Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0201262147280.8768-100000@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: in the hole of the forest / claudia / of the vectors of disease
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 21:47:53 -0500 (EST)
- in the hole of the forest claudia of the vectors of disease there were creatures about, clumps of these almost black, almost charred, insects, sometimes hundreds hung together, crawling across themselves like a furrowed moving fruit. beneath them were fern fronds in the dim light, and on the fronds were insects with white cotton freezing them at the joints, a form of spittle or mold perhaps, or perhaps even the guise of another species imitating the dead. we were wanderers without hope of the truth; later i'd spend hours passing out images, begging for identifica- tion, searching online and off, to no avail. only that they were bugs, of the hemiptera, fattened and joined, of the three types - one ovoid with the red outpostings, one circular, and where the x-ed wings crossed there was a lighter darker tan against the slate of the rest, and that pentagon- al, also with the tan and slate, but the wings slightly more prominent. in all of them the wings seemed pasted on, thinned, useless. i took image after image. all of similar types were not only poisonous, but the vectors :we walked through the clumps carefully; the bugs were sluggish, of the order of bugs with the wings x-ed and flattened across their backs, almost slatish in color, hanging from vines, in the forks of the trees, only in this dense and twisted half-lit spot, isolated from the rest of the thicket. we returned again to gather more images, stopping only at the atala butterfly, threatened and endangered, this orange-bodied dark-blue creature of the glade. but we went in farther, breaking through brazilian pepper, cabbage palm, and other palms and trees - the latter so twisted, we emerged later with blood on our arms.:at last i came to the eastern blood-sucking conenose and it seemed pinned down for the moment. this led to chiagas, darwin's disease, also to kissing and assassin bugs, hemiptera all, but the proboscis was different. it was a dead end. i noticed the as- sassins seemed lone assassins; our bugs are two-fold or three-fold gender, at least three different morphs, heavily communal. it seems impossible. i want to hold my arm out, my flesh out, to their touch, their gatherings. there are an enormous number of potential diseases, some deadly. i want to call them to me, the squat ones with the outline of the housefly on their back and red protuberance on their sides, and the flattened ones of unearthly colors, some almost circular, some pentagonal, reflecting the simulacrum of more popular species.:: at last i came to the eastern blood-sucking conenose and it seemed pinned down for the moment. this led to chiagas, Darwin's disease, also to kiss- ing and assassin bugs, hemiptera all, but the proboscis was different. it was a dead end. i noticed the assassins seemed lone assassins; our bugs are two-fold or three-fold gender, at least three different morphs, heavi- ly communal. it seems impossible. i want to hold my arm out, my flesh out, to their touch, their gatherings. there are an enormous number of potent- ial diseases, some deadly. i want to call them to me, the squat ones with the outline of the housefly on their back and red protuberances on their sides, and the flattened ones of unearthly colors, some almost circular, some pentagonal, reflecting the simulacrum of more popular species, there were creatures about, clumps of these almost black, almost charred, in- sects, sometimes hundreds hung together, crawling across themselves like a furrowed moving fruit. beneath them were fern fronds in the dim light, and on the fronds were insects with white cotton freezing them at the joints, a form of spittle or mold perhaps, or perhaps even the guise of another species imitating the dead. we were wanderers without hope of the truth; later i'd spend hours passing out images, begging for identification, searching online and off, to no avail. only that they were bugs, of the hemiptera, fattened and joined, of the three types - one ovoid with the red outpostings, one circular, and where the x-ed wings crossed there was a lighter darker tan against the slate of the rest, and that pentagonal, also with the tan and slate, but the wings slightly more prominent. in all of them the wings seemed pasted on, thinned, useless. i took image after image. all of similar types were not only poisonous, but the vectors {your nervous system my penetrating} ::of fatal disease. we were covered with marks, almost sexualized, as our bruised breasts would warrant comparison of the living with the dead. we left stones unturned, noted the reddened swollen bellies of one of the morphs.:turning this way and that:everything moved slowly nothing moved of the vectors of disease of black turning this way and that in the hole in the forest claudia of the vectors of disease _