(Photo from Orthinographies by Xavi Bou )
I’d wanted to post another in my fantasy and fiction writing series first thing this month, when I received a health update that requires immediate attention. But I wanted to offer those who are supporting me a word of gratitude and an outtake from my upcoming book on disability and ecology The Body is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human.
Swarm is a Song
A murmur, almost a feeling, the dense mineral thump of clouds rubbing against the mountain tops. You hear the song in your belly, for that is where your tympanal organ is stowed. The vibration spreads to your hindlegs. For some months you have felt shy and sensitive, leaping from leaf to leaf, hiding when you see the emerald glitter of a fellow grasshopper. But something is happening. A thin scent, pink geranium, maddening, has tickled the taste receptors of your antennae. Once inhaled, it inflates you with a desire to move. You rub one hindleg against the crisp edge of your wing, small pegs bristling into a music called “stridulation”. You aren’t just a singer or a musician. Your whole body is an instrument. But where is the orchestra? A bump on your back. A thump. Another grasshopper. Another bump. One grasshopper’s hum collides and combines with your pulse. You fall into groove. All it takes is three or so of these collisions to activate a complete transformation in both your behavior and your body. It is ecstatic, kinetic. Your shyness melts as your skin turns from green to black and yellow. Your curiosity grows along with your physicality. Suddenly you are bulky. Muscular. Surrounded by musical friends. You have made the mysterious transition from grasshopper to locust. As a coordinated swarm you will first march across plains and deserts and fields, consuming any crops or plants you encounter, and then, finally, you will take flight: a gaseous, glistering song, blocking out the light of the sun.
This mind-blowing metamorphosis is characterized as the movement from a “solitarious” phase into “gregariousness” of grasshoppers in the Acrididae family. Individual grasshoppers, happy to live their lives alone, suddenly start to “bump” into other crickets. Something about these interactions triggers the formation of a chaotic, yet coordinated group called a swarm. This group activity actually transforms their very bodies, turning the grasshoppers into larger, stranger creatures called locusts. Such a dramatic phenotypic plasticity is almost completely unprecedented in the rest of biology.
“The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands” reads Proverb 30:27, reflecting the locust’s ability to defy human understanding and measurement. They have no king, no identifiable hierarchy, and yet they are able to bring mankind to its knees.