The Wasp and the Cockroach

I watch maybe a bit too much television. It helps relieve an active brain at the end of the day, but I’m also captivated by the stories, anecdotes, myths and humour that I pick up sailing from one program to another.

Occasionally something I see leaves an indelible mark, stimulates further contemplation. This happened to me watching an episode of the British comedy infotainment show, QI. Host Stephen Fry was describing the habits of a certain species of wasp that preyed on a type of cockroach. Rather than killing the cockroach, the wasp’s bite released venom that drugged it. The wasp would then lead the befuddled victim to its nest, lay eggs on it and the hatchlings would progressively eat the insides of the still-living cockroach. After telling this story and showing some vision of the wasp in action, Fry declared in disgust: "I challenge anyone to tell me there is a loving God!"

For those of us who’d like humanity to move to an ecological or earth-centred consciousness, Fry’s challenge is a very appropriate one. We cannot simply see nature as positive and nurturing without also appreciating its destructive side. Killing is a fundamental reality of the created world – life lives upon life. The wasp kills the cockroach for its survival and that of its progeny just as we humans do the same to a multitude of beings, from bacteria right through to sentient animals. Life lives upon life: the Earth Mother and the dark goddess Kali, ever hungry for sacrifice, are one.

Of course in this we are required to see the big picture, to realise that the various interactions of living beings are contained within larger biological systems. The wasp and the cockroach have purposes within their ecosystem, contributing to particular cycles of life. The processes of nature move outwards from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the interactions of stars and the universe as a whole, each process relating to and nested within other, larger processes.

For me, Fry’s response to the story of the two insects points to what humanity’s purpose in nature may be. His outrage is the sign of a being aware of the quality of things. The development of human consciousness allows us to stand back and look upon nature, making independent choices and decisions and distinguishing between right and wrong. In a sense this process is an illusion because we’re not outside nature but are nature like everything else; what is actually occurring is life looking upon itself, creation understanding its own self deeper.

Codes of behaviour that set down what is right and wrong, and by extension what is good and evil, have been part of cultures across the world for thousands of years. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were forced out of the Garden of Eden, banished from a simple undifferentiated existence in nature into one marked by knowledge (or awareness) but also suffering. Human consciousness, as an aspect of the consciousness of nature, had discovered the existence of good and evil, or that which furthers life and that which negates it.

Good is essentially about aligning with the processes of life in their ongoing evolution, embracing and furthering them in the understanding that all is ultimately one and that everything is interdependent. Evil entails denial of unity, separation and self-interest in opposition to other beings, and often leads to domination and abuse. Humans have been struggling with this most fundamental polarity, good and evil, and its implications for millennia.

In expressing disgust with the wasp and sympathy with the cockroach, Fry is not necessarily saying that evil is occurring in that situation, but his reaction does come out of that singular human appreciation of quality. This discernment has always brought out the best in us: from loving human relationships to love of nature, great art, architecture, civilisations, systems of thought and knowledge, magnificent leaps of creativity and inspiration. Without quality all life, not just our own, suffers. That’s the human gift to nature – an awareness of and aspiration towards quality, or soul.

What do we make, then, of the present situation in which we humans have overrun the planet and are progressively destroying so much life? Perhaps it all comes down to fundamental polarities and choices: how many of us are prepared to aim our lives in the direction of quality instead of following the path of ignorance and greed? What is at stake cannot be underestimated – it’s about the radical transformation of humanity and the planet as a whole. With good acts some forests may be saved, some people’s lives improved, some disasters averted, but the big picture is nothing short of a full-scale birth of planet Earth into a new era of life. It’s the new creation that Jesus was said to have initiated 2000 years ago ... if we pay attention, we can see it stirring all around us.

On Beauty

Walking with a friend through the Bendigo Gallery’s Royal Academy of Arts exhibition recently, I stopped at a painting by the 19th-century American artist John Singer Sargent.

In fact, on my rounds through the gallery, I returned to it several times. By about the fourth viewing, I was awestruck. The painting, “An Interior in Venice”, shows a sumptuous room where a well-to-do, older couple are sitting in the foreground, the man reading a newspaper while his wife looks directly at us. In the shadowed background a young couple is standing. The feature of the painting is the light that shines on the older pair, particularly the woman, from an undisclosed source at right. The light has a clean but bold quality, soft yet dramatically enlivening – it’s a statement in favour of a couple in the twilight of their years, a reversal of the adoration of youth with the younger folk almost inconspicuous in the room.

The more I looked at the painting and its beguiling evocation of light, the more its sheer beauty struck me. I was almost in tears. The artist had achieved more than technical mastery – which in itself requires talent and years of work – his creation was inspired. The work had transcended its own forms, its technical and functional capabilities, to a level of refinement impossible to describe in words. Its power could only be felt, experienced, its appeal drawing from our highest senses.

Beauty has that spiritual quality, that refinement that takes leave of mundane experience with its separate forms and necessary functional requirements to a different level of consciousness characterised by unity and oneness. As the mundane is transcended it is also transformed, so that everyday life takes its place in that ultimate unity. Light entering a room is not simply light, but an expression of the nameless divine; a seated woman is not simply a woman, but a vessel for divine spirit. We need beauty to remind us who we truly are, in the fullest, most expansive sense. We need beauty’s charm of transcendence.

Nature is perhaps our most constant reminder of beauty. The sublimeness of a red sunrise, the hulking cragginess of ancient rocks on a hill, the power of the ocean pounding on a beach, the misty lushness of a rainforest, all draw us back into ourselves and towards the primal unity. Like the Singer Sargent painting, nature is inspired – which is why for countless millennia humans have worshipped it and sought to explain its wondrous qualities as the work of gods and other divine beings. Nature is the first teacher of beauty: in order to achieve something beautiful the artist has to align their consciousness to reach from that divine, creative ground of being.

As a society we don’t place much value in beauty; or rather it is overshadowed by other considerations. The ugliness of modern cities – with their dominant concrete buildings, roads and endless suburban sprawl – is a triumph of functionalism over beauty, of commerce and industry over simple joy of being. The material considerations of life are important, but they are not the sum of what it means to be human. “Man does not live on bread alone,” the truism tells us, and indeed there lies the root cause of much of what we do wrong as a society – a too narrow vision of life stuck in functionalist materialism. Beauty needs to return as a serious consideration in everything we do, so that human society reflects nature’s beauty more and that reflection finds fertile ground in the life of each individual and community.

Oddly, art itself nowadays finds beauty problematic – for many artists, it is related to conservative or bourgeois values. Hence, much of what is considered cutting-edge art is dark and discordant, aiming to shock or disturb, to deconstruct and disharmonise. In a way, this is symptomatic of where our culture stands more broadly – in a kind of no-man’s-land where the old certainties of religion and values no longer hold, where nothing ultimately is real or makes sense. The artist wanders forlornly through the “dark night of the soul”, the miserable landscape evoked in TS Eliot’s classic modernist poem, The Waste Land.

It’s important to understand that every culture in every period of history has had a particular relationship to beauty, has seen it in different ways and different forms. The spiritual dimension is always entered into from the field of time and space. I think it would be fruitful to investigate our own attitudes and find a way to re-engage with beauty; not in a superficial, Pollyanna or conservative fashion, but with the intention of healing and integration. We don’t have to stay in a dark place in relation to the deeper reality of being – light and dark dissolve in the boundless magnificence that beauty reveals.