I haven’t published much lately, but have maintained my writing practice over the past several years. I’ve been journaling, but sometimes my entries devolve into meditations, some of which I think are worthy of sharing. I hope to post more of these meditations over time, and the first one I’ve chosen with the holiday season in mind.
October 20, 2018
Arielle’s parents’ bathroom has a strand of twine crossing from wall to wall, supporting two dozen bright green chrysalis. They were the green of dreams of springtime fields when droughts and dust were a twinkle in the eye of the creator. A kinetic green, each with similar and alien markings, dots of polished gold. There was a fingernail shaped line of these golden dots along the top of each chrysalis. There were also two dots towards the bottom of each, right where the eyes might be. And the chrysalis itself bore the veins and markings, a kind of hieroglyphic representation, of where the wings would be and where the head would be. But inside there was no butterfly.
There was also no caterpillar any longer, because it had sloughed off all of its butterfly identity. Arielle had shown me a video of this process. The caterpillars, themselves beautifully ringed in yellow, white, and black, would choose a moment, a warm instant, and decide that it was time to pupate. They would climb to an elevated space, affix their proboscis to the roof with strands of filament, and then hang for some time before the first change. The caterpillar hung from its tail in a hook form and the first part to split was the back of its head. The body of the creature writhed, and the brilliant green shown from out of the split in the flesh. The body would whip and like that the head was split open revealing the dreamlike verdant underneath.
And soon the laceration would grow, and more of the green appear, and the black and yellow flesh shed from the head up, so that, by the end of the process, the green and writhing pod had freed itself from the container of flesh, which hung desiccated and weightless from the same filament that now held the chrysalis aloft. And then, with another few wriggles, the skin, head and all, dropped free and fell to the bottom of the tank. And in time, the green and gold begins to fade, the substance of the chrysalis turns transparent as rice paper, and the wings and the thorax become visible through their container. And then the monarch frees itself, an orb of liquid in its thorax which stretches and flexes and pumps life into the beautiful, delicate wings.
In medieval times, the butterfly was seen as a symbol of the resurrection. The caterpillar was the earthbound and begrimed creature. But, in time, its earthly coil was shed, sloughed off and discarded and left behind. And then, from the primordial essence comes the butterfly, a beauty so stunning, so contrary to the worm from which it was formed, that it could seem divine. The wings expand, stiffen, retract, and the animal takes flight. And we, too, strive to become this after abandoning our own tenement of clay. And in this sense, the butterfly is a symbol for our own transcendence, for the way which a body is left but a soul takes flight. The terrestrial is abandoned for the heavenly.
But when the butterfly is the symbol for transcendence, what becomes of identity? Does one’s personhood transcend as well? Does the Butterfly retain anything of the caterpillar? I was reminded of an episode of a radio show, Radiolab, I’d once heard, that discussed the symbology of this metamorphosis. In that episode, “Black Box” (first aired January 16, 2014), their producer, Molly Webster, met with a lepidopterist, in whose lab were thousands of living butterflies of all varieties. The scientist takes a pupa from the ceiling, lays it onto the examination board, and slices open the flesh of the chrysalis. There is nothing of the caterpillar inside. Nor is there any indication that a butterfly might emerge. All that exists is the intermediate plasm of existence, the thing that separates the unformed from the formed.
On one hand, the symbolic ideal is to shed all earthly blight, to rid oneself of the terrible stain of having inhabited a body that ages and desires and swells and cracks. And in regard to the caterpillar and butterfly, there is an intermediary stage, the chrysalid, during which all signs of caterpillar have been erased. If one were to open up the chrysalid, only a paste would emerge. Nothing is left of the original creature.
Carolyn Walker Bynum, in the chapter of her book, Metamorphosis and identity, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” writes:
“In The Resurrection of The Body in Western Christianity, I connected the extreme literalism and materialism of twelfth-century notions of resurrection at the end of time with a fear of metempsvchosis, of loss of self through loss of body, or – to put it another way – with a pervasive conviction, underlying many genres and divergent discourses of the period, that the human person is a psychosomatic unit whose survival necessitates bodily continuity…”
In the twelfth century, theologians and philosophers wondered about the complications of a bodily continuity as it regarded issues of resurrection. Would a baby child be resurrected in the most perfect moment of a hypothetical life? Because what would be the benefit of resurrecting a baby incapable of rational thought or satisfying human agency? On the other hand, if one lived into senility, in what form would that person return? Would there be an ideal-self separate from the body? In this sense, the body that one inhabits is relevant – it is the vessel through which a resurrection will be engendered.
Bynum goes on:
“Orthodox attacks on heretics for metemsychosis – that is, body-hopping, body-exchange, or body-erasure – came, I argued, at the height of Western understanding of resurrection as materialist and literal. Scholastic and monastic discussions of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw an embodied self as locus of identity and connected this identity with triumph over change, over physical process and decay. Bodily resurrection was thus both supernatural and natural. It is natural for the human person to have a body, and survival of soul alone is hence an aberration that cannot be perpetual; but divine power is necessary, for in the natural order biological entities give birth only to like, but numerically separate, individuals (additional instances of the species).”
Because the body is the locus of identity, resurrection presented complications to twelfth and thirteenth century scholars. The soul could not exist independently of the vessel and the vessel at death and after succumbs to putrefaction. Thus, the decay inflicted on the inanimate body indicate the earthly deteriorations, the aging and changing, the impermanence that Christian tradition has had such a pathological horror of. The body cannot be reincarnated in its deathly form.
And yet, without the original body, with the idealized and angelic transformation that the butterfly represents, the body is left behind and a new form is taken. As Bynum notes, the fear of metempsychosis is connected with “a pervasive conviction… that the human person is a psychosomatic unit whose survival necessitates bodily continuity.” Furthermore, “monastic discussions of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw an embodied self as locus of identity…” Hence, the symbol of the butterfly becomes problematic when one takes into consideration the belief that identity will be wholly lost if the body is not retained. If the soul is to animate a new form, the original identity will be lost with the original form.
“Roger Bacon, using conventional arguments that entities give birth only to like but separate instances, not to the same instance, maintains that bodily resurrection (return of the same instance) is possible because God reduces body to prime or first matter and induces the same form in it again.” In this sense, even the body is re-formable from Materia Prima, the material from which all the material is formed. Or, more exactly, material that formed the perfect models for all degraded forms of existence. Hence, the soul would have to inhabit that same body – body is still requisite for continuity of identity – but, as formed from first matter, the body is regenerated in its ideal form, perhaps a form it had never taken before – as in the case of the deceased baby who is reincarnated as a grown human.
So though the butterfly is an inspiring metaphor for the resurrection in our idealized forms, the question persists: what of the original caterpillar is preserved in the butterfly. The two forms are so distinct as to seem incomparable. The second entirely unique, so that the first has been subsumed. This erasure of the body could be seen as an existential threat within an ethos that deified continuity and abhorred degeneration.
In his essay, “How Did Insect Metamorphosis Evolve?” Ferris Jabr discusses early enlightenment understandings of the caterpillar metamorphosis:
“1651 English physician William Harvey published a book in which he proposed that caterpillars and other insect larvas were free-living embryos that abandoned nutrient-poor “imperfect eggs” before they matured. Harvey further argued that the cocoon or chrysalis a caterpillar entered during its pupal stage was a second egg in which the prematurely hatched embryo was born again. He entertained the idea that a caterpillar was one creature and a butterfly was an entirely different beast.”
The valuation of these forms of existence persisted in the seventeenth century, in the musings of scientists whose enlightenment thinking was moving them further and further from recourse to divinity, establishing the ideology of experimentation, observation, proof, and analysis. But the ideological inception of these valuations remained rooted in Christian tradition. The ground-dwelling insect was born of imperfection. The cocoon was a second egg, and the embryo was born again, an elevated animal, one of an entirely different species. What was flawed and terrestrial and undeveloped in the first lifeform became an “entirely different beast” in its second life.
In the chapter of Bynum’s book titled, “Shape and story”, Bynum offers varying definitions of identity:
“Finally, identity can mean spatiotemporal continuity. In this sense, identity refers to the fact that I am the same person I was a moment ago. This third understanding of identity carries the connotation of oneness or integrity… it offers the deepest and rawest threat to our grounding as a self. For considering identity in this sense raises doubts about whether anything perdures – my personality, my cat, my briefcase if I take my eye off it for even a moment. If I have amnesia, does my body guarantee that I am “me” over time? What if it then undergoes a sex-change operation and complete cosmetic surgery? Is there any sense in saying that such an altered entity is “the same individual,” whereas a donor mouse and its clone are two separate individuals?”
The fear is that the butterfly, in its absolute difference from the thing out of which it was formed, will retain nothing of the caterpillar. In the terms of a symbology, the parallel would mean that the self would be completely subsumed in the act of resurrection. But selfhood, personal identity and individuality, had become so much of what we yearned to retain in western traditions. To lose the self in resurrection would not be resurrection at all. The consciousness was embodied in the form and without the form, the self would vanish. In crude terms, who would care if the butterfly left the chrysalis as the most beautiful and angelic form imaginable, it isn’t a desirable inevitability if the caterpillar is not there to enjoy her new existence. What would the promise of resurrection be if the person was lost?
Molly Webster, producer of Radiolab, touches on this exact dilemma. So, she asks, what is maintained from one form to the next? In that podcast, she talks to Marth Weiss, a professor of environmental studies at Georgetown University. Weiss had been able to condition the caterpillars to detest a specific odor by way of negative reinforcement (shocking them). The caterpillars were then allowed to pupate, and Weiss discovered that the moth that emerged would also be adverse to the odor. “My feeling is, Wow. I think it’s amazing that a caterpillar can have an experience, go into its chrysalis, five weeks pass, emerge as a seemingly different organism, and that it still can recall experiences that happened to it when it was a caterpillar.” What this ostensibly meant is that a speck of the brain is preserved. The butterfly retained a spark of the identity the caterpillar passed along, via the intermediary substance of the pupal stage, via some sort of bodily continuity.
When I reconsidered the video that Arielle had shown me, I remembered the markings that remained around the chrysalis once the caterpillar skin had fallen free. I could make out the markings of the caterpillar from which it was it was molded – visible in the subtly yellow rings, the crescent of golden dots. And looking at the chrysalises that hung in Arielle’s bathroom, I could see, etched in the green flesh, features of the butterfly to come, outlines of wings and thorax, the casing dotted with gold like the nodes of a blueprint.
In regards to the English physician William Harvey, Ferris Jabr writes:
“Some of Harvey’s ideas were prescient, but he mostly misinterpreted what he observed. In 1669 Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam rejected Harvey’s notion of the pupa as an egg and the butterfly as a different animal than the caterpillar. Swammerdam dissected all kinds of insects under a microscope, confirming that the larva, pupa and adult insect were phases in the development of a single individual, not distinct creatures. He showed that one could find immature moth and butterfly body parts inside a larva, even before it spun a cocoon or formed a chrysalis. In some demonstrations, for example, Swammerdam peeled the skin off silkworms—the larval stage of the domesticated silk moth (Bombyx mori)—to reveal the rudimentary wings within.”
The butterfly was always already inside the caterpillar. The architecture had been forming in there all along. Swammerdam had been able to open up the body of the caterpillar, part the flesh, and show that, along the inside walls of the creatures, “one could find immature moth and butterfly body parts inside a larva, even before it spun a cocoon or formed a chrysalis.”
Which mean that the caterpillar was already born with the form its resurrected self as a physical part of its own body. The identity of the creature’s reemergence was formed as a hidden part of its physical structure. In this case, the identity of the caterpillar is not lost. Rather, the identity of the soul in ascendance is established before the animal has ever entered the pupal stage. So that the identity of the soul is developing in the body before the body knows or perhaps despite the body not knowing that it is already incubating the transcendental part of its self. The identity is something that forms around the soul, and perhaps the soul is a means of conveyance for that identity. Regardless, the body is already generating the structure for ascendance, the means of conveyance away from the gross physical world. As Molly Webster asks, “What of my future self is in me now?”
Symbolically, the caterpillar predetermines the structure of its ascendance. But, as Matthew Cobb, professor of zoology, acknowledges in Radiolab, the biological truth of the organism reveals that the process is not at all about death and resurrection. Rather, it is about the continuity of life. That, in itself, when considering notions of afterlife, or of the ascendance of the soul, reintroduces anxieties about identity, because even if the soul retains the identity, it is also not being reborn, but is existing continuously as variations of the earthly form.
The lifespan of the caterpillar is also, perhaps, not a fitting a metaphor for the earthly lifecycle of humanity. We rarely experience the moment of incubation and rebirth. We rarely undertake the departure as one person only to return as another, imbued with the wisdom and insight of one who had “grown wings” so to speak. This metaphor is much more evocative of a growth moment, a sort of sea change, catalyzed by specific events or experiences.
Furthermore, the continuity that we see in the butterfly, the preconceived form determining the post-development, post-transformation form, has its complications for the questions of identity. For, though we find in the body the locus for identity, we also refuse to consider that identity may be out of our control. The sense of selfhood is something shaped and determined, something manipulable and representable – something that we consciously embrace and represent (typically through consumerist choices).
In the contemporary, technological world, this can be seen in the curation of self-hood via electronic forms and social media platforms. A person is no longer an identity limited to the confines of a body, but is now a compendium of the various artifacts that are shared universally, the combination of which is unique to that person alone. The formation of identity, the development of the form that we will inevitably become, is not something that remains a physical and anatomical predetermination, but is a work in progress, as self-curative project that is always a matter of self-selection.
I personally would have feared the notion of a biological determination of the soul, and continue to fear such things. This is not because I want to believe that I am in control of my own identity. Rather, I glory in the mystery that I do not know how I have become. Biological determinism is defeatist and leaves little room for change and growth. If my butterfly precedes me, then what is the point of personal growth when my ascendance has already been written? The same can be said of genetic determinism. If the soul that animates me is a matter of the genes that I’ve inherited, then what of every decision I’ve ever made? Was there any agency at all? What is the purpose of deciding? What is the purpose of struggle and pursuit? Conversely, why try to change and grow and become better as a human among humanity? Because that too would be lost in a deterministic understanding of human identity.
Nevertheless, there is relief in considering that the person I am has some physiological or biological or spiritual foundation that precedes the influence of all cultural signifiers. Arielle and I had been discussing, before ever considering the relevance of butterflies or identity, the Marxian notion of reification, as was later developed by Herbert Marcuse. In the Marxian conception of the term, reification represented the moment when the human becomes something written, something without agency. Counter-intuitively, objects had become the active, agential, generators of meaning. The object is the performer of identity. The consumer, thus unwritten, accepts the identity bestowed by the ownership of things.
Marcuse went further to discuss the ways in which human desires were not actually a matter of personal tastes, but were a product of a market system that peddled in identity. We mistakenly believe that identity is a factual and measurable substance, as determined by the cultural signifiers that one accumulates. The signifiers themselves – the music or art one likes, the political beliefs one has, down to the secret desires one experiences – are all collected from a vast trove of cultural ephemera, and that ephemera is the million billion dust motes of a capitalist system in which identity has become commoditized. If there is a core and unalterable potential self that precedes all of acculturation, then perhaps there is hope that the substance of human identity can be re-centered in physical and experiential activity, rather than hypostatization and consumption.
Bynum, C. W. (2005). Metamorphosis and identity. Zone.
Jabr, Ferris, “How Did Insect Metamorphosis Evolve?” Scientific American, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc., Aug 10, 2012. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insect-metamorphosis-evolution/
WNYC Studios, RadioLab, “Black Box”, First Aired Jan 17, 2014. https://radiolab.org/podcast/black-box
Marcuse, H. (1987). Eros and civilization. Routledge.
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