blindered, blinkered

"...although new studies have shown that some insects can on occasion strike out into new territory, leaving instinct behind, still a blindered and blinkered enslavement to instinct is the rule, as the pine processionaries show. Pine processionaries are moth caterpillars with shiny black heads, who travel about at night in pine trees along silken roads of their own making. They straddle the road in a tight file, head to rear touching, and each caterpillar adds its thread to the original track first laid by the one who happens to lead the procession. Fabre interferes; he catches them on a daytime exploration approaching a circular track, the rim of a wide palm vase in his greenhouse. When the leader of the insect train completes a full circle, Fabre removes the caterpillars still climbing the case and brushes away all extraneous tracks. Now he has a closed circuit of caterpillars, leaderless, trudging around his vase on a never-ending track. He wants to see how long it will take them to catch on. To his horror, they march not just an hour or so, but all day. When Fabre leaves the greenhouse at night, they are still tracing that wearying circle, although night is the time they usually feed..."

{--Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek}

that scientist goes on to discover that the caterpillars continued this trek for a week, battling heaves and swoons of temperature, lacking food or rest. he concludes,

     "...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 advice them to abandon it..."

and today,  effectively snowed in (!) i am wondering just how apt that scientific nomenclature is, not just to describe the weary caterpillars but my own state as well. (or, collectively, the state festooned on us all.) it is not uncommon to feel my peripheries have begun to narrow, malleable but firm, as brass. as time lurches on it seems technology and its ability to daze and strand us before glowing lights, screens and rectangles of all kind, has a tighter grip than ever before. only, so immaculately engineered is it that one does not even realize until they squirm, just slightly, in their chair.

a few things were stirred in me as i read Annie Dillard and her showcase of J. Henri Fabre. mainly, was Fabre's conclusion, that the caterpillars are denied "any gleam of intelligence in their be night minds." were the caterpillars truly experiencing a deficit of intellect? or was it merely that they could not perform their intrinsic life work when wrested from their 'silken roads' and set to perform on the vase of the palm plant? and so with humans, while we are embroidering, knitting, baking, running, feeling, opining and creating with less tenacity than ever, we are spurred by a Faceless Many to type, text, message, display, project and worry more. (excuse the irony of this, while i put these words into virtual space but virtue of a kind of tool i am rebuking.) at times i feel i am one of those shiny-headed caterpillars, responding to what is before me without leaning away and looking down and all-around.

what empowering tools can we wield? are all honest creative gestures remedy for this? does laying one's face in the snow and tasting the ground nullify that terrible Wanting feeling we often experience when we scroll through the internet? it seems my own intellect lacks any rudimentary glimmer in my wider and more complicated version of mr  Fabre's vase.