Plato, Love, and Waxing Poetically Nostalgic about Cicadas
The myth of the cicadas (as told by Socrates in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus):
"The story is that once upon a time these creatures [the cicadas] were men--men of an age before there were any Muses--and that when the latter came into the world, and music made its appearance, some of the people of those days were so thrilled with pleasure that they went on singing, and quite forgot to eat and drink until they actually died without noticing it. From them in due course sprang the race of cicadas, to which the Muses have granted the boon of needing no sustenance right from their birth, but of singing from the very first, without food or drink, until the day of their death..."
When I first read Phaedrus, I was struck by this story—the idea of men and women being so entranced with music that they begin singing long and hard until they finally starve to death without even knowing. The downsides of this scenario (it's hard to enjoy music if you're dead) and the impossibility of the details aside (how does one sing in a state of dehydration anyway?), I was enamored with the myth at once. In my old grad school text, which I pulled out tonight to find the quote above, the cicada passages are underlined with an excited note in the margin (The Myth of the Cicadas! scrawled in blue). Not only is this idea of singing to the end, of being possessed full tilt until one's last breath is drawn an excellent (and crucial) bit of the backdrop of the overall conversation between Phaedrus and Socrates, which is about love, writing, being possessed, what it means to desire (among other things), but the story is one that has undoubtedly shaped my personal celebratory adoration of that funny little red-eyed creature—THE CICADA—itself. As well as the nostalgia I feel when I read that the cicadas are out and about once again this summer in some states along the East Coast.
During the summer of 2011, when Tennessee was gifted with the 13-year, brood XIX cicada, I found myself immediately reading their shrill, winged rituals through the summery pulse of the Phaedrus. Week after week, as the cicadas sang us to sleep at night and called us to wake in the morning, I heard their songs and thought of art. I listened and followed Socrates and Phaedrus as they walked along the river and discussed what happens when words are transformed from living speech, face-to-face conversation and put down on the page ("And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place...") I listened and fell asleep with the images of pages, like cicadas, in search of places to land. I imagined the muses proffering their gifts to earth and a group of receivers being so overwhelmed by their aesthetic impulses that their very bodies became art, people who died and then, instead of being admonished for forgetting their needs, were honored with the even bigger gift of "cicada-hood," which simply, wonderfully, allowed them to drop back down (or emerge up through tiny holes) to the earth and sing passionately once again.
And now the 17-year cicada songs are in abundance this summer for those lucky ones on the east coast. Obviously, reading the stories of them (but not the recipes as I like them too much to eat them) has made me positively nostalgic for the 13-year brood. One of my best memories from that summer, was the night when the cicadas we had been waiting for began creeping their way up out of the ground in Whites Creek. A few days after their arrival in Nashville, FINALLY, it was happening: exoskeletons like amber stones glinting moonlit in the grass. Look: there's one, there's another, and wait, there's another! until we noticed the ground itself was moving as well as the bark on the trees. Night itself had gone to liquid as the cicadas crawled through the grass and climbed by the hundreds—each one steady, steadfast in search of a tree, branch, or side of house; each one in need of a place to stop, burst violently open, and emerge head first, arched up and back out of its shell. With our flashlights, camera, and hats (the latter after a few gooey bodies landed on our heads), John and I spent a few hours just watching. Utterly entranced, as one cicada nymph after the other split out of its skeleton to emerge and slowly unfurl its still-wet and tentatively fragile wings. When we eventually went inside and to bed, it took us a long time to fall asleep. We kept talking about what we had seen and how we had never experienced anything like it.
Fortunately, cicadas made their way into our dreams.
And when we woke in the morning, we knew the price of sleep was worth it.
For there they were: the music lovers. Singing away. Trilling wildly.
For nothing more (but nothing less) than a little bit of love.
