As we end a year of Covid gloom, acquire vaccines and adjourn, squinting and stretching, into springtime, Americans residing in several Mid-Atlantic, Midwestern and Southern states will have company: the billions of periodic cicadas known as Brood X.
The cicadas are coming. But you probably already knew that.
As loudly as these arriving insects announce themselves, we have already done that work for them. We have beamed out warnings with knowing headlines, ushered in primers telling people what to expect from these extremely noisy bugs, and conjured up cheeky tips and tricks for suffering these periodical pests. Enjoy them with earplugs! And, of course, there are essays to be written about them.
Cicadas, it seems, cannot just be cicadas. They must also be symbols.
The conveniently classified Brood X presents endless opportunity for filling in the blank. The obvious: We are emerging from our little underground lairs, too, this spring - tunneling out after tunneling in as the Coronavirus infected the planet. Maybe, we too, will even sing as we emerge.
The cicadas represent another thing gone wrong in a miserable 13 months, the latest airborne plague to sap a little joy out of the blossoming spring.
Let us try a different yardstick: The scale of a single year, after all, is too small. These creepy crawlers emerge only every 17 years, while so much can happen to those of us who stay above ground in that time: all of elementary, middle and high school for a child turning into an adult; or a meeting, courtship, marriage and childbirth for someone who was already an adult during the last cacophony.
That is just our personal histories. What about society? Four presidents here, a smattering of revolutions there, tsunami, invasions, genocides and the World Wide Web truly going worldwide. Covid-19 was not even our only pandemic since 2004.
Maybe, then, the cicadas signify more than a bad year. Maybe they signify the passage of time. They prompt us to press pause on a ceaseless existence so that it does not just pass in a blur - playing the same role, say, as an anniversary or a birthday. Or they encapsulate, in their brittle bodies, how fragile life is. A translucent wing lying on the sidewalk of a thrumming street somehow sums up everything.
This search for meaning in an insect’s life is not new. Plato wrote of cicadas as liminal beings: humans who, caught up in the ecstasy of music, had died without knowing it. Aristotle thought of them as immortality incarnate. And cultures around the globe wrote of them as inherently of the moment. They live for so little time, but they live so hard. Cicadas have been carved out of jade and placed in the mouths of the Aztec dead: they have been laid in gold on the headdresses of Chinese nobility.
We may feel smaller considering these creatures. The events that have obsessed us in this new century are scarcely worth witnessing in their compound eyes. Or we may feel bigger, our own evanescence forgotten compared with a bug’s brief run. Suddenly, we are ageless.
These cicadas can signify all manner of things, but they cannot signify nothing. If these bugs are just bugs, strutting and fretting their time upon the stage, we lose the chance to make sense out of what we witness: out of the disease that has killed so many and hurt so many more; out of the boundless opportunities that await us when the pandemic ends; or, of course, out of the unpleasant experience of billions of winged menaces shrieking at us from the trees everywhere we go. We lose the chance to make ourselves meaningful, too.
We rarely let nature exist undisturbed - physically, sure, but figuratively, too. We twist it instead into shapes that we can recognize and, better yet, into shapes in which we also recognize ourselves. That is not good. That is not bad. It just is - a way for humans to find sense in the nonsensical, and move through the world without being overwhelmed by it. Otherwise all we can hear, no matter where the bugs are, is a deafening roar.
They are all 17 years old and have not seen the sun since 2004, the year they were conceived, laid and hatched. Then they said goodbye for a while. They tunneled into the dirt and sucked the sap of tree roots while counting, slowly, the years. This is the one for which they were waiting. And, over the next few weeks, their loud noises will fill the air.
What the emotionally submerged human dreams of, the cicada literally does, digging upward into the warmth of late spring, sprouting wings and spending the rest of its life buzzing, bouncing, bopping and blithely bugging out. What a way to go: climbing into trees and falling out of them, drunk on love and sunshine, making a racket, using every second of the time they have left, which is about six weeks.
Cicadas seize the joy that other insects forgo. No tunnel digging, hive or mound building, leaf cutting, stinging, biting, sucking blood, or even warfare. No anything, really, except making the most of the brilliant days between the darkness. As the 17th-century Japanese haiku master Basho wrote:
The cry of the cicada
gives us no sign
that presently it will die.
Let humans slog along in human time, piling up the milestones this year’s graduating class of cicadas missed: the first iPhone; the first nlack president; two new popes; hurricanes Katrina and Sandy; Captain “Sully” Sullenberger landing his damaged jet on the Hudson; the IRA laying down its arms and countless others taking them up; Olympic Games in Athens, Beijing, London and Rio. When this year’s cicadas were juvenile and grublike, Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard undergraduate. (Facebook, the swarm he unleashed, had not yet run its course.) Plague-mongers including Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were toppled while the cicadas waited; others still rage or fester. Some afflictions have flared and subsided, like Zika, Ebola and “High School Musical.” New ones, unseen, are waiting their turn. Not for Brood X to brood.
If the cicadas fear missing out, they never show it. But, then, always on schedule, they bring in the noise and regenerative funk. They take a hammer to our eardrums. They creep many of us out. But, after all those years of self-denying absence, cicadas have earned the right to rumpus.
Then the party ends and all that is left are husks and an echoing silence. The grubs are underground, tenacious and alive, leaving above-ground humans to mull about sorrow, impermanence and death.
Many people, Ogden Nash among them, often make the mistake of calling cicadas locusts and likening them to one of the Biblical plagues on ancient Egypt and some even think they actually care about our timetable. Unknown numbers of years ago, through evolution’s accidental genius, they hit on a way of life of astounding utility and beauty. They need no further adjustment.
The Cicada is one insect that has no defenses and survives only through outrageous fecundity. Their cohort is so large they outlast every creature that eats them, which is a lot of creatures. You may grasp this next month when your dog or cat is lying under a tree, belly full, unable to even look at another cicada.
Defenseless and delicious is a generous way to live. And while you hear them sing, you can think about your time on this side of the grass. What have you done with your 17-year increments? The year these cicadas were born, a failed New York developer started a reality show called “The Apprentice” and engaged himself to Melania Knauss and a former president died. A lot happened after that, and Brood X got to miss all of it - the election, the pandemic, the impeachment, the shredding of the Constitution, the disgraceful exit amid a spasm of violence. In the world the cicadas reenter this month, that calamity has come and gone.
As we start groping our way out of the pandemic this spring, it might be good to look up now and then, in the trees. Ascetic discipline and long patience. The shedding of inhibitions and other useless carapaces. The hot pursuit of connection before time runs out. Nailing your entrance - singing loud. And knowing when to exit.
These are all invaluable life lessons, and our insect cousins will soon be screaming them all down at us, for weeks.
Will we be listening?
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