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moth

Greetings everyone.  It's been a long time since I've
been on this list (a year, at least, since I've really
kept up),  but after a little convincing last saturday
(hi amy and rick!) I decided to check it out again.  

Mark, I am so glad you're still around.
Hello, Chris!

it's nice to be back.

I was thinking about Moth tonight and it reminded me
again of a little discussion I tried to start up
before.  No one ever told me if this was already
thoroughly discussed, but I still get tingly when i
think of the song's connection, in my mind, at least,
to Annie Dillard's _Holy the firm_.  So, I thought i
would include the excerpt here...read it, delete it,
comment on it...but please don't hate me if it is a
conversation already run into the ground. 

you are all wonderful!

Here it is (finally).  It's from _Holy the Firm_ by
Annie Dillard, Perrenial Library, 1988, pages 14-17.
I have so much to say about it, but I want you to get
your impression first:

        **Two summers ago I was camping alone in the
Blue
Ridge Mountains in Virginia. I had hauled myself
andgear up there to read, among other things, a novel
about Rimbaud that had made me want to be a writer 
when I was sixteen; I was hoping it would do it again.
So I read, lost, every day sitting under a tree by my
tent, while warblers swung in the leaves overhead and
bristle worms trailed their inches over the twiggy
dirt at my feet; and I read every night by
candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest
and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing,
where my light made a ring.
        Moths kept flying into the candle. They would
hiss
and recoil, lost upside down in the shadows among my
cooking pans.  Or they would singe their wings and
fall, and their hot wings, if melted, would stick to
the first thing they touched--a pan, a lid, a
spoon--so that the snagged moths could flutter only in
tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. These I could
release by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I
would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of
moth wings, triangles of shiny dust here and there on
the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water, and
replenished
candles, and read on.
        One night a moth flew into the candle, was
caught,
burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the
candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my
page, because I saw it all. A golden female moth, a
biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the
fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck,
flamed, frazzled and fried in a second.  Her moving
wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle
or light in the clearing and creating out of the
darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, red
trunk of a pine.  At once the light contracted
again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul
smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled,
blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her
head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise;
heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it
was all over, her head was, so far as I could
determine gone, gone the long way of her wings and
legs. Had she been new, or old?  Had she mated and
laid her eggs, had she done her work?  All that was
left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and
thorax--a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube
jammed
upright in the candle’s round pool.


        And then this moth-essence, this spectacular
skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning.
The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking
abdomen to the jagged hole where her head should be,
and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that
robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That
candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height,
side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for
two hours, until I blew her out.
        She burned for two hours without changing,
without
bending or leaning--only glowing within, like a
building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like
a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God,
while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in
Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while
night pooled wetly at my feet.**

with that, goodnight.

Jeni
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