Metamorphosis
Perfect sphere of potential. Fertile ovum of possibility. Nature’s beautifully engineered genesis a fractal microcosm of the world in gestation. Hours old or billions of years, time’s infinite tangle. Helical codex twisted around itself like the light-seeking creeper embracing the tree in leafy coils, wound together in complementary duality, calls cellular order from the fecund chaos. Construction through division. Specialisation through diversification. Complexity through the simplest of instructions. Living architecture of intelligent design, not crafted by some creationist deity’s hand, but chronology’s accumulated wisdom of constant experimentation.
Danaus plexippus. The Monarch butterfly begins.
Great grandson of Zeus, Danaus ruled over Libya’s sands. He sired fifty daughters, the Danaides, whom his twin brother Aegyptus demanded as wives for his fifty sons, so to acquire his sibling’s lands. Horrified Danaus built the world’s first ever ship and rowing it’s fifty oars fled across the sea to Argos with his children. He assumed the city’s crown from Gelanor, he who laughs, after his totemic wolf attacked the dominant bull of a grazing herd outside the city walls. A symbolic signal to the city’s people now Gelanor laughs no more. Danaus’ assumed his new throne lit by the flame eternal of Phoronius’s fire.
When Aegyptus and his sons arrived in Argos to claim their brides, to avert war Danaus reluctantly handed over his daughters to their forcefully betrothed, giving each a pointed dagger and sharp instructions to murder their new husbands on their wedding night. All but one killed their bridegrooms in the coldest of blood — including Plexippus, he who urges on horses — and buried their many heads at Lerna where the Hydra guards the entrance to the Underworld.
But one daughter Hypermnestra spared her husband, lynx-eyed Lynceus, as he in turn had spared her chastity on their wedding night. They begat a Danaid Dynasty of Argive Kings, whilst her sisters were punished in Sisyphean style by being forced to fill a bottomless bath with jugs of hopeless water. A futile mission without fruition. Damned to the infinite incompletion, of a task of relentless repetition. Forever.
Danaus plexippus. Your twelve names; Builder of ships. King of Argos. Betrayer of brother. Murderer of nephews and sons in law. Charioteer. Rider. Milkweed. Common tiger. Wanderer. Prince of Orange. King Billy butterfly. Black veined brown.
Firm body is birthed from soupy nutrition. A ‘hairy cat ravager’ (French ‘chatepelose’ or ‘hairy cat’ combines with English ‘piller’ or ‘ravager’ — ‘caterpillar’) takes shape. A tunnelled gut doored by jaws. Incubated inside, today’s imaginal cells cluster in inanimate suspension. Discs like old vinyl on the shelf, ready to spin out life’s music as tomorrow’s songs of eyes, legs and wings.
Pulsating machine of monstrous consumption chews noisily into the world. Eating itself out of its old house and into its new home. Ravenous as a spring woke bear. Milkweed yields to mandible as meadow grass to scythe. Head weaves in hypnotic loops to evade sticky latex hoops that might terminally tie this Teufelskatz (Swiss German — ‘Devil’s cat’) to its dinner.
Insatiable cavern of appetite swallows leaves. Two-hundred-fold its own weight disappears with rapacity to make a locust blush. Tiger-striped warning, absorbing its hosts distasteful milky sap to revolt the future’s hungry mouths. And when sated. Settled. Spun secretions, gossamer casket of shining threads, a cocoon womb of rebirth. But first a death. Of sorts.
Of sorting. Inside the gold-sheathed chrysalis an acidic suicide dissolves the hairy, footed grub. Form melts like a Dali timepiece. Waxen physicality pools. Glistening tube-entombed larva reduced to fluid essence. As tadpole to frog a radical reinvention, less evolution than reversion to lifeblood. What is, ends, and what will be, starts. The Devil’s cat a nightmarish memory, whose memories live on in the aviator it will become.
Imaginal discs drunk on rich potentiality conjure limbs and organs. Starving gut shrinks for sophisticated nectar sipping, not bales of mulchy leaf digestion. Scaled wings a pastel sketch of dusty beauty, mackerel iridescence. Soft askeletal skin calloused into chitinous exoskeletal armour. Leaf-walker, stem-crawler becomes sky-flyer, wind-surfer.
The butterfly bud blooms. Shimmering sleeve cracks open like a weary eyelid. What was base and voracious, is now delicate and serene. Billowed chest pumps wings erect, aroused rigidly to the sensuality of flight. Hairy cat ravager is now butter-thief, a witch transformed, a little soul, primed for the wingbeat that changes the world.
First flutter, gentle as a child’s sigh. Fledgling flapping, aerial ballet of flickering, strobing form flits with erratic elegance. Up. A fraction closer to the stars of all origin. And onwards. The initiation of a journey vast in scale and beyond one lifetime. A migration completed only by descendants. A dynastic flight spanning continents, seasons and multiple generations. Many frail but tenacious Lepidoptera (‘scale-wings’) will not return.
Genetic drumbeat marks time. Compound eyes, like seeds on a sunflower, track Helios’s celestial zenith. Light’s angles dance circadian rhythms, guiding voyagers out and home. No caterpillar devastation in these wanderers’ wake. Destructive slug now gentle visitor. Just tongues unfurling like fresh fern fronds. Supping sweet nectary secretions from mother Milkweed’s flowers.
We share the same crucible of existence. Born out of this world as fellow waves from a fraternal ocean, not into it like divine gifts. The humble Monarch who transcends the oral avarice of their greedy history. The true Sovereign who redreams themselves through a mid-life sleep of lucid reimagination. The noble Ruler who begins a joyous journey into the wild unknown they them self will never complete.
We are as butterflies. Ripe for what’s needed next. Let’s wrap ourselves in silken strands, metamorphosis time is here.
Ed Gillespie is the author of ‘Only Planet’
