Why We Need Umwelt?
An Ecological Storytelling Outtake from The Body Is a Doorway
I often times think that when you write a book, you always end up writing two books. If you are adept at recycling old material or thinking, weaving it into the next project, not all goes to waste. That being said, so much writing I love didn’t end up fitting within the narrative arc of my upcoming memoir The Body Is a Doorway. I was telling a story and stories need musculature and movement. They need to go somewhere. The flab had to be cut. But now I am sifting through older writing, picking out paragraphs, ideas, seeds that were deposited but never sprouted. I’m in the composting stage I know comes before I start to make something new. I’m sharing one of the early pieces I wrote in summer 2021 when I first started to think about writing this book.
Why We Need Umwelt: Ecological Storytelling
What is it like to be a bee? It is certainly not like being a tiny human with wings, a sting, and an appetite for nectar. It is something very different indeed. For every being comes a unique set of sensory apparatuses that filter and interpret the world. Imagine that you had five eyes. Feel those extra eyes on your head. Eyes covered in fine hair, tuned to subtle shifts in polarized light. Even on an overcast day a bee sees and navigates by streaming ladders of sunlight invisible to a human eye. Not only does light play a larger role in a bee’s world, so does color. Bees perceive ultraviolet light and are believed to most sensitive to and attracted towards purple, violets, and blues. A world where lilacs and forget-me-nots and irises are more than just beautiful. They are the dominant tone. The nourishing magnet. A color that invites the tongue. But even that imposes a simplistic human sense experience. Bees have complex “mouths” that fold up when out of use, composed of a “glossa” surrounded by “labial paps” keyed for taste and a proboscis that can curve into a straw to suck nectar. Tasting, then, is a series of complex dance moves: an “unfurling” of the mouth apparatus, and then curling the proboscis so that it forms a straw. Taste happens on the sides of the mouth rather than on a tongue. Taste happens when the proboscis enters into the flower. Taste is a penetrative act. If this wasn’t intense and weird enough, factor in that bees have a different experience of the “instant”, sensitized to movement occurring every 1/3000th of a second as opposed to the human experience of 1/50th of second. A field barely ruffled by wind for a human is agitated and vibrating for a bee. The world shivers and crinkles and gestures. Another insect’s wings flicker with silver-blue light against the purple grasses.
This description is a crude attempt to demonstrate what biologist Jakob von Uexküll called Umwelt, or the particular perceived world of an organism.