Haunted by Dragonflies

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Green Emerald Patrolling the Rockhole at Rungutjirpa

A deep cleft splitting the mountains asunder, Rungutjirpa has been known for 40,000 years or so to the Arrernte People of central Australia as a site of creation.  A Goanna Dreaming is storied here, their tussling long ago putting things today as they are.  For the last 200 years or so Whitefellas have know the place as Simpson's Gap, in honor of the same geographer, A. A. Simpson, whose name also serves to designate a nearby desert and more distant cape.  Whether the life of a Whitefella geographer constitutes a dreaming serious enough to merit being mentioned in these environs is not an unimportant question. Personally, I am not so confident of a positive outcome.  And so even if doing so makes me more than a bit uncomfortable, calling on the tongue of the very people whom the people of my tongue have so persistently displaced, I end up referring to this site in its Arrendan rather than English instantiation.

Following anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose's example, I come first to Rungutjirpa whenever I reenter the country of the red center.  Showing up here is not something to be taken lightly.  In late afternoon the green waters lapping at the rocky foot of the cleft catch bits of sun and bushels of shadow.   After clambering around a boulder or two, I settle down on a spot along a bit of sandy shore overhung by stone and stare up into the airy heights and then down into liquid depths.  Their muddy bottom is likely only a few meters below my folded knees, but what the waters suggest are abysses as deep as creation itself.  The immensity of the world above is effortlessly gathered onto the pond's surface, an image shuddering with the passing of every breath of air. We are, the waters whisper, agile enough to encompass all that is illumined.  And, they could just as well add, all that is not illumined.

Wandering Percher Resting
on the Path to Rungutjirpa

The sun flashes on the wings of a green dragonfly, a single Emerald Tau (Hemicordulia tau), capering and gliding in great figure eights over the length of the pool.  Below its path more diminutive wandering perchers (Diplacodes bipunctata) hover near the water's surface into which they are regularly dipping their red, red abdomens, as thin as colored pencil leads, as they lay their eggs.  Just above these yet others are coupling in flight, male with female. The wandering perchers are less standoffish, coming near from time to time to perch, just as their name promises, abdomen flexed upward on stone within an arm's reach.  The Emerald Tau, on the other hand, circuits ceaselessly never alighting anywhere.   Scooping up mosquitos and gnats on the go with its opened jaws, the dragonfly replenishes its energy and continues to claim its spot under the sun.  Other males will be driven away.  At one point he even breaks off from his path and rushes toward me, hovering at eye level four or five feet away for a few moments. I can't help but think he is making clear that I am in his sights.

The globular eyes of dragonflies are famously immense compound organs, honeycombed with 30,000  or so "ommatidea," each of which in turn is shaped in a hexagon composed of a lens fixed over a small patch of light-sensitive cells.  But even if we know precisely the anatomy involved,  what the dragonfly actually sees is not so certain.  Some theorize its field of vision is a vast mosaic cobbling together individual bits of light, others that the outlines of things are not so distinct even as any movement nearby is magnified thirty-thousandfold, others that the dragonfly's visual field circles a full 360 degrees around its body, effectively immersing it in a globe of illumination.  Its tail would be as available to it as its forelimbs.  Possessing no fewer than eleven and as many as thirty chromatic opsins (proteins with distinct sensitivities to color in the diverse rods of its many retinas), it is rumored the dragonfly lives in a far more colorful, even ultra-chromatic universe. I wonder then what the Emerald Tau makes of the redness of the red earth here, already intense to my mammalian eyes with only three opsins to call upon, not to mention the overwhelmingly blue sky stretching overhead.  What boiling bubbles of color might my own mammalian flesh be for these non-mammalian eyes?

Green Emerald over the Waters

 "When we appeared in their eyes/ we were strangers":  In these lines from his poem "After the Dragonflies" (Merwin, 2016), W. S. Merwin wonders not only of how foreign we might seem to this living kind but also of how enigmatic and perplexing we become to ourselves when we muse upon our own all-too-human image making itself at home in a dragonfly's perceptions.  At the core of the exchange of light between one species and another, the eyes work magic, bringing the flesh of another living kind, or at the very least its facsimile, into one's most intimate depths.  The Bible might have well proclaimed that man has been made in the tselem, the image or imprint, of the Most High but should have added that immediately this image radiates outward into the eyes of arthropods and amphibians, of mammals and birds.  And when we turn to the world surrounding us and see ourselves there being seen by all these others, might this not be just as disconcerting and unsettling, as our seeing ourselves in the gaze of the Creator?   "Where art thou?", the dragonfly is asking.  Easier to imagine oneself in the mind of God than in that of an arthropod.  But the latter meditation offers its own peculiar invitation into spiritual insight, into humility before and complicity with others that undoes the assumption that one's loyalties can be confined to one's own hominoid skin.

Golden Winged Skimmer in my Garden in Salisbury, MD

These days, dragonflies are doing well at Rungutjirpa but not so well in one's own backyard.   W. S. Merwin's poem imagines a world in which dragonflies, once "as common as sunlight," have disappeared.  And already to a degree they have, given the persistent applications in urban areas across the planet of a diverse array of insecticides targeting mosquitoes.  A governmental study recently concludes, "Virtually every pesticide currently used to manage mosquito populations has the potential to adversely impact nontarget species" (USFWS, 14).  The adverse effects, for example of mathoprene, has been observed in fourteen aquatic taxa including odonata, the dragonflies and damselflies (Breaud et al.).  I remember, as Merwin does, a time in my childhood when dragonflies aplenty helicoptered about the yard, hooked to one another in dazzles of profligate and promiscuous mating. Not so in my garden today despite its proximity to an entire landscape of marshes and swamps comprising the eastern shore of Maryland.  The dragonfly population just outside my door regularly crashes throughout the summer  One can only theorize as to why.  Even more troubling is a recent German study which hints that the biomass of insects is plummeting across the face of the earth as complex ecosystems are transformed into huge swaths of monoculture regularly seasoned with pesticides.  A trap set up in the Orbroicher Bruch Nature Reserve that yielded 3.5 pounds of diverse species of insects in 1989 only yielded 10.6 ounces in 2014 (Schwaegerl, 2016).  Something is afoot.

Images of dragonflies abound on the internet.  We humans love to observe this particular creature in all its intimate details, to hold its taxonomical characteristics fixedly and precisely in our imagination.  This often results in what might be termed the money shot, one in which every filament and hair, every anatomical detail, is rendered with precision.  The results are truly spectacular if not just a bit pornographic.  One wonders whether a picture of a human being similarly rendered might be similarly sought out and for what reasons.  Imagine a close up focusing on every hair and pore, not to mention the nearly microscopic mites inevitably finding their way into such environs, speckling the face of a fashion model.  So much for Descartes' notion of a clear and distinct idea.

Colonial seizure of lands often involved the renaming and reimagining of things in a manner that was not necessarily intent on who was involved. The land might speak, but we Whitefellas weren't necessarily interested in listening.  Goannas might dream, but Geographers were for the most part fixed on describing, delimiting, and classifying topographical features.  And of making maps so one could know where to find them again.  The colonial project in a nutshell: uncover, designate and store for future use.  The images of dragonflies mentioned above made with a view to fixing the precise details of their taxonomy fit well into this attitude.  In lieu of these the images offered on this blog hopefully move toward the iconic if not the Icon.  The living kinds involved have not been removed from their habitat and held firmly in place between one's fingers or by means of some other implement in order to get the money shot.  Instead, the photographs here verge on the oneiric, as the gesture of a dragonfly's flight over the waters of Rungutjirpa actively threads a line between darkness and light.  One is hopefully summoned into a world revealed through the powers of a fellow creature.  Are we willing to live in the company of dragonflies, to invite them into our most secret recesses?  I pray that we are.

Works Cited

Breaud, T. P.,  J. E. Farlow, C. D. Steelman, and P.E. Schilling. 1977, "Effects of the insect growth regulator methoprene on natural populations of aquatic organisms in Louisiana intermediate marsh habitats  Mosquitoe News 37: 704-712.

Merwin, W. S.  "After the Dragonflies,"  Matthew Zapruder, ed.  New York Times Magazine.  July 22, 2016.  URL: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/24/magazine/ws-merwin-after-the-dragonflies.html?_r=0.  Accessed, December 15, 2016.

Schwaegerl, Christian. "What's Causing the Sharp Decline in Insects, and Why it Matters."  Yale Environment 360.  July 16, 2016.  URL: http://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters.  Accessed, December 15, 2016.

USFWS. "Environmental Effects of Mosquito Control: Appendix K."  Edwards, 2004. URL: https://www.fws.gov/cno/refuges/DonEdwards/CCP-PDFs/Appendix-K4_EffectsofMosquitoControl.pdf.  Accessed, December 15, 2016. No longer accessible on USFWS Website.