterpillar will eat anything not attached to the ground.
Having made the decision, I wanted to get some writing done before leaving, but events escalated quickly.
These caterpillars move fast when they want to. And if they are not currently within an inch of a valid food source, they are restless.
Our dude crawled all over the pansies, decided there was nothing of value, and exited the pot, falling over the oval surface and down onto the trellis below. We transported him to one of the hostas, since there’s more room in there. But we soon found him back on the rug again.
I needed to act, and luckily the garden center is so close by, it only took me 15 minutes to get two fresh parsley plants. It’s this moment, nearly running down the alley back to our building, at which I felt the most silly buying herbs to feed to a caterpillar, but at $3.99 each, it’s not as if we’re being eaten out of house and home.
When I got back to the porch with the plants and gardening tools, Ashley was trying to read a book while the caterpillar was crawling across the face of the Post-It note. When he got the end, she would turn it over, and he would crawl across the other side. Eventually he ended up on her finger.
In the meantime I’d swapped out his barren parsley playground for a brand new one twice the size. I coaxed him onto my finger and brought him over. Crawling into the thicket, he seemed instantly happier, and within minutes he was back to chowing down.
Now a thunderstorm is blowing through, the first rain we’ve had since the butterfly’s eggs hatched. The wind is incredible. It’s been windy all day; earlier we lodged a piece of cardboard in the dirt to provide some buffer. I don’t know if that’s going to be enough. I’m watching it go horizontal against the parsley, and that poor guy is in there somewhere, holding on for dear life.
He’s got very strong grips, what with all those legs, and he’s made it this far. And I guess this way he’s got some protection from the rain.
Learning
On Thursday I took a Newberry Library seminar called “The Philosophy of Anxiety.”
If I may horrendously oversimplify, we focused on the comparison between the Stoics and the Buddhists, who said that anxiety is a negative emotion, caused by desire and by attachment to outcomes, and the Existentialists, who said that anxiety is a positive emotion, caused by knowledge of free will.
For the Stoics and Buddhists, the solution to the problem of anxiety is to relinquish all attachment and extinguish all desire. For the Existentialists, anxiety isn’t a problem at all; it’s of use as a fuel to reach fulfillment, and as a grounding and focusing presence.
Both seem useful; I’ve spent some time reading the Stoics, and found solace there, but lately I’m more enamored with the Existentialists, whom I don’t know much about, and I’m excited to explore them further.
In the case of the caterpillars, the Stoics have a lot to offer. They say: don’t be concerned by anything outside your control. Loss is a fact of life. In fact, they want you to spend time every day doing a kind of “negative visualization:” imagining what it will feel like to lose what you hold most dear. Then you’ll be prepared when this inevitably occurs.
It applies even to something as small as a pet caterpillar. Small things aren’t always small; and sometimes they’re practice.
I’m guilty of assuming that I would see all five caterpillars recede into their cocoons and then, by some kind of magic, be reborn into beautiful butterflies. But I was never promised this; it was probably never even particularly likely. If I had imagined them stealing off in the night, and how that would make me feel, it might have cushioned the blow.
Even this one: sure, he appears happy now, but he could leave at any time, too, for any unknown reason. A bird could still pluck him off that parsley stalk. If it makes it to the chrysalis, something might go wrong and he never re-emerges. Or I could miss the re-emergence—and he’ll just be gone.
The Stoics are accused of being unemotional (thus the contemporary meaning of the word). And certainly their advice is not the most practical. But they’re not saying, “withdraw from the world.” They’re just saying, “it’ll go better for you if you don’t cling to illusions about what the world really is.”
Reading
David Marchese — “John Stewart Is Back to Weigh In”
The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. But if we don’t address the anguish of a people, the pain of being a people who built this country through forced labor — people say, ‘‘I’m tired of everything being about race.’’ Well, imagine how [expletive] exhausting it is to live that.
Imagine the anguish of living in a country that profited off the forced labor of your ancestors, and is still having this conversation: ‘‘Hey, do you think we should fly the flag of the people that fought to enslave your ancestors? What do you guys think of that? Good idea or bad idea?’’ And then you hear, ‘‘It’s history.’’ It’s not history! It’s hagiography. If you go down there and read the plaques on the Confederate monuments, they aren’t, ‘‘This [expletive] thought he could enslave people based on the color of their skin.’’ That’s not what the plaque says. The plaque honors them! Enraging doesn’t begin to describe it.
Adam Davie — “21 Essential Films About Black Lives, In Every Major Genre”
This also contains a link to the full database of films, with 1700+ entries (!).
Mood
Titus Andronicus — “A More Perfect Union”
I revisited a few of my old Titus favorites this week, and The Monitor, regarded as their best album, definitely still stands alone. An extended Civil War metaphor (yes) released in 2010, it’s timelier than ever. The first song, “A More Perfect Union,” leads off with a prescient piece from an Abraham Lincoln speech, and then describes frontman Patrick Stickles’ move from New Jersey to Somerville, MA, which will be contrasted with American history throughout the album. Alright that sounds obscenely pretentious, but, just look:
There’ll be no more counting the cars on the Garden State Parkway
Nor waiting for the Fung Wah bus to carry me to who-knows-where
And when I stand tonight, ‘neath the lights of the Fenway
Will I not yell like hell for the glory of the Newark Bears?
Because where I’m going to now, no one can ever hurt me
Where the well of human hatred is shallow and dry
No, I never wanted to change the world, but I’m looking for a new New Jersey
Because tramps like us, baby, we were born to die
And later:
Oh, woe, woe is me, no one knows the trouble I see
When they hang Jeff Davis from a sourapple tree,
I’ll sit beneath the leaves and weep
None of us shall be saved, every man will be a slave
For John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave and
there’s rumbling down in the caves
So if it’s time for choosing sides,
and to show this dirty city how we do the Jersey Slide
And if it deserves a better class of criminal
Then I’ma give it to them tonight
So we’ll rally around the flag, rally around the flag
Rally around the flag, boys, rally once again
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom
Rally around the flag, rally around the flag
Glory, glory, Hallelujah, His truth is marching on
It’s stirring shit.
A More Perfect Union - song by Titus Andronicus | Spotify
Titus Andronicus · Song · 2010
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Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron