Recognition
The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.
-- G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
... It is only by abandoning our usual conception of material things as relatively unstructured, completely unconceptual, and ontologically limited in their nature that we can attain a proper understanding of what they are.
-- Kit Fine, Things and Their Parts
A process is one thing, but it may have parts. The colony was a process, of which she was one part. So many thousands of her sister's legs extended, swinging in endless procession over the pheromone path she, as part of the colony, laid. This spindling branch, far above the earth. This path meant food. Together, it would be that they could gather from here.
This piece of knowledge from another and that from yet another.
The colony's knowledge. The colony-process only acts through its parts, though it cannot be known merely by examination of each part in turn. The colony is not constructed by combining ants. The ants are understood as abstracted from the colony. A listless squinting eye gazing down at the dirt might, for an instant, see the whole. One collective swirling of black splotches against the red sand. A being whose parts are not contained within one corporeal boundary.
They together must lay the trail, tend the fungal gardens, groom the larvae, repair the tunnel walls, carry the eggs to new chambers, remove the dead, forage for leaves, protect the foragers from parasites, and build new galleries after the rain. It had been many cycles since the last rain. Her part had been nearer the halls and tunnels when it last had. Her part changed, as all parts did with time.
Antennae flick the air. Humid. Pressure dropping.
We shall need more earth soon.
Further up toward the source, the trail was needed. She extends up the crooked branch as one of many thousand tiny tendrils of a single being. A singular goal and an inherently shared purpose. Closing on it now. The air is gray, still, and heavy. The branch wobbles slightly.
Reverberations in the air. Heavy drops speed by. She is pushed rapidly by the exploding surface tension of one falling bead. Spinning in a disoriented kaleidoscope of branches and sky, she finally stops. Bobbing gently at an obtuse angle, she is suspended in air. The legs flail, and the antennae spin. Stuck.
We must find the trail again.
She begins to feel vibrations through the binding threads that adhere to her abdomen and thorax. They grow more intense, with higher frequency. She shakes, suspended in the web as they intensify.
A black shape engulfs her field of view from above. Eight monstrous legs and more mouthparts working fast, covering her in yet more adhesive wire. The grey of the sky disappears for black in swaths of thread as she is rolled and spun.
We must not lose this one yet. We plead to you!
The hungry industrious appendages stop. The head turns down and so many eyes loom there like moons in an otherworldly sky. She makes a plea to the many eyes and winding mouthparts. Anything that she might do to escape this fate.
In rare communion, the spider spoke with her. She spoke of strange things, her words weaving an unsettling covenant. She spoke of stillness, of not moving for long periods of time as if to be activated by some perturbation. She spoke of time, of seeing many more cycles than her part of the colony had seen. She spoke of risk and apprehension to act. Most striking and terrifying in her words was the aloneness with which she announced these things. She spoke to the pleading colony member in terms of "I", as if it were some part which had no relation to any whole. The spider spoke in terms of "what was due" from the world. What was due came from takings. The ant had known only of claims. Claims were made by the colony -the process- for one part, so that the "we" may see its goals through.
The spider's enigmatic ideas seemed on the cusp of inconceivable, as if the mind's shape bent against the force of their consideration. Takings and dues required the "I". This, in turn, seemed to require the abandonment of the conception of "self" as essentially of the colony. Self, in the eight-legged one's words, was prior to the whole. It must reject the fundamentality of its nature as part.
From the world to the spider’s ensnaring threads. What was due? Whatever came? Whatever was taken. So the eight-legged orator claimed. From the spider's "I", she spoke that this ant captive was due by the world a new fortune. For she had been a lucky one. The one who ended up here was to begin a taking of her own. To complete it, something in return was due, of course. Merely that the next trail she lay must be under this branch so the colony may take and eat whatever falls there.
Befuddled and terrified, the ant agreed. And so she was cut loose and dropped, almost floating, to the earth below where she began her concentric search for a trail back to the nest.
When she moved as colony-member again, she felt the pull of the eight-legged one's entreaties. Something clicked and at the same time felt disjointed. She had a taking now. That seemed to make her new. She had done something new and therefore had something new. But in what sense? The colony only "has". It’s parts alone do not “have”. We have. No. Now she - her "I"- had. But to have here did not mean the same as it did before. How does an "I" have without another to acknowledge it, and wouldn't that make it a part of the "we", for even the colony could only "have" in contrast with yet other colonies? Mustn't there be claims of some "we" for havings to take place at all? No! These could be rejected, the spider had said! They must be rejected, or perhaps she would never take or be due from the world. But how could they be rejected? Merely by saying one rejected them? How can one reject a trail one is yet still walking? Perhaps the power of declaration had some power of the "I" that lay untapped until the spider's sermon had availed it. She could invoke that power!
When she laid a trail from the nest to the spot below the spider's branch, she did so -she felt- while rejecting the colony. Her "I" laid this trail. This was her work now. Far above, merely a blur, a dark shape occupied one corner of the nook in the branches where she had bargained for her freedom. A slow and cold breeze blew.
When the trail was complete, she pivoted back toward the nest. She felt ambivalent about laying the return path. It was to be that we, the colony, laid the return path differently. Now, she saw that she need not. It was merely her choice to, should she please. Those eight luminous eyes and the fear they struck. Like a god. Like a reminder in her mind of her newfound freedom.
Upon her return, the antennation she shared with her sisters directed them to the new trail. Her new trail. When she saw with the "I", she saw that the path was hers. She had made it, and so its fruits would also be hers by extension. She had been a lucky one. She felt pride, a different kind of pride. Her sisters had simply these missed deeper secrets. As she touched antennae with them, she came to realize that they were being tricked. They, in fact, were becoming takings themselves! They were taken by the colony, from their own "I"s. From her new vantage point as herself alone, she saw that they were all being made to sacrifice their "I", giving up what was most theirs. Perhaps the spider could help them as well?
A line of black dots streams slowly from the sand ramparts below, along the new trail, out towards the spot where the ant had fallen back to earth.
Upon the next watch, her sisters return from the new trail. They bear a strange parcel across their backs. A larger-bodied wood-colony member, some unlucky one. It appears strange, white, and bristly. The prize of her efforts.
A bounty. The colony gradually ate from the white bristly body. It overfilled the coffers. Her sisters worked and ate by her fortune now.
Those who ate from the white body began to act strangely, though she seemed unaffected after several replenishments. She would watch them stray from the trails and make uncanny proclamations, heads tilted upward, antennae spinning in the air as if search for some unseen other to interface with.
Those who ate soon began to abandon the colony. They would cite peculiar reasons: they must leave to seek the sun, that only brightness was worth seeking. They spoke as the spider had spoken: of "I". They would say that the colony had no claim over them.
A slow and steady exfiltration of these pilgrims took place. She began to see that she had brought them a new mode of being. To each their "I", until all the parts stopped moving as colony. When there is no "we", she thought, it will take from them no more. They will have freedom as she had. Would there be no "we" or would the "we" merely be silenced? Were its parts any less its parts when distance separated them? Had each pilgrim's "I" silently been there all along?
She saw that the colony had been more than a concatenation of "I"s, for self-interest alone could not justify the laying of trails that required thousands to walk, or the building of chambers that required generations to fill. But what power did these claims of the many have over what was due to the "I"? Was that the right way to view it?
The tunnels thinned, the trails dried, and fewer and fewer of her sisters returned. Her brothers were long gone, having flown straight for the sun. That supreme taker to whom nothing was truly due in the depths of the nest soon shriveled and could demand no more.
Near the end of this cycle, she stood at the edge of the nest at the entrance. A great globe of a moon sat in the sky. She stood on a trail she had laid. What was a "trail" when the last gatherer was gone? It was hers. But who was there to know that?
This piece of knowledge from another and that from yet another.
Now, what other? Surely that deeper sort of knowledge that the spider had imparted. Some singular power of the "I" that now only she was here to possess.
The ground felt cold. She had not moved for some time. There was no reason to move. As the spider had said, this was waiting. Was waiting always waiting for? It seemed an alien concept.
She returned to the nest to wait out the cold. It was so empty that she could walk anywhere through the tunnels now, unimpeded. She was free, along with all the absent pilgrims.
She entered each chamber. She went first to the coffers. A mound of white bristling food still sat unfinished. It belonged to her. She had brought it. The others had their free choice to leave it. She ate. She continued on to the brood chamber, palpating the tunnel walls with her antennae, reading the temperature, feeling for vibrations. It was cold. No movement.
All of the food was hers now. As she ate and ate, she began to see the world anew. She had not yearned for the sun as the pilgrims had, but she saw what it meant. It meant freedom. This freedom was of a radical kind, like that of a mantis in the air. One's "I" should not be bound to do all the things that the colony imposes. What good to the "I" is the brood, the trail, the walls, the tunnels unless the "I" professes that it wants them! Better now that they are empty. Better that the bustle be gone. What the individual should be bound to is only what they seek, whatever that may be, perhaps the sun. What better pleasure than to see the sun! She had laid the trail for that great pleasure for each colony member by letting them eat of the white flesh, giving them the spider's knowledge, and letting them see their "I". Only then could they see the true order of things. Then they could see that all the takings from the "I" for the colony were just for the colony's sake, but the colony had no "I"!
Her time now consisted of eating from the coffers, spiritless trail-laying, wandering the tunnels, and so much waiting. Why must she wait? She dreamt of antennations with a secret fluid that imparted arcane secrets to her. There was a notion that these secrets were from the same well of knowledge that the spider had drawn from. Then, the spider's great eyes would appear in the sky. Eight floating yellow moons would hang there and slowly drift away as if falling infinitely backwards into some unknown dimension behind the sky.
Another cycle passed. The coffers dwindled. A mere husk remained where there had been a bright white bounty before. The tunnels were difficult to traverse, and grains of sand blocked many passages. She had laid many ingress paths for the sun-pilgrims to come back, but none returned.
"I" must have workers and food.
What process was the "I"? It could certainly do different things than a "we". Surely it too had parts? Is any one thing also its own progenitor? Was the spider's "I" of its own making? If it were truly such a self-originating thing, how was it communicable to another at all? The spider surely was a part of some greater whole, even it it was not a colony. Can one cease to be a part of some whole of which one is constituted merely by volition? Did parthood in some way shape the constituent individuals? It seemed to her that there were kinds of parthood, and thus kinds of wholes, but it was all a muddle.
All this waiting left so much room for thought. These thoughts plagued her, though none seemed to stick. They would appear in her mind, a staggering question, and evaporate like mist before they could be outlined. She wondered how the spider's deep knowledge had ever manifested without having any other knowledge from which to be justified. Had she just willed it into existence? Perhaps, in the same way, one willed oneself to reject the colony? Maybe if one waited or thought long enough, perhaps ages, the "I" was merely due some basic knowledge by the world.
Hunger overwhelms her. She feels brittle. The sky is red, and the sun is leaving her, bending away behind the horizon. She feels a strange sensation. The "I" is threatened. The "I" cannot sacrifice itself for itself. It must act or... Or what? She feels compelled. The entrance to the nest she stands at the mouth of is just a hole. It is just an absence, not a thing. It is hers, perhaps, but not subject to any claim in the face of risk.
Upon stirring the next day, she feels the weight of her antennae. It will rain again.
We shall need more earth soon.
She speaks as colony-member in her thoughts as if it might summon sun-pilgrims back to her solemn empire. An empty act. How can it be empty when "I" have done it? What makes the act done, not merely a hollow gesture?
The first drops land far from the nest and quickly grow closer in a cacophonous wall of grey. Soon, pieces of the nest's buttress are flung about by the impacts, never to be repaired. She feels fear. She retreats to the inner tunnels, then turns back. Nothing to protect. Nothing to move. She flees. High-ground must be found amidst the panic and the torrential crashing.
She makes her way arduously towards the tree. The spider will be there. She is blasted askew after only a few steps and must right herself. Forward, she moves, legs flicking blades of grass and earth. She reaches the trunk. The verticality and the branches offer protection from the speeding drops. Streams of pulling water tear past across the bark.
Across, this fork, back to the same spindly bough. She passes several pilgrims clinging to the branches. They do not move; spikes of odd color protrude from their motionless heads, reaching towards the sky. These were the branches. But what hangs now between them, where she once was ensnared, is only some mottled silk and empty husks. The eight-legged seer is gone. The drops indifferently tear at the few remaining strands of web. Perhaps the spider, too, had a brood somewhere. Perhaps deeper in the tree. Had she left these webs as the pilgrims did for the sun or as the worker does for what must be gathered?
We must gather before the chambers flood.
