Ben’s last post inspired me to go back and do some re-reading.
Lawrence Weschler:
“I’m obsessed with a narrow range of huge issues: Passion. Grace. Exile. Blockage.
“In the case of passion, the overarching theme is something I describe as ‘Inhaling the Spore.’ In Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, the first image is of ants foraging for food on the rainforest floor, who every once in a while accidentally inhale the spore of a fungus. The spore lodges in their brain and they start to behave oddly. They leave the forest floor for the first time in their lives, climb up the tendrils of surrounding vines, and eventually impale their mandibles on the stalk of the vine and wait to die. They die because the fungus has actually been eating away their entire nervous system, and two weeks after their death, a horn, laden with spores, erupts from out of their heads. The spores then rain down onto the forest floor and the whole process starts again.
“All of which is an allegory for what interests me. I’m fascinated by moments when people ‘inhale spores.’ … In all my writing, I have been concerned with people and places that were just moseying down the street one day, minding their own business, when suddenly and almost spontaneously they caught fire, they became obsessed, they became intensely focused and intensely alive — ending up, by day’s end, somewhere altogether different from where they’d imagined they were setting out that morning … ”
Yikes.
Now, if that doesn’t make you want to go out and watch the hell out of some ants, I don’t know what will.
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