On Butterflies

 

Just sitting here in a field at the university and I see my favourite butterflies: first a female orange tip and then about 5 minutes later a male. Some 30 minutes after that they are fluttering aro und together. To my left there is a long-tailed tit with food in its beak just resting and scanning the area before heading to its nest to feed the young. The male orange tip just lands on a flower right next to me. It is so like clockwork this breeding thing; it is ubiquitous. The long tailed tit flies back from the nest over my head. I think for a moment as I see that pair of butterflies together of my muse and myself. I wonder whether they experience the extraordinary quality of it, as I did or is it as I see now just plain and simple. I tried at breeding I say to myself and it didn’t work. So I imagine a conversation with an adversary who says that I should just try again, it will happen. I reply that making it happen isn’t the interest for me. I look at the birds here who will fledge their young in a few weeks and I look at the human responsibilities. I suppose we invest equal amounts – birds produce broods every year that take a month to fledge but only live a couple of years, we on the other hand produce just one brood which take 2 decades to fledge but live for 80 years. It is not the making it happen that is the point I think again, it is the cost. An advert in the paper I was reading says get paid to do the thing you something you enjoy most. Two thoughts enter my mind. My first ever realisation about the nature of “work” was that you didn’t enjoy doing it. True this isn’t universal but the most important jobs like cleaning and manual labour are not the things we chose to do for enjoyment. My mother calls them chores – this means they are not things we chose to do. Fact is work is mostly that assignment of things that have to be done but no-one wants to do them so they get a salary attached. Another way to see that is if doing something is so enjoyable then why would anyone pay you to do it, wouldn’t they just do it themselves? Labour and reward this is at root why I am reluctant to make it work. In a Malthusian, Efficiency-of-the-markets way if something has great rewards then the cost will go up (either in price, or in population) until the cost balances the rewards. Fact is having a family is extremely costly and the cost just keeps going up. My cousin is renovating a new home at the moment and I am utterly bewildered at the sheer complexity of planning regulations and the like. With each generation the amount of work required to provide an environment of nurture for children increases. Time was like the animals that you simply grew what you needed from the ground. Now with increasing population pressures and the ratchet of capitalism (increasing efficiency requiring greater complexity to create jobs) the environment is becoming chocked and there is simply no space for anyone. I made a half resolution today never to own any property: it is abhorrent I have decided, not because of what I shuts in but because of the principal of shutting people off land which I consider an act of violence against my fellow man. We go to all this trouble to ensure safety and security for the next generation at the cost it seems of the current generation. Space and Land quite evidently precedes the act of partitioning spaces – enjoying that primary Space and Land cannot be affected by the trivial creation of spaces. Of course people are welcome to divide the world up into little properties but it is a petty and trivial activity. Looking at the butterflies again the overwhelming sense is that breeding and property are actually petty and trivial activities. Not that this perspective is easy to reach. I have realised with great humility recently that the path I think I’m treading is difficult, at least as difficult as a good marriage – it is not the easy way at all. Up here in the cold mountains there is great perspective (occasionally when the clouds shift) but the going is most certainly harder than for the folks in the valleys. This must be accepted. So the sense grasped today is that there is clear space beyond the confines of the concepts of sexual relationship, marriage and breeding.

I forgot to add a central point to the discussion on work. There is an assumption in this society that “doing” is a given and we simply need to decide what flavour of doing we will be employed in. My genuine question since the outset has always been “why?”. Maybe a childish question but I don’t see the source of the premise that we need to do. Doing is always in response to something: a need or desire in ourselves or in someone else. Without need or desire what doing is there to do? Folding that into the question of breeding produces the other flavour I missed out.