The other day my friend Lucas texted me: “A meditation for a year of covid, the start of spring, and the cicada swarm,” with a screenshot of Joel 2:24-25:
24 The threshing floors will be filled with grain;
the vats will overflow with new wine and oil.25 “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten—
the great locust and the young locust,
the other locusts and the locust swarm—
my great army that I sent among you.
I’m not one to go to the Bible for comfort—it is much better for violent tales of dream-interpretation and punishment—but this spring, as the earth thaws and people emerge from their torpor, I guess I can take some heart in the phrase: I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.
That’s the NIV translation, at least; the KJV puts it somewhat differently:
25 And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller [sic], and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.
If you are wondering how locust / cankerworm / caterpiller / palmerworm became the almost-Seussian great locust / young locust / other locusts / locust swarm of the NIV, you are not alone. I myself waded into an ancient and answerless exegetical debate that is almost too tedious to recount. Basically, nobody knows what exactly the four Hebrew words refer to in this context: different stages of the same locust, different species of locusts, or totally different insects.1 But, since Joel is apocalyptic literature, it doesn’t really matter: the point is that God’s “great army” will terrorize his people, that death and ruin must come before the good times can begin.
Yesterday my friend Vita sent me a screenshot, along with “Happy bday week!”, that read:
Billions of cicadas are expected to emerge in several states in the next few weeks after 17 years underground, just in time to help orchestrate the soundtrack of summer.
People sometimes confuse cicadas and locusts, but they aren’t even closely related. Billions of locusts would be an Exodus-grade plague; billions of cicadas will just be really, really loud. As the weather warms, the foretold nymphs of Brood X’s periodical cicadas will crawl from the ground and molt into garnet-eyed adults, buzzing off into the trees and leaving empty shells, or exuviae, behind. The males will make a racket, mate, and die. (Many, of course, will just die.) In August the nymphs will hatch and descend into the earth. When they see sunlight again, I will be forty-four.
Christine Hayes, Professor of Religious Studies at Yale, notes that the last prophetic books of the Old Testament date to the time of the return of the first exiles to the Promised Land. Rather than experiencing the glorious homecoming foretold by pre-exilic prophets, they find themselves in poverty, toiling to rebuild the temple, surrounded by hostile factions, lacking political autonomy, and generally bummed out. New prophets insist that God is displeased because the temple is unbuilt, but once the temple’s done, the goalposts keep moving. Promised peace fades into the distance, to a time of judgment, to the eschaton, to the end.
“I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Monday. “I so badly want to be done. I know you all so badly want to be done. We are just almost there, but not quite yet.” When reality doesn’t live up to the oracles, the world requires further grimness, further prophecy, and a future that gets further and further away.
Charles Wright, a favorite poet of mine who once lived on Locust Avenue in Charlottesville, Virginia, wrote in a coda to one of his poems:
I slip the word in my shirt pocket: Time.
To warm it, to keep it dark, to keep it back from Forever.
I fold it in half and hold it there.
Like the cicada, however, it leaves its body and goes about its business.
Slick shell, such beautiful wings,
A corpse to reckon with.
Memento mori, perhaps.
This week I will turn twenty-seven; when the cicadas return I will be forty-four. There are ways of keeping time beyond the tick and shuffle of papers and clocks, meetings and work, birthdays and holidays: Jupiter’s 12-year trip around the sun, the return of Halley’s Comet every 75 years, biennial plants that take two years to bloom and then die.
Here is another: a billion flightless insects burrowed beneath America, feeding silently on roots, waiting to emerge, waiting for the end.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
I have had three songs on repeat this week, “For No One For Now,” from the Lael Neale record I posted last week; “Friends on Ice,” from Yung’s recent record, Ongoing Dispute; and Roy Orbison’s “Dream”:
Pharoah Sanders’ magnificent collaboration with Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra, Promises, has also been on heavy rotation.
on the screen
I rewatched The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Coen brothers’ 2001 neo-noir about Ed Crane, a taciturn barber who finds himself, as most Coen characters do, in an escalating and ineluctable sequence of disasters. It’s rather straight-up for neo-noir, to the point that it almost seems worth dropping the prefix: it’s shot in black and white, mostly indoors, often at night. The dialogue, as in older noirs, is important-sounding and empty, with a wryness that never really breaks the surface. There are several colorful, fast-talking characters, however, that are more from the Coen canon than the films of the 50s. In that sense, it’s almost an anti-noir: Crane, like a hardboiled detective, broods and thinks and hates people who talk too much, and yet he is always the person least in control, with little idea of what’s going on—a sort of deadpan, existentialist counterpoint to The Man Who Knew Too Much. After all, in the Coens’ America, the disillusioned and well-intentioned are usually no match for the hucksters, the experts, the law.
Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson’s 2020 documentary about her father’s senescence, is the kind of documentary that I tend to really like: metafilmic, personal, eccentric, lingering. The central conceit has Johnson, who lost her mother to Alzheimer’s years earlier, filming her father as he acts out various slapstick ways of dying—he, too, is beginning to lose his memory. An attempt at joyously and confusedly confronting death, it does squander some of the good stuff on gimmicks and suffers from a kind of structural messiness—it was almost as if the idea was so good that they forgot to finish shaping it into something—but it’s certainly worth watching.
on the bookshelf
Lorrie Moore’s short stories are probably the place to start—Birds of America has some of my all-time favorites—but Anagrams, her first novel, is the tale of a despondent and lonely woman attempting to make sense of her life and her few relationships amid the mishearings and misunderstandings inherent in language. Brilliant in that Nabokovian puzzle-box way, it’s also wonderfully lowbrow and excessive, like someone chortling at their own joke. It’s also the first time I’ve laughed out loud reading a book in a while.
meme museum
Recently a video appeared in my feed of a small dog zooming around an obstacle course, its trainer running frantically to keep up. (With a little Googling, I found out that this was Gabby the papillon at a Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show agility competition in 2019.) Days later, the same account posted an edited version of the video, an exact match of the original with the important exception that Gabby had been replaced by a miniature animated Shrek. I love it not only because it’s stupid but also because it’s not really any stupider than a dog show is in the first place. I also love it because, for something so stupid, it clearly took a considerable amount of time to make.
from my incoming texts
“I doubt a low income family is going to be investing in NFTs”
“I suffer from such referential mania”
“Finally I spent a considerable amount of time thinking of globes and atlases”
weekly wiki
Other attempts include Julius A. Bewer’s shearer / swarmer / lapper / finisher and J.M.P. Smith’s shearer / locust / hopper / destroyer; Ovid R. Sellers notes that “in the 1935 edition Meek has changed ‘destroyer’ to ‘stripper,’” which, I mean, come on, guys.