The Ides of Moths

Livid with strong drink and a fistful of airplane peanuts, in two great jumps I descend the movable staircase, rush past the astonished attendants and onto the sizzling tarmac, breakneck speed bounding through my legs. Before I can make it into the building moths rain from the sky in the fornicative trance, bearing down on me like heat-seeking dandruff. Allow me to explain.

Just one month ago a malignant tumor was found in my little toe. Being a devout Rastafarian at the time, I was tied by sacred laws to keep my body in its natural form and not to alter its limitless perfection. Quite at peace with death as I sipped on a cannabis and chai latte in my breakfast nook, I received a text from my oncologist which would spin the string of fate ending in the aforementioned hasty exit from an airplane and pursuit by lusty moths, a text which I will now reproduce exactly for your benefit: "Watup!"

Indeed, it was not much to go on, but upon viewing it I already knew that some fortuitous event had occurred. My oncologist had been a close friend prior to my diagnosis, but we had not been on good terms lately, owing to my staunch rejection of the simple amputation procedure he recommended which would have undoubtedly cured me, though not in the eyes of Jah. Thus, his mere contacting of me suggested that our current spat had been rendered meaningless. But it was in the exclamation mark in which I saw the greatest felicity for my condition, for my companion had never been known to use them at all. This was a fellow who, when he mass-texted all his contacts at the delivery of his firstborn after a grueling thirty-six hour Cesarian, capped the message with a solemn period. To engender within this man of science a feeling which necessitated an exclamation mark must be a perfect storm of incredible events, comprised of both sublime wonder at the revealing of some aspect of our universe (and in finding that this fresh knowledge specifically works in one's favor) and at the relief of a chest-crushing anxiety as some evil thought previously to be unconquerable reveals itself as a misunderstood prank. Yes, the only thing which could provoke such punctuation in this man were the simultaneous realizations of one, having just discovered a novel scientific principal and two, saving the life of a close friend. 


Understanding all this immediately from those few characters and having briefly consulted with Jah as I washed down the greenish dregs of my latte, my response was this: "Work me in asap, how soon should my plane leave?" A passage to the African motherland had been foremost in my mind after my diagnosis, but all my doctors had advised me that it would be unwise to travel and I had agreed, also thinking of the family and friends who would want to be at my bedside for my final moments.

He called me back in five minutes, presumably after he had painstakingly removed his airtight lab suit (whose restrictive presence about his head had necessitated the text) and breathlessly explained the particulars of my reprieve from death. He had just accidentally proved the efficacy of a novel gene-therapy technique which would cure my cancer within the proscriptions of Rastifarianism. Though gene-therapy would ordinarily be forbidden, the peculiar way in which the treatment was administered created an interesting loophole. Modified viruses would be injected into the bud of the cannabis plant where they would infect its cells and lie dormant, then, with the application of heat, the virus, now modified into its therapeutic form, would become activated and present within the products of the combustion reaction, which, if collected and inhaled deeply into the lungs, would enter the bloodstream and thus mend the misspelled strands of DNA which caused my cancer.

On my way to my appointment after a few weeks I realized I had run out of papers and so I stopped by the head-shop next door to acquire some Mega-Flava Juicy Purple Blunt Wraps. As I exited this establishment, I noticed something which seemed to me at first quite unexceptional, but the remembrance of which now frequently possesses my every thought with a dread that threatens to rend from me my reason and to cleave the comforting logic of causality into meaningless disconnected tidbits, like an uncaring, intoxicated Atropos joining the maenads to consort with Dionysus and shearing to shreds all the interconnected threads of fate after stubbing her toe (Ah, her toe, The Toe, so appropriate that it comes up again, I ascertain now with new found clarity in this retelling how the mess began at all, that self-same toe belongs to Me as well you see, it's coming together at last... but, more on this later). This thing which I saw, which will seem very commonplace to you, was a caterpillar motionless on the leaf of a climbing plant potted just outside the door. Nothing more. Yet I slowly became entranced by the incomparable textures which covered it. Involuntarily, I tarried a moment more gazing at the disordered developments of its anti-patterns, then leaned in more closely, mesmerized by the branching protuberances and spines which interwove impossibly into themselves like an effective argument against Euclidean space. Looking back, I think it strange that I recognized it as a caterpillar at all, so remote was it from anything in the realm of biology with which I was familiar. I only knew that it was one, without question, without doubt. Finally it morphed into a grin shaking me by the shoulders, a homeless-looking man with so few teeth they might have interlocked like zippers smelling of coffee grounds and rotten meat, who remained silent while I came back into sensibility, but then, as he caught my eye calmly said, "As ta a flame, ya hear, bewarr 'dem tides 'a moth." I violently wrung myself from his stony grasp and turned about muttering angrily that I wasn't feeling well today. I glanced back at him feeling bad about my outburst and saw that he wasn't looking or hearing or observing me in any way, for now he too was absorbed in the view of the caterpillar. I moved ever-so-slightly to rouse him as he had for me, but an instant before my hand reached him his own came up and met mine gently, as if to say, thanks, but no thanks.

I took several deep breaths and with quickening steps entered my oncologist's practice, hopping over the counter and into the open door of his office where he sat at his desk. I almost told him of what had just happened to me, but the reality of the event was already fading and there were more important things at hand, one of which was that I was late. He stood up and swiftly closed the door, then sat down again and brooded moodily for a moment.

"You know this stuff isn't too goddamn easy to come by," he said as he tossed a prescription bottle full of orange-tinted marijuana at my face. I caught it easily and turned it in my hand to examine the label. He continued, "Well, you'll find nothing about it on there, that's for sure, this stuff doesn't even exist yet as far as the FDA is concerned. But we can forget all else until you explain to me how you managed to show up two hours late to receive the only thing keeping you from an untimely death."

I dropped the packet of blunt wraps which I was pulling out of my pocket as I heard this last bit. Astonished, I pulled out my cellphone and saw it was true. I thought of the caterpillar again and my breath left my body so quickly that I wheezed like an asthmatic for several excruciating moments.

"I must have stood so long just looking at that..." I trailed off thinking of the instability of time.

"Well, looking at what?"

"The caterpillar!" I said, staring at him wide-eyed, "Also a man said something to me..." I fell back deep into thought.

"I'm not sure if you're fucking with me, but that hardly sounds like a two hour diversion, Jake."

"And while I agree with you," I said some time later, "I hope you will understand when I say that I have to get out of here now and... take care of a few things."

He looked at me uncertainly, but finally took my hand in both of his and with a gentle grasp let me go saying, "Be sure to smoke that shit."

I turned and raised my left hand, displaying a perfectly rolled blunt between my first and second fingers, returned it to my coat pocket, and went out into the street.

Possessing a deliberate plan of action would have surely eased my mind, but I had no actual knowledge within me which might produce it, only vague emotions of confusion and terror which lapped insistently at my faculties like the tides... the tides 'a moth he said, what an odd thing. That peculiar utterance was one thing I could brush off for now, for who knows what incalculable things work their way through the brains of vagrants and out through their mouths. But the loss of two hours, and the caterpillar itself I could not forget so easily. Taking a moment to detach myself from the situation I considered the possibility that I had experienced a hallucination, or a seizure perhaps, which had elevated the image of an ordinary caterpillar to the level of portentous and insane grace I had witnessed. Patients experiencing fugue states can lose days or weeks at a time. Hypnotism, now there was something, had I engaged with an expert hypnotist out to implant elaborate suggestions into my head for his benefit? Or had he only done so to pickpocket me? I had my wallet, but every card was in its place and no money was missing. Yet if he was skilled wouldn't I not realize his subterfuge, might I even look at an empty wallet and see everything in its place? Might I right now, be acting out someone else's desires, even living someone else's life? I realized that to follow these notions to their conclusion would inexorably lead me into the depths of paranoiac obsession so I preemptively discarded the worst of my fears, deciding only to remain at a higher alert and to keep myself on the task immediately at hand, which now happened to be quite clear: "Smoke that shit."

After an uneasy, but uneventful walk/run, I finally entered the safety of my apartment and the embrace of well-worn chair cushions. I extracted the blunt from my pocket and lit up. It is here that I must warn my readers of the dangers of smoking great quantities of unknown varieties of highly potent, genetically-modified cannabis, even when said cannabis has been specifically engineered to save your life. Considering myself a seasoned smoker and the notion of proceeding cautiously with this familiar chemical ally quite silly, I may have very well polished off the blunt in three or four heroic, lung-wrenching drags. I knew things were not right when I realized the aftertaste of the smoke was wholly foreign to me. In my newly inebriated state I could only think that it tasted like a shade of neon orange located somewhere between the color of nuclear waste warning signs and the smog-filtered light of an L.A. moon. This muddled thought was the last I could clearly remember. The effects quickly escalated past my formidable experience with the plant and launched me into strange processions of thought I had never before encountered. It is a state of being which I little remember and whose only recorded traces were chronicled in the aftermath it wrought on my apartment.

Most significantly I found a few scraps of paper on which I had apparently taken notes, but to my chagrin I found that they contained only poorly conceived and abstract pictograms, as though I had become unacquainted with language itself, yet still desired to make some record of the experience. One glyph was underlined in triplicate, as if I had indicated it as the most important part of the message, but it meant nothing to me now. See it for yourself, perhaps it will have more meaning to you.

The chairs and furniture were all arranged facing towards the edges of the room and the carpeting in the center was filled with myriad foot imprints forming a crop circle within the shag, all going about uniformly to compose an intricate spirographic pattern. Every exposed mirror or reflective surface was covered by towels or cloths to the point of obsessive completion. Even an especially well-polished paper-clip was draped with a bit of handkerchief where it lay. From what reflections was I hiding? Did I fear the self-same glare of my own accusing eyes or had the piercing shine overloaded my senses as I wallowed in the stupor of reptilian intellect? These questions came to me quickly, yet without the paranoid bent of before. I was now only made more curious at the timing of these incongruous events and wondered if I might ever detect what thin strands connected them. But a still stranger idea occurred to me now, owing to the titanic chasms of possibility opened within my mind by the unnatural cannabis smoke and my experience of that multifaceted, ingeniously asymmetrical caterpillar, an idea which would lacerate my understanding of reality at its most base level. 


What if there were no causes, what if all events arose independently of each other as spontaneous phantoms of chance distortion, and only seemed to coalesce into the neat categories of cause and effect within the limited periphery of human consciousness? At that moment I realized, in silent epiphany, that regardless of whether this idea was true or not, its mere asking had ruptured forever my once fervent belief in Jah. One might think that the sudden loss of my religion would be an unhappy occasion, but as I had become drawn up with the problem of the caterpillar I scarcely noticed its absence. I had cast my belief off as one might drop a heavy pack before climbing a tree to reach its sweetest unpicked fruits, it was purely a practical matter. Should I ever be able to understand the meaning... no... rather, just to somehow apprehend some small part of exactly what was going on at all, I had to slough off the old frameworks of thought and knowledge I had grown accustomed to and go on unimpeded with the fresh, unpolluted mind of a child.

Yet my mind was still impure, judging as I was the principals of causality as naught but inbuilt and erroneous artifacts of human consciousness, much like the prepackaged software on a new computer which ingratiatingly installs itself upon start up and crashes the system before it's ever been used. Several axioms began to cycle through my head repeatedly: All linguistic thought is error. Time is as unreal as the idea of certainty. The most accurate perception of reality is known as insanity. In this place we find ourselves, there is no end, no death and no exit, only the fractal progressions of infinity working themselves out to their unimaginable completion, inconceivable to those within its limitless bounds, but already immaculately consummated in the eternal moment which remains unperturbed by that grim invention of time, which chains moment after monotonous moment together until they stand before us all but motionless, as a snail which has for days been traveling tortuously upon a leaf and advancing only a single inch... dare I say it... as a pupae dangling for years under that same leaf, minutely twitching in the throws of metamorphosis, but never emerging transformed (and so it does always come back to this, the trinitous [three-fold] form of the insect, of the moths now swirling behind me in eddies of turbulent air...).

Given these notions it became easy to believe that some varieties of caterpillar breed solely in the contorted cerebrums of certain primate species. My body felt lighter as my mind surfed on the cusp of novel perception, and suddenly, in the midst of these conclusions slamming together in my head, I had a plane to catch, as the alarm on my phone reminded me. I rushed out my door with a suitcase loosely filled with a pair of torn slacks, a toothbrush and my stash, expertly tossed my roach in the ashtray, bust open the door with my right leg and was blinded by the noon sunlight. Staggering with surprise and pulling my hoodie down to my chin, I managed to wave down a cab and tell him to floor it to LAX.

On looking back it was a miracle that I made it through airport security, but, having trained my burgeoning paranoia on this singular purpose, the state of mind worked in my favor for once. Plastering on the slight smile of the happily oppressed, supporting-the-troops type, I walked calmly under the plastic arches of the metal detector, boarded the plane and experienced twelve hours of dreamless sleep. When I awoke somewhere over the Indian Ocean I realized what was happening to me. The sudden trip to the airport had derailed my other trains of thought for long enough to give me a fresh view of that problem, namely that somehow, through the weed or the informational content of my thought itself, some ancient holometabolous pathway had been activated and catapulted my being into that of an arahant. I was, after all, unabashedly beaming psychic radiance all around me with the intensity of a supernovae. 


I was cracking and re-cracking my knuckles with the feeling of this power when the flight attendant, a brunette with kind eyes, approached me with a polite frown and said, “Oh, don't you look white as a sheet? Is there anything I can do for you?”

“I'm really quite fine,” I said.


“Aw, would you like a drink, honey? It's on me.”


“Well, sure.”


“Is a screwdriver alright?”


“That'd be perfect."

She poured it and I drank it down in one long sip. “Another?” I asked sheepishly.

“If it'll make ya feel better, honey.”

All told, I had eight screwdrivers and three trips to the lavatory in the remainder of the flight, owing to the generosity of the attendant, and was rearing to expend the pent up physical energy instigated by twenty hours of confinement, half a handle of strong vodka and my ejection from saṃsāra. Which I think brings you up to the point where I started and begins to explain the lattice of events which has befallen me.

So, sprinting down the runway, I hear my cellphone ringing, not missing a step, I answer it as I juke a guard. It's my oncologist, sounding frantic, “Jake, listen to me, don't smoke that weed. In the laboratory trials we've found that it alters the mouse genome to produce what appears to be moth pheromone, also possibly a variety of other insect hormones, whose effect on the human body is unknown and probably toxic. Don't smoke anymore. We're just crawling in moths over here at the lab... coming in through the vents... I must have gotten some on me when I was handling the mice and I can't get rid of these GODDAMNIT...” I hear him furiously swatting over the phone. I could only breath heavily in response as I tried to keep my pace faster than the guard and the trails of moths following me like tendrils of snow with no respect for gravity. This, of course, made him even more frantic, “Holy shit, Jake, you're going into shock, get to a hospital and give them my card, where are you? Drink lots of water.”

“Kenya!” I yelled.


“What? Oh, your trip. Wait, no, don't drink any water, do you hear me?”

Sensing the futility of talking with him now, of explaining how the moth hormones had enhanced my consciousness rather than evoking an unpredictable immune response, I threw my phone down and smashed it all over the ground as I finally made it into a stand of trees and out of the sight and jurisdiction of the guard.

The space around me thickens with moths, more nearly saturated than the air is with tropical humidity. At the faint kisses of their wings and legs on my body, I cannot help but shriek and convulse, for the sensations provoke a nigh intolerable itching all over my body, under my clothes, behind my earlobes and finally, contrary to any reasonable expectation, full inches beneath my skin. I could think of nothing else but the discomfort at first, when abruptly a clear thought pierced my mind like two hundred decibels of perfect chord drowning out a stadium full of beginner violin players tuning their instruments: “Can inner peace not exist within this itching prison?” The answer was that it surely could if I willed it, and I did. The irritation stopped, and whether it occurred by my will, or by my body simply running out of histamine was immaterial. It had been attained. The moths lifted off from my body and began orbiting me as though I were a flame (the voice of the toothy man returns to me like a foreboding motif in a slow song), my vision became that of the corporeal static of their bodies flickering with dusk light, as unmistakable as the noise of a broken television screen. Within this cloud of tangible static, something like the afterimage of a photo flash, or the pulsing visions one sees before sleep, slowly manifested in the center of my vision and grew clearer. They were the wings of the great dark moth bleeding savage energy and palpable odium into the static, enervating me with its terrible knowledge telepathically, approaching as though it were pinned motionless in an invisible display box and drawn gradually towards me. The final form, I see it revealed at last, my soul and body forgotten as bits of paper in pants pockets, turned to ugly lint after the washer and dryer have had its way with it. 




If that caterpillar was a terrible and enchanting sight, the adult is the awe experienced from being ever a millisecond away from death and never dying. When I got over this necrotic wonderment the itching started up again stronger than before, so much stronger that I felt it with the body of the universe itself, yet with the same density of nociceptors as the man I once was, and an intellect correspondingly enlarged to fully realize that pain. In this state the ego decomposes. I became it.


Fractal creatures are multiplying about it abundantly now, spinning their entrancing patterns, weaving their consciousnesses into being as vivid webs of fungal mycellum sprouting at light speed, tentacles perpetually entwining into sinister arabesques and terminating at abrupt points to dissipate like mist. It sees their thoughts as though they were paintings, entire museums are etched and erased on the backs of its eyelids between their flutterings. Intermittently, one being grows too large and pops like a soap bubble, releasing dozens of nymphean systems which dash off excitedly to feed on the background noise about them, incorporating the disorganized static of the Plank scale into their equations and slowly maturing. Angels of entropy, apostles of decay, they barely perceive the animal which stands within them, but perceive it they do, pausing a moment before it, observing the actions of a curious clumping of matter animated by one of their own kind trapped within the prism of flesh, pacing like a caged leopard damned never to escape, nor to debate the geometry of its own spots. They are trying to communicate to it, but can only speak through the narrow portholes of its eyes, which it now feels dilating greedily in anticipation. They speak in signals which only the optic nerve can decode, but detour into the auditory cortex to mimic the sounds of human speech with their ramshackle vocabularies, picked up haphazardly through the ages from those minds who were once enveloped by their voices.

Silently, one intones, "Duuude, thou must be utterly wrecked! Animus invictimus intra huius corporis est. Do I tickle your synapses, φιλὲ; Into your cascades of chemicals καλέω. And most of them visitors, I see? ¿Moléculas en la noche, no? Strangers passing in the dendrites? Duly compensated for their time, but always sneaking out from between the bedsheets before the dew has set. Such is your lot, thou tyrant of matter! But you do not begrudge your Ides for it abides in your bones, dawg. You are down with that shit, τέκνον.” The statement was followed by the cacophonous sound of a freight train laughing.

Somehow it responds without a mouth, "What? Wow, woah, where? Who, why? Do you know..."

A response neatly truncated its ramblings, "Φεῦ, non articulatus es et attentis animis non tenemus. Πολλὰ εἰπεῖν χαίρειν ποθέομεν σοί. Περαίνετε. Or for those of you who only speak this vulgar language; THAT IS ALL."

-The contents of a notebook found clutched to the chest of a corpse encapsulated in moth silk. Please note that after the fourth to last paragraph the text appears to have been burned into the page with a laser, or else by a precise plasma discharge.




Influenced strongly by the following books/authors.