On silkworms and butterflies
Correspondence with Mr. K has been taken back up again, like a forgotten piece of knitting one returns to. And each of our emails (I've succumbed) has felt like an offering, a writing prompt for the other person.
In one of my updates to Mr. K, I shared the opening essay of my recently completed manuscript. It's a piece about new motherhood and how it makes tactile all the metaphors pregnancy and childbirth affords. In it, I describe how the first month after the baby is born, the Taiwanese practice of sitting the month, feels like being nestled in a silkworm cocoon. I recall a childhood memory of my mother bringing home a box of silkworms on a carpet of mulberry leaves, and how this process of spinning silk, the singularity of the silkworm's focus before its metamorphosis, so aptly describes the experience of 坐月子. This is a metaphor that is made all the more material for me because of my family's business in textiles (think silk, threads, strands).
To which Mr. K responded with his own essayette about the Monarch butterfly evoking the real magic (is this an oxymoron?) of imaginal cells, the special goop of cells that swims inside the chrysalis, rearranging themselves into what will eventually become the butterfly. "Imaginal," which scientifically and poetically describes the potential of the caterpillar's becoming. Does that mean that we - on a conceptual and cellular level - imagine ourselves into being? I was never good at science in school and mistakenly believed I wasn't interested in it, but now I realize it is because no one told me science was poetry!
Butterflies remind me of Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi's existential question, which he poses in the shape of a dream. The story goes: Zhuangzi drifted into sleep one day and had a vivid dream that he was a butterfly. The dream was so real that when he woke, he wondered whether he was actually the butterfly now dreaming of a man? It’s the question - more than 2000 years before The Matrix - that tickles the mind: Is what we're experiencing reality or is this all an illusion?
In his blogpost, Mr. K is the butterfly, flitting in the sky, making his way home.
