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By Nick Kleese
Public Space One Artist in Residence
Please now pretend you are a butterfly. I will guide you through how to do so, as I am well practiced, for I pretend to be a butterfly several times every day. Here’s how you do it: close your eyes and invent antennae on your head. Feel them sprouting long and complex from your scalp, weighing your head and neck until your chin is drawn toward your chest. But now your chest is thorax, so get used to it, and the calcium of your bones has dissipated into pretty wings that now span the length of the room. You feel powerful, strange and timid.
Sound and smell become shape: that persistent electric hum around you is flat and layered like a mille feuille (mmm, you think: sucrose). The coffee drip, dripping in the room upstairs seeps through the floorboards in oblong stalactites. The artificial light — emitting noisily from those new caffeine-scented accoutrements and the screen on which you are now reading this — is painful, wrapping around the contours of your newly textured room like burlap. Every move you make, every twitch of your proboscis, feels incredibly profound.
Hallucinogens: are you yourself now in a bad way? You’re not sure — you’ve never tripped. You consider calling up Mike. He’ll know. Plus, maybe a chat will calm your nerves. But, is he a butterfly, too? If so, what has he decided to name his lepidopteran self? Heck, you don’t even know what you’re calling your own self! Panicked, you skitter to the window, crawl out onto the wooden sill to watch polygonal traffic slither by, and begin listing the many positive things about being a butterfly to cool your jets. As the sun warms your ultralight body, you take the following mental notes:
- Beautiful wings
- Mating rituals = highly structured
- Kids love you
- You’ve skipped the horrors of the chrysalis: the transition from caterpillar to goo to exoskeleton
- High metabolism
However, despite the relative comfort these thoughts offer you, your old human anxiety creeps back into mind in the memory of an NPR story you heard once while driving to work. The report claimed you were dying out. When you heard this story you had to tell Mike. You found him in the copy room fiddling with the automatic stapler and he said the story must be bullshit, because he didn’t know anyone who’d died. Not a single one. If the butterflies are dying out, shouldn’t there be butterfly bodies everywhere? You considered this: when was the last time you saw a dead monarch? Not lately. And yet you realized the flaw in his logic — the claim that seeing is the only form of believing. You continued watching him adjust the guides on the stapler and assumed he should know better. Maybe Mike was just in a bickering mood? Maybe he had a late night? Whatever the reason for his logical oversight, you let the issue drop.
But, now, on your sill, as the sun sets behind the smoke of barbeques and sweat to the west, you’re feeling more philosophical, more feisty and more despondent knowing there are some folks who — when prompted to do so — won’t even try to pretend to be butterflies. These are the same people who, you formulate, will deny the butterflies are dying out. You imagine yourself confronting them: Yeah, yeah, they read The Metamorphosis for English 11 and watched some TedTalk about transcendental meditation, so they know what’s up and know it’s all bullshit. It’s just a matter of swapping stats, dude, they’ll say nonchalantly, matter-of-factly, as they thumb through Instagram on their iPhone. Plus, I remember from Intro to Philosophy that even if you were a butterfly you couldn’t understand it because you can’t speak butterfly and the butterfly can’t speak English. Your mental debate doesn’t go much further than that.
Yeah, whatever, you think, still sitting on your sill, still pretending to be a butterfly.
Just then, an olive colored Jeep Laredo with four long-haired college guys inside approaches like an octagon. They roll down their kaleidoscopic windows.
Hey, hippie! Get a job, hippie! they holler and cackle. The words tumble toward you like 8-bit boulders but, thankfully, you’ve enough foresight to give your wings a forceful flap, lifting yourself to safety as the words barrel through your open window, as to spite the non-believers now rolling wildly through the hazy, auburn suburbs toward the shopping mall at the frontier of your crumbling realm.
