Three or Four Caterpillars
form & fixity; quest & courage; nourishment & metamorphosis
Here’s Yājñavalkya, the sage, in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad—discussing not reincarnation per popular notion, but the nature of the self and how to recognise it regardless of form. When the world is made and remade constantly, you must learn new ways of seeing.
As a caterpillar, having come to the end of one blade of grass, draws itself together and reaches out for the next, so the Self, having come to the end of one life and dispelled all ignorance, gathers in his faculties and reaches out from the old body to a new. [ IV.4.3 ]
– Eknath Easwaran, The Upanishads
Here’s Annie Dillard laying into the poor inchworm. Lest you think she has it in for caterpillars, read the next bit. No one can accuse Dillard of not seeing closely.
Few sights are so absurd as that of an inchworm leading its dimwit life. Inchworms are the caterpillar larvae of several moths or butterflies. The cabbage looper, for example, is an inchworm. I often see an inchworm: it is a skinny bright green thing, pale and thin as a vein, an inch long, and apparently totally unfit for life in this world. It wears out its days in constant panic.
Every inchworm I have seen was stuck in long grasses. The wretched inchworm hangs from the side of a grassblade and throws its head around from side to side, seeming to wail. What! No further? Its back pair of nubby feet clasps the grass stem; its front three pairs of nubs rear back and flail in the air, apparently in search of a footing. What! No further? What? […] Its davening, apocalyptic prayers sway the grasshead and bump it into something. I have seen it many times. The blind and frantic numbskull makes it off one grassblade and onto another one, which it will climb in virtual hysteria for several hours. Every step brings it to the universe’s rim. And now—What! No further? End of world? Ah, here’s ground. What! No further? Yike!
“Why don’t you just jump?” I tell it, disgusted. “Put yourself out of your misery.”
– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
We may freely criticise those we love. But we cannot quite bear it when someone else does. When Jean-Henri Fabre, the French naturalist/entomologist says pretty much the same thing she says above—that caterpillars lack “any gleam of intelligence in their benighted minds”; “the caterpillars in distress, starved, shelterless, chilled with cold at night, cling obstinately to the silk ribbon covered hundreds of times, because they lack the rudimentary glimmers of reason which would advise them to abandon it,”—this is what she says, seeking to understand why what bothers her bothers her.
I want out of this still air. What street-corner vendor wound the key on the backs of tin soldiers and abandoned them to the sidewalk, and crashings over the curb? Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, who lay a bullock on a woodpile and begged Baal to consume it: “Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.” Cry aloud. It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
At this point, there are some inevitable questions you should be asking yourself.
And finally, here’s the once-tiny caterpillar who’s got his stuff all figured out, albeit by trial and a bellyful of error 🐛❤️
The next day was Sunday again.
The caterpillar ate through
one nice green leaf,
and after that he felt
much better.
– Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Image: Generated using Substack’s own AI image generation function. Slight legs glitch. Based on the original cover of The Very Hungry Caterpillar— written, illustrated, and designed by Eric Carle, 1969.
#form #metamorphosis #knowledge