Beeing and Nothingness

On Sunday, the Independent posed a terrifying question: Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? [Article includes, in the penultimate sentence, the most perplexing use of the phrase ‘more prosaically’ I’ve seen in a while (is there anything poetic about reduced sperm counts?).] Look on this, and despair:

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

How apt an allegory for the alienating effects of technologies designed to aid communication, for our increasing isolation from familial and social contacts, and for the desertification of modern life!

Well, not just an allegory, since every schoolchild knows (as the article linked to reminds us) that bees actually are necessary for the survival of the human race. Who could doubt it? When Aristaeus lost his bees, he was so traumatized by this catastrophe that he saw fit to curse his gods and to pray for death and destruction. And appropriately, the loss of the bees on that occasion was down to Orpheus, whose lyre was undoubtedly the earliest prototype of the Nokia Communicator (OK, a bit of a stretch, I admit).

So easily do we slip back into metaphor and allegory, when we attempt to talk about bees! Bees cannot help but be allegorical, even when they’re getting lost.

Book IV of the Georgics has a lot to answer for, of course, whether we’re considering the beehive as a model society, or imagining that bees are endowed with some kind of divine intelligence. They’re there to show us the moral value of hard work (*shudder*), the rule of law, and an orderly political system. Homer in the second Iliad had had the Greek armies swarming like bees; Virgil goes on to apply the simile, in the first Aeneid, to the Tyrians as they labour to build the city that will become Carthage; Milton will imitate it in comparing the assembly of demons at Pandemonium to bees (insects which, apparently, can, round Milton’s way, be observed to ‘expatiate, and confer
/ Their State affairs’).

That the bee simile keeps getting recycled like this is appropriate, since the activity of bees has long been used to figure the practice of literary imitatio. It all begins with Seneca’s famous letter on the art of reading (Ep. mor. 84), and takes off from there. By the Middle Ages and Renaissance, everyone’s buzzing with bee analogies. G. W. Pigman’s article on ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’ [JSTOR] lists a whole swarm of ‘em. The bee is either a paradigm for ‘transformative imitation’, since it gathers pollen from flowers and by some sort of ‘digestive’ process converts it into honey, a completely different product; or else it represents a kind of literary eclecticism, because it gathers its honey from diverse sources (the ‘florilegium’ thing). There is some confusion here, because the ancients weren’t sure exactly how bees made honey. Seneca pleads ignorance on the matter. He seems to favour the ‘digestive’ explanation (otherwise how could his analogy work?), but does mention that ‘some authorities believe that bees do not possess the art of making honey, but only of gathering it’. Pliny the Elder thought so, anyway. I think the persistence of both versions, although they seem to contradict each other, is important for the aesthetic of imitation generally, with its paradoxical insistence on difference in sameness and identity in otherness: ‘…ut etiam si apparuerit unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est appareat’ [‘so that even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came’]. Now that we know more about apian physiology (or rather, now that knowledge of bee physiology is a matter for scientists rather than natural philosophers), the productive tension that is integral to the imitative aesthetic can no longer be supported.

Of course, the fact that modern communications technology is killing all the bees will serve as a compelling argument for the decline of art in an age of mechanical reproduction and the deadening effects of the culture industry. The ideal that the mobile phone represents, which is the ideal of noiseless, loss-free communication, has given rise to a complex of anxieties surrounding notions of originality, authorship, and intellectual property. This commodification of culture is incompatible with the poetics of imitation, the generative dynamic that produced the world’s great literature, which is now obsolete. And so the bees must die, and all beauty and truth must die with them.

The bee has proved an all-purpose insect, ever apt for analogy, always ready to service any allegorical needs you may have. Its very ubiquity can be annoying, though. Kind of makes you wish it would just buzz off. It so happens that I’m reading Our Mutual Friend at the moment, and, although I usually find Dickens’s facetiousness quite irritating (look who’s talking!), I must say that I found this passage very amusing (I’ll quote at length, because paraphrase won’t do it justice):

'And how do YOU like the law?'
'A—not particularly,' returned Eugene.
'Too dry for you, eh? Well, I suppose it wants some years of sticking to, before you master it. But there's nothing like work. Look at the bees.'
'I beg your pardon,' returned Eugene, with a reluctant smile, 'but will you excuse my mentioning that I always protest against being referred to the bees?'
'Do you!' said Mr Boffin.
'I object on principle,' said Eugene, 'as a biped—'
'As a what?' asked Mr Boffin.
'As a two-footed creature;—I object on principle, as a two-footed creature, to being constantly referred to insects and four-footed creatures. I object to being required to model my proceedings according to the proceedings of the bee, or the dog, or the spider, or the camel. I fully admit that the camel, for instance, is an excessively temperate person; but he has several stomachs to entertain himself with, and I have only one. Besides, I am not fitted up with a convenient cool cellar to keep my drink in.'
'But I said, you know,' urged Mr Boffin, rather at a loss for an answer, 'the bee.'
'Exactly. And may I represent to you that it's injudicious to say the bee? For the whole case is assumed. Conceding for a moment that there is any analogy between a bee, and a man in a shirt and pantaloons (which I deny), and that it is settled that the man is to learn from the bee (which I also deny), the question still remains, what is he to learn? To imitate? Or to avoid? When your friends the bees worry themselves to that highly fluttered extent about their sovereign, and become perfectly distracted touching the slightest monarchical movement, are we men to learn the greatness of Tuft-hunting, or the littleness of the Court Circular? I am not clear, Mr Boffin, but that the hive may be satirical.'
'At all events, they work,' said Mr Boffin.
'Ye-es,' returned Eugene, disparagingly, 'they work; but don't you think they overdo it? They work so much more than they need—they make so much more than they can eat—they are so incessantly boring and buzzing at their one idea till Death comes upon them—that don't you think they overdo it? And are human labourers to have no holidays, because of the bees? And am I never to have change of air, because the bees don't? Mr Boffin, I think honey excellent at breakfast; but, regarded in the light of my conventional schoolmaster and moralist, I protest against the tyrannical humbug of your friend the bee. With the highest respect for you.'