The Fly Trap (5 page)

Put a boy ashore on an islet and watch what happens. He’ll charge around it. Every time. He bounds from stone to stone along the edge of the water like a happy animal, living proof that the word “territorial” derives from the same root as “terrier.” He’s exploring his territory, following the coastline along its entire length like a cartographer, searching for driftwood and flotsam. Only then does he explore the interior of the island with the buttonologist’s blessed tunnel vision.

Purple loosestrife sways in the light sea breeze. The heavy smell of seaweed. Arctic terns!

…

There are millions and millions of insect species here on earth. Of these, hundreds of thousands belong to the multifarious order of flies,
Diptera
. Houseflies, dance flies, robber flies, hoverflies, thick-headed flies, soldier flies, snipe flies, picture-winged flies, fruit flies, flesh flies, blowflies, stable flies, marsh flies, shore flies, louse flies, dung flies, parasite flies, stiletto flies—every imaginable name. In Sweden alone there are 4,424 different species, according to the most recent figures. New ones are discovered constantly.

Of all these very different fly families, I am interested only in hoverflies, also called flower flies. But even these are far too numerous to cover in the course of one lifetime, except superficially. Scientists have identified more than 5,000 hoverflies in the whole world, and there are undoubtedly thousands more that haven’t yet been discovered or named, that simply exist God knows where. The 368 species of hoverfly found in Sweden to date are undeniably manageable. But our country is very large and verdant, and the days are so packed with impressions and clamourous information that I am forced to limit myself so as not to lose sight of something I am forever seeking.

Therefore I collect only on the island. Never on the mainland.

So far I have managed to capture 202 species. Two hundred and two.

A triumph, believe me. Only the difficulty of explaining is greater.

Not even on Öland or Gotland—those comparatively gigantic islands, where generations of entomologists have been capturing flies for all they’re worth since the time of Linnaeus—not even there, over the course of a quarter of a millennium, have they managed to identify as many species as I have over the course of seven years here. The number says something about the island, and perhaps something about the depth of the buttonological pitfall, but most of all it says something about the possibilities of the sedentary life. When I get old, maybe I will pursue my hoverfly studies only in my own garden, sitting here in the sunshine by the meadowsweet and the butterfly bush like a caliph in his pleasure garden, the pooter hose in my mouth as if it led to an opium pipe.

Don’t misunderstand me. We’re talking about hunting for pleasure, nothing more. Of course I could name a number of very good, very sensible reasons why a person
ought
to collect flies. Scientific reasons, or environmental ones. And maybe I will, later, but it would be hypocritical to begin anywhere but with pure recreation. Anyway, I’m no missionary. Few collectors are. If anything, it’s probably solitude that gets us to make up reasons that other people can understand. If I say that I collect hoverflies principally to map out changes in the local fauna, practically everyone will understand, even applaud, what I do. But it’s a lie. Because enjoyment is so awkward. People who have not fallen into the trap themselves know nothing. On this point I am in agreement with Thomas De Quincey, who in
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
dismisses all who believe they know something about the effects of intoxication on a restless soul.

[With regard to] all that has been hitherto written on the subject of opium, whether by travellers in Turkey (who may plead their privilege of lying as an old immemorial right) or by professors of medicine, writing ex cathedra, I have but one emphatic criticism to pronounce,—Lies! lies! lies!

He did in fact destroy himself with opium, completely. He sank so far that his broad interests during a particularly critical period were reduced to the study of the national economy, a subject which at that time was thought to be reserved for “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Of course he could also have confined himself to a description of the drawbacks, the misery of addiction, for there he was the greatest expert of them all—in precisely the same way that we entomologists can expand endlessly on the unpleasant effects of environmental devastation on the tiniest of creatures.

And nevertheless, the rapture of intoxication seeps in between the lines.

But, to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness. I have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man’s experience or experiments, even though he were but a ploughboy, who cannot be supposed to have ploughed very deep in such an intractable soil as that of human pains and pleasures, or to have conducted his researches upon any very enlightened principles.

Now, with the best will in the world, I cannot pretend that I have ploughed very deeply into the soil of joy, and into that of misery hardly at all, but however it happened, I began to get a distinct feeling that René Malaise had.

On a good day, his trap might give me a thousand insects.

But that was only the beginning.

Chapter 5

The Archipelago of Buttonology

It was August Strindberg who coined the term “buttonology.” He was angry and needed a taunt. The old taunts wouldn’t do, so he invented a new one—funnily enough in a short story called “The Isle of the Blessed.” He wrote it in Switzerland in 1884 and, as usual, what he wanted was more than simple revenge for various injustices.

But because the idle found it difficult to do nothing, they invented every sort of idiotic foolishness. One began to collect buttons; a second gathered spruce, pine and juniper cones; a third procured a grant for travelling the world.

Several years later he lived and wrote one of his best novels right here on the island, on the east side, facing the open sea. Yet I’m fairly certain he was not happy here. Eager as he was to conquer territories on a European order of magnitude—or larger—he belonged by natural necessity to the mainland. Finding peace in a little cage was not for him, it made him aggressive and ornery. It was here too, on Midsummer Day 1891, that he attacked his wife’s Danish lover Marie David so violently that he was later hauled before the district court and found guilty of assault. “Terrier” is still related to “territory.”

The target of his innovative taunt in “The Isle of the Blessed” is said to have been the archaeologist Oscar Montelius and his then famous typological method for establishing the chronology of Bronze Age artifacts, but this has not prevented generations of ignorant wiseacres from applying Strindberg’s characterization to other scientific systematizers, entomologists among them.

The man who collected buttons had accumulated a fearful quantity. As he did not know how he was going to preserve them, he sought and received money from the state to erect a building to house the collection. He then sat down to organize his buttons. There were many different ways of sorting them. One could divide them by garment—underwear buttons, trouser buttons, coat buttons, etc.—but our man devised a more artificial and therefore more difficult system. But to achieve this, he needed help. First he wrote a treatise on The Need for a Study of Buttons on Scientific Principles. Then he petitioned the Treasury for a Professorship in Buttonology, along with two assistants. His application was approved, more for the sake of creating employment than for the intrinsic value of the proposal, which no one was yet in a position to judge.

As usual, Strindberg works himself into a frenzy, heckling a society gone astray, in which cretinism and softening of the brain have taken on epidemic proportions. In the eyes of the volatile writer, the Kingdom of Sweden has become a stronghold of stupidity where ecclesiastical, artistic, scientific and political elites make war on one another with absolutely magnificent imbecility.

But the man who gathered cones, not wanting to come off second best, astonished the world with an enormous artificial system that divided all cones into 67 classes, 23 families and 1,500 orders.

And as a final proof that his fatherland was now in a state of spiritual distress, he tells us that the pompous men in power have now succeeded in persuading the oppressed masses that “the state would collapse unless the people were prepared to grant a salary and professorship to a gentleman who had mounted a large number of bugs on zinc needles.”

…

For a long time, I used the classic insect pins from Austria, but as my interest in hoverflies deepened, I switched to pins from the Czech Republic. They’re cheaper. Otherwise there’s no great difference. They’re made of black enamelled steel, 40 millimetres long, with a little brass-yellow plastic head, and they come in seven sizes. The thickest is as stiff as a nail, while the thinnest, number 000, is as capricious and flexible as a French verb. You stick the pin right through the fly’s thorax. That’s all there is to it. For aesthetic reasons, you can use a couple of straight pins to spread the wings while they dry, but on the whole flies are very compliant collectibles. If you protect them in tight-fitting drawers from dermestid beetles and other misfortunes, they will last for several hundred years, which is a comforting thought for the entomologist.

About the drawers. The system was invented by a pedant but is nevertheless elegant. A lovely chest of large drawers full of small boxes under glass. The boxes, sixteen to a drawer, have no covers and can be moved around as new specimens are added or the old ones begin to overflow the banks. Suppose, for example, that one summer you decide to pin down a copious number of, say,
Brachyopa pilosa
in anticipation of the good time you’ll have later, over the winter, as you examine them all under the microscope in hopes of finding a specimen of the very similar but infinitely rarer and in every way mysterious
Brachyopa obscura
. And when you’ve filled all your boxes with
Brachyopa,
you just put in a new box and push the others along. Quite simply the same principle as in that children’s game where you move brightly coloured, hard plastic numbered tiles with your thumbs until you have them in numerical order.

Obviously, spring is going to feel like liberation.

I always save a few particularly difficult cases for the winter—aberrant specimens of critical families with many species:
Platycheirus, Cheilosia, Sphaerophoria
. Insects whose names arouse uncertainty as well as hopes of some small advance at the outermost limits of human knowledge. Restful handiwork, and exciting. Then—in winter, by air, around the world, on pins, in little aluminium film cans padded with Bubble Wrap—the most peculiar of these flies travel to renowned and respected experts of oracular status in service of the art of decoding the meandering choreography of the German classification tables.

A sea eagle, broad as a banner at a protest march, streaks past over the ice outside my window, and sometimes the crossbills are busy out there in the dusk, dropping cones on the terrace from the spruce at the corner, which I vow to cut down every autumn for the sake of the light. Ravens reconnoitre from the top of the radio tower on the other side of the village whose age no one knows. Otherwise nothing. The north wind and the west wind and half-smothered rumours of the villagers’ indiscretions and despair. When spring finally arrives in March, my flies sit in neat, straight rows, except for a few that endlessly travel or have been caught somewhere like nameless foot soldiers in the ranks of biology’s army of inadequately identified fly families. An empty space in the drawer is also a discovery.

In March, I begin sitting in the sun on the steps, and it is then, long before the snow is gone, before the woodlark, the robin and the joggers, that the first flies appear, although not hoverflies but attic flies, so called because they spend the winter in attics. They belong to the blowfly family, interesting creatures themselves, but not a fly one collects from sheer childish delight. At least not so far as I know. Unless possibly in March, when the buzz of any fly at all will pass as a hopeful harbinger of summer. There is something unalterably ominous about blowflies—the musty odour of cadavers and William Golding—which makes no one happy, with the possible exception of those inscrutable forensic entomologists who take pride in solving murder cases by studying the larvae of flies and other insects with names like
Sarcophagus,
Thanatophilus
and
Necrophorus,
found in the victim’s viscera. Based on the creatures that live in the dead and on their stage of development, such people can say an astonishing amount about when the crime was committed and, in certain cases, even determine that it did not occur where the body was found but took place somewhere else. A gloomy science with a truly stable market only in the USA. One can learn more about this subject in order to broaden one’s scientific knowledge, but its practical utility is generally limited. Moreover, you lose your appetite. And all you remember afterwards is the story of the Finnish charlady.

It was towards the end of the 1970s. A government bureaucrat in Finland found a number of fat fly larvae under the rug in his office. He immediately summoned the char. How in the world, he asked her, had his office come to be crawling with maggots? The charlady had no good answer. She might of course have made a number of amusing replies, some quite sarcastic, but she did not. She said only that she didn’t know, but that in any case it was not her fault. Where the maggots came from was a mystery. She had taken out the rug and beaten it only the day before, on that point she was absolutely certain. But the bureaucrat did not believe her, and so the charlady was given her notice on the spot. She was found guilty of having cleaned badly. And in addition she had lied. So good riddance.