NOURISHMENT - A SCRIPT
I saw the eggs being laid. 3.30, 28th June.
A hot blur of colour, a concentrated stillness then gone. And I remembered I had seen this before, from this spot, on this very same tree years ago, without realising then what it was. This time I was prepared.
In trying to make sense of my motivations for this enquiry I was drawn this oracle from the Book of Changes:
“Nourishment. See the jaws.
Your own quest for something real to fill your mouth.
If you accept this as nourishment, who will you become?”
A heat wave struck. The elm crisped in its pot. I felt a dilemma. Should I transfer the caterpillars to a suitable host, or let nature take its course? The truth is, I didn’t want to let them go. I wanted to observe the moments of transformation. I involved myself. I took them on holiday with me to the West country in a cool bag.
How does a study of Lepidoptera, the scale-winged insects, butterflies and moths, inform a creative practice rooted in fashion and textiles? Designers have often seen nature as a resource – lifting patterns and colour stories, textures and forms in the name of ‘celebration’, but in a time when human action has impacted the earth to a measurable geological degree – the Anthropocene epoch, examining the very construct of ‘nature’ seems urgent and necessary. What or who am I making for?
The main food plant of the Comma butterfly is the nettle. They used to be abundant also on hops, when hops themselves were abundant. I fed them fat on Cornish Elm, one gorging itself twice the size of the others.
Timothy Morton says: “Ecological anything is scaled to something bigger than individual guilt. Call it what it is – a hyperobject so massive, so fragile that it is invisible. Climate change, global warming. Call it extinction – we are in the middle of it.”
Scarcity and abundance
Lynda Grosse says “Economies don’t fail, they end because they succeed in fulfilling a scarcity.” Futurist Paul Saffo posits that, after the Industrial Economy based on a scarcity of ‘things’; the consumer economy on a scarcity of ‘desire’. we are now in the Creative Economy and the new scarcity is ‘meaning’.
Some moth species have no mouth parts in the adult stage, storing all the nourishment they need within their body for their short life span on the wing.
Ursula le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory... of Fiction – or Evolution:
“A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
Many theorizers feel that ... the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.”
Before the weapon, the vessel.
The hop plant, Humulus Lupus or Willow Wolf is in the hemp or cannabis family. It is said that female hop pickers of menopausal age in Germany were known to be influenced by the phytoestrogens in the flowers of the hops. Some say this is also the cause of enlarged breast tissue in beer drinking men.
The convulsions are so like death-throws and birth pangs at the same time.
What will evolve in our plastic world? When we have combined, broken down and recombined the elements to re-Frankenstein our environment over again.
The second brood is darker than the first
I missed the key moments of transformation, all three.
Between breakfast and leaving for the beach, or going out to post a letter, the change from grub to chrysalis was complete. The first fat caterpillar hung himself from his leaf stalk three weeks after hatching. The whole journey took 46 days.
END