Insect Tutelage

for Naoki Matsumoto



My editor is a bit old-fashioned, and still likes to come over to my house to pick up manuscripts. Except that my printer is broken right now, so what ends up happening is that he shows up and inserts his portable USB drive into my computer and I copy the files over and that way there is still some remnant of that manual handing-over of the manuscript, which makes him happy. None of this matters all that much; neither does the fact that every time he comes over I discover something new about him. We’ve known each other for many years now, so that amounts to a lot of information. This last visit I got a little careless, however, and left my ant out while I went to the bathroom. When I came out, much to my surprise, I found that he had edited my ant. Without even asking. Now on one hand I am of course quite shocked and outraged by this gesture, but then on the other hand I think that maybe the ant looks cute this way, with shorter front legs and two mandibles taken out, but I will have to wait until my editor goes home so that I can talk candidly with the ant and figure out what is truly the best for all of us involved.

from Eugene

We have our light years, they have their. Their longest unit of time is nothing else but the lifespan of one of their own. Different colonies may use different varieties of apple, but. The time it takes for a single ant to eat an entire. Red. An entire. Fruit. An entire. Apple. The fact of the matter is, that working alone makes the task excruciating. ly. Slough. Slow. Working alone, a single ant is unable to eat the entire. Thus a new replacement ant must. The new ant must take over for the old ant at exactly the right. Which means that a number of ant eggs are readied and placed nearby so that when death arrives for the first ant, the ant that is the most freshest-born can immediately take over the job of the former. In this way, a series of single ants are required in order to consume an entire. And so it goes that an apple speed is the sum of a number of ant-lifetimes, the total amount of time required for the consumption of an entire apple by one hypothetical, long-living ant, and so then the question might go, how many apple speeds does it take to dig this hole, from right here under my feet, straight through the underground and popping back up again over there where you –

from Nobu

Some ants aspire to greatness, some for R&R, others for eternal sweetness. The hip contemporary ants of today, however, aspire to artistic immortality. Japanese ants with such aspirations have been taught since youth that the best way to make their dreams come true would be to find a way to get depicted in the artwork of some young student at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

This is not a new idea, however, and word is getting around that these days it is just too competitive to try to hook up with an artist by loitering on the college campus. For the last few years, ants have been quietly raiding the entrance exams for the school, hoping to be featured in somebody or other’s entrance exam drawing – getting them early, so they say.

But this whole idea of getting them early is a tough call. These days there are so many young Japanese kids clamoring to get into art school that the campus itself is unable to accommodate all these hopeful applicants. Now they’ve taken to using the Kokugikan – best known as the place we go to watch our Sumo wrestling – as the site of the first round examinations for entrance into the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. And the ants have made their way there as well.

On the day of the exam, official administrators announce the topic, the artists set to work demonstrating their artistic chops, and the ants (currently there are only a few who have caught on to the Kokugikan idea) parade around that ring of rope, strutting their stuff, hoping to catch somebody’s eye, to make it, make it in, get drawn, painted, regarded with admiration from all the world over.

Two comments from the narrator:
1) There is always one, at least one ant, who finds in this experience a new direction for life, such as Sumo immortality.
2) As for my own ant, I found it when I was messing around in the backyard as a little kid. That was several decades ago, and oh weren’t those the days...

I wake up this morning and my hands are no smaller or larger than they were last night, but it happens to be that I can only pick up one thing at a time, ever. If I reach for a second object I get a swift kick in the ass. From where, I haven’t the slightest idea. I was doing just fine at first – glasses, shirt, mug, remote control – but this was before I figured out the new system. Once I knew it I couldn’t resist, and kept looking for the loopholes – a strand of hair, the other arm, part of a blanket. I tried to get used to, and enjoy, the kick in the ass, but I couldn’t figure out how to wire it towards the pleasure side of my brain, or how to convince myself that this lack of control was a good thing, but perhaps this will come with time. I went outside in the hopes that it would inspire me, ran my hands through bushes, picked things up while running, lifted small children with my arms but not my hands. I tried to outrun the kick. Played in the McDonalds jungle gym full of balls in primary colors. Looked in through the window of a kickboxing gym. The inevitable end to my dilemma came, of course, when I happened across a colony of ants. I picked one up and let go, as it scurried across my palm. I acquired another, simply by extending my finger to the ground. Another ant crawled aboard, and then another, then another, until I could no longer tell the difference between a kick and an ant.

Caused by a very low light upon a very small ant, its elongated legs move not slower, just taller, with a weightiness akin to that loaded gun over there on that table. Beside the ant is the trigger, but only in shadow. In shadow the ant meets its lover, angles in for a kiss, passes right through her, unless, perhaps, is devouring her instead.

from C-Salt


Anywhere inside of a human being is safe, anywhere outside is not.
Some ants refuse to play, which leaves them, unfortunately, in a permanently unsafe state. The more evolved an ant, the more attuned it becomes to the emotional and social weather patterns of humans, preying on that moment of rudeness and the consequent open jaw on the recipient’s part, through which it may enter and be safe, safe as ever.

And yet how rude or polite was that, in the larger context of ant-human relations?
What is that wedged between my teeth?

Or, evolution of the floor. That time and place where floor meant not linoleum, carpet, hardwood, or even dirt, but ants. A bad floor has roughly a 40% mortality rate, most likely due to the additional bad luck of high heels, entertainment centers, and cats. A good floor would be extremely well-organized: the uniformity and tightness of the grid can, at best, create an ant surface tension of 65 Dyne/cm2. All of which is contingent upon the floor having recruited sufficient numbers of ants to begin with. That said, the value of an ant floor depreciates in a sharp slope along the axes of time and wear, while a brand new one can be purchased only on the black market, and only by people who have been carefully screened for ant-corpse allergen sensitivity.

Things have evolved as far as this. Once every summer in a nondescript beach town in Southern California, a contest is held. On a smooth, very smooth surface, a puddle, very large puddle is formed. Local ants are invited to the puddle, all with the understanding that the ant who breaks the surface tension, and thus the puddle, shall be the winner of a brand new Chrysler Crossfire Limited. The task looks easy enough that it lures a few ants to jump on first, not realizing the inadequacy of their body mass until it is too late. More ants then pile on quickly, so that the judges are forced to keep a sharp lookout in order to correctly identify the ant that breaks the water surface. When the mass of ants atop the puddle starts approaching critical mass, the ants grow restless and the whole puddle quivers.

It turns out that the puddle attracts quite a bit of attention, and ants, whole colonies of ambitious ants and poor ants and lonely ants with nothing to do, seeking a little friendly jostling, hopeful ants and soon even the random passerby ants with no ambition whatsoever have joined in on the action, having been lured in by all the ongoing excitement. It is just this kind of unambitious ant who finally ends, by winning, this mad contest of jostling ant matter, and is presented with the car. At which point the ants are now returned to their senses, reminded that this game was a human invention after all, the car a human-scale car.

The winning ant is now faced with the Herculean task of gathering enough fellow ants to band together and form a massive huddle, a complex collective large enough with which to operate the car. A pair of ants nearby loiter around the butt of a not-quite extinguished cigarette, taking turns inhaling, and exhaling statements about how overrated winning is.

Two ants harbor an incredibly strong belief in the strength of their love for each other. With much confidence, they decide to embark upon a long-distance relationship, the distance long not in the normal ant-scale, but long enough such that it might qualify as a long-distance relationship even for humans. Every night, each ant goes to bed with the smug and satisfying knowledge that he or she feels no less love for the other ant, than had the distance been just a few miles closer.