There is something palpably intelligent about the way hornets look at a human being. Other insects, and spiders too, seem to operate on the assumption that some children make: “I can’t see you, so you can’t see me.” Rather than scuttling away, a spider or a moth clinging to a grass stem will often instinctively try to save energy by shimmying around and interposing the stem between you and it, long before the attempt to fly or scuttle off. Alternatively, it may give no thought to the matter at all, and simply run for its life.
When I met a hornet at Badbury Clump a couple of weeks ago, the response was quite different. I approached it stealthily from behind with my camera, as I would any other insect, being careful not to let my shadow touch it. I had my macro-zoom out to the full extent, just ready to take my first shot, when it suddenly turned about, the head and thorax articulating so that it could watch me without changing position. I was so entranced by this performance that I quite forgot to press the shutter. I stood spellbound as it seemed to consider the relative merits of flying away versus sitting still. Had I noticed it? Clearly I had. Was I a predator? Possibly not, but that large simple eye I was holding at waist-height was too like a spider’s eye for comfort. There was a nod of the head, as though to signify that the mind was made up, and the hornet flew away, leaving me to bewail my missed opportunity.
Jeannie found my second hornet for the year, sitting on a church floor whilst I was engrossed in photographing the wood-carvings. She called me over to it, and because I was able to rest the camera on the floor, there was a chance to get a picture without any motion blurring, even in the subdued light of the church. The hornet was clearly injured, because it seemed to size me up as a threat almost instantly, but could not move away. All it could do was to spin about on the floor in a spasmodic paroxysm of buzzing, much as a human being might do, trapped in a wounded hornet’s body. So I followed it in circles at the centre of the church, trying to get a symmetrical shot with the two eyes and antennae in the dead centre. The hornet seemed to decide that it was not going to allow me this privilege. I photographed it from the side, and from a forty-five degree angle from the head and tail, but never got a shot from directly in front, or directly behind. Eventually I gave up, took pity, and transported the stricken insect outside, on top of a photocopied guide to the church monuments.
What is it precisely that makes these particular insects seem more intelligent than others? Is it merely the highly articulated body which allows the animal to contort itself in a way which seems to parody human expressions? Or is it to do with timing – the way the insect seems to pause and consider before acting? I suspect both of these are important, but there is something more: a sort of chill of recognition which seems to come over me when I encounter one of these animals. Guillermo del Toro lent a similar intelligence to the stick-insect fairy in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’: it too contorts its body to look at people, and when I consider del Toro’s creation, I suddenly seem to remember that my hornets also had the power of meaningful gesticulation.
Am I guilty of anthropomorphism? Perhaps, but I think not. I cannot attempt to read the mind of a hornet: its gestures might mean something quite different from the human gestures it seems so clearly to echo. My instinctive conviction that the second hornet was driven by pride and a sense of dignity into refusing to let me confront it head on in its agony is probably mere romanticism. But I do believe I was meeting with a mind that possessed more than a glimmer of self-awareness.
The poets know what I mean. Gillian Clarke writes about a field mouse, sliced open my a tractor blade: “It curls in agony big as itself/ And the star goes out in its eye.” The suffering of the field mouse is as world-encompassing to it as is that of any human sufferer. Robert Frost was about to drown “with a period of ink” a moving speck on the page on which he was writing, when all at once he realised that it was “a living mite/ With inclinations it could call its own”:
“I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.”
It is not anthropomorphism, then, but a kind of animism, certainly. One of the wisest of writers on natural history, W.H. Hudson, wanted above all things to become an insect for a day, and to carry the memory of the experience back into human life. How wonderful this would be, to become an insect-shaman and to see the world through compound eyes, and experience it through a body with an exoskeleton, for a single day! To know what it is to carry memories of a pre-metamorphic body. To recall the dreams of the chrysalis. To fly, and to drink nectar through the hungry tube that has become your mouth. To inhabit a world in which a thyme leaf is the size of a dinner plate. To breathe through spiracles. To feel vibrations - and other sensations unknown to humanity – through your antennae. To know for a day an insect’s hunger, an insect’s love, an insect’s lust. To know what it is to rest in peace atop a swinging flower head, as an insect.
Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa had such an experience, only the metamorphosis was, for better or for worse, a permanent one. It was the reactions of others, discovering that he was now a cockroach, that turned Gregor’s experience into a nightmare. Perhaps that is why W.H. Hudson chose a more charismatic insect, the common blue butterfly, as his ideal. Let us hope he escapes the lepidopterist with his net and poison bottle, and steers clear of the farmer spraying insecticide in his field beneath the Downs. Personally, I would choose to be a hornet for today. Go on. Take off your sandal and prepare to slap me. Creep up on me from behind. I’ll turn my head to face you without the slightest movement of my legs, and I’ll stare at you – just stare. Lash out if you dare.
