This "Gothic" self-actualization resumed an unexpected form, hearkening back to his childhood with its focus on the animal kingdom, for Michael's dorm was soon decorated with small frames of dark wood, holding under their glass the delicate, morbid forms of insects and arachnids. The first two he bought: a scorpion and a tarantula. The others he determined to capture for himself.
You may question any association between entomology and self-exploration. Concurrently, Michael did read Buddhist texts, the Quran, the Tao Te Ching, and so on. (He was pleased to find he could work a classical philosophy course into his college schedule, saving some time in independent learning.) But he found all this too distant and academic, and even believed briefly that no philosophy exists other than armchair philosophy.
His entomological exploration began with Lolita: after finishing the novel, he became keen to learn what sort of person Nabokov was. It surprised him that the author had been a passionate lepidopterist, with a collection at Harvard; some species had even been named after him. Michael read a poem Nabokov had written after Lolita while butterfly-collecting in the American west, and spent nearly an hour rereading the following lines:
Here the very air is stranger.
Damzel, anchoret, and ranger
Share the woodland’s dream and danger
And to think I deemed you dead!
(In a dungeon, it was said;
Tortured, strangled); but instead –
Blue birds from the bluest fable,
Bear and hare in coats of sable,
Peacock moth on picnic table.
Michael neither knew nor intended to discover the real-world meanings of these references; he was only concerned with one conclusion. Like paper from a wood block's ink, he had been impressed by these lines with a new awareness of the connection between the macabre and the natural world. Nabokov's poem contrasted imprisonment and murder with the vibrant beauty of nature, yet Michael's takeaway only half allowed this. While the purposeful quality of human cruelty mostly stands apart from nature -- where violence is generally delivered out of base emotions such as hunger, fear, lust, or anger -- nature is also a dark mistress. How violent is a spider as it devours its prey; yet how cruel to contain and murder it with cold, to then display its corpse like a painting! Did Nabokov realize -- but he must -- that the innocent peacock moth he may have added to his collection was itself placed in a glass dungeon, then "tortured, strangled"? And why did this titillate Michael?
Convinced that entomology and its adherents embraced and elaborated little-considered aspects of existence, he began by ordering the aforementioned two specimens and looking over Father William Kirby's Introduction to Entomology. He felt that the extract, "many of them beyond conception fragile and exposed to dangers and enemies without end, no link should be lost from the chain," further highlighted his intuition that entomologists are unique in that they must respect and cherish life, while also acknowledging its ruthlessness and yes, even killing their hapless wards. Michael was not disturbed by this hypocrisy among his newfound heroes, having recently decided that hypocrisy is an inescapable aspect of humanity, and best worn on the sleeve. Furthermore, he thought, an entomologist is forced into the outdoors, into "the field," to constantly stare nature in its face, unlike so many academics.
Michael set to work. Since he already had a spider and was indebted to Nabokov, he went butterfly-hunting. He felt a shudder upon reading that a butterfly is best killed by first squeezing its thorax between one's own fingers, and the phrase again came to mind, "tortured, strangled." But I eat and wear mammal flesh, I drive, I buy, I kill constantly, Michael thought. The perception of this act as barbaric by contrast is pure nonsense. Now he would learn how it felt to kill something beautiful.
It was a swallowtail butterfly he unintentionally named. Despite his love of the Gothic and acceptance of death as a key element of life, it must be admitted that Michael's eyes watered as he watched "Charlotte's" wings go still. But once she had been frozen and mounted inside a lovely hardwood frame, Michael experienced a sensation of inner flight. His breath came strong, his chin lifted, and he felt as though he were standing at the top of a flower-coated mountain in a warm gust of wind. This is reality, he thought, gazing at the corpse. This is me.
aole i pau
My Thoughts on Michael
A Little Introduction
I realized while writing this story that my connection to my characters is of varying strengths and emotionally unpredictable, if there is any emotion at all. I thought that it might be interesting for readers to hear my sentiments concerning these characters, who begin to take on a life of their own.
This is not mere reference to an author's feeling or a reader's imagination. Once you have formed aspects to a character, you find yourself bound by them. They have real rules, rules defined by their personality, which means that instead of writing whatever you feel like, sometimes you must stop and ask yourself, "What would Michael actually do here?" Asking these questions is part, I think, of what helps make a character "dynamic," or real.
Although Michael is fictional, the limitations created by his personality to which I must adhere are real. Furthermore, I have feelings and opinions about this personality. It is the same as if someone tells you, "A friend of mine always hands out blankets to homeless people in winter." Now you have an opinion of some sort formed about this friend, if only in the slightest degree. The friend may or may not exist; the person telling you about them may have invented them for some reason. Not having confirmation of their existence does not stop you from having an opinion about them.
Thus we fall in love or grow to despise people whom we have never met, or who do not even exist.
As for Michael
This story is one of the easiest for me to write so far. I'm very different from Michael, but I connect with him. I admire his dedication to learning and to epiphanies, and his intelligence and areas of maturity for his age. I also am interested in his journey. It's sort of, you know, stuffy, but somehow I feel like I'm writing a "hero's journey." Maybe the obstacle is himself.