Many things that we encounter are mysterious. There are phenomena that seem inexplicable. The world is strangely self-evident, but what this evidence proves is unknown to me.
One morning, before dawn at the end of July, I walked with my dog along the leafy edge of a park. The air was suffused with a loud, high-pitched whine. This sound was continuous, without pulse or rhythm of any kind, a noise pitched above a buzz and more penetrating than a hum. The whine suggested some kind of radiation, an emanation, as it were, from electrical current or magnetism or some other source of energy. I wasn’t able to localize the whining sound. It came from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously and its volume neither decreased nor increased with my motion – in other words, the pervasive whine was oddly unapproachable, generated in some other dimension either without space or inserted into the interstices of the terrain that I was traversing. I wondered if the noise was associated with the transformers on the utility poles under which I was walking, but, since the sound couldn’t localized, this hypothesis had to be rejected. In any event, I don’t know that currents of electricity or their phase changes in transformers emit any audible signal. At the base of the hill overlooking the park, there is a lagoon where some Canadian geese were gathered, and the river that bisects our town flowed in its trough along the edge of fields, a soundless brown current, and, hidden from sight among a jungle of trees and brush, the wastewater treatment plant was spread across a terrace on the hillside. I know those buildings, windowless and, even, without doors for all practical purposes, big brick boxes that concealed their contents as if ashamed of them. On some occasions, when I have walked on the dead-end lane between those mysterious brick sheds, I have heard clanking inside, sepulchral banging as if fetters were being dragged across a concrete floor and, perhaps, the whisper of fans, but, so far as I could remember, the place didn’t produce a high-pitched whining noise.
I walked through the park on the sidewalk near the bandshell and pavilion. The sound neither amplified nor lessened. It remained equidistant from every place through which I moved.
Then, the sun rose, a red hot lump of gore slowly detaching itself from the horizon. Liquid threads of blood moored the sun to the line between sky and earth. I was viewing the light through an atmosphere congested with smoke particles from vast fires burning in the Canadian forests. There were air quality alerts and the sun rising through the prism of this particulate debris was a sinister scarlet, the fires in Canada, it seemed, transported to the horizon at my Minnesota town.
I wondered if the whining noise had something to do with the bad air. Was it the shriek of a million trees expiring in a sea of fire, carried by their ash to my latitude? I walked about twenty blocks and the strange noise accompanied me every step of the way. Sometimes, I thought the sound was inside my own head, hence, impossible to locate but omnipresent. But, when I reached home, and went inside, the whining sound didn’t penetrate into that sanctuary.
On You-Tube, I watched a video showing a man lecturing about the spiritual in music. This articulate and learned fellow is Michael Parloff, a musician who conducts a series of talks called “Encounters” as part of the Music at Menlo series. (Menlo is a music school located in the San Francisco Bay area.) At the outset of his talk, Parloff observed that some composers represent the fundamental presence of the world as a drone. There are three noteworthy examples of music signifying primordial, undifferentiated Being by a droning sound: a drone precedes the rising of the sun in Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra, Mahler’s first symphony begins with a low-pitched drone supposed to represent “the sound of awakening of nature at earliest dawn”, and the E-flat bassoon note that begins Wagner’s overture to Das Rheingold – Parloff points out that these drones contain overtones from which the composer, then, constructs the succeeding music; for instance, the arpeggios representing the current of the mighty Rhine in Wagner’s overture are built from the overtones to the E-flat drone. Parloff says that these drones represent the “background sound of existence,” the stuff, in other words, from which all things are made.
A whine is a kind of drone, albeit one that is high-pitched, and, so, I wondered if the strange noise that accompanied by morning walk was, in fact, the background sound to existence, a tone from which all other notes comprising the world could be inferred. The next day, the whine in the air seemed lessened – the pitch was the same but the volume seemed turned down. On the third day, a Monday, I couldn’t hear the whine unless I specifically tuned my ears to it – the tone was still there but faint and, at 7 am, when the factory whistle at the plant sounded, the trombone bleat of that noise banished the whine from my hearing. I haven’t heard it since that morning and don’t know where it came from.
Humidity makes the mornings clammy and, since thunderstorms have flayed the trees, I walk with my head downcast to keep from tripping over branches and twigs blown onto the sidewalk. Near my driveway, at a crack between slabs of concrete sidewalk, I saw that the surface of the walk was covered with cinnamon-colored powder, a splash of the stuff about two feet long and a ten inches wide. The center of the spill was darkest with streaks lightening as they radiated away from the densest accumulation. When I stooped to inspect, I was surprised to see that the stain was, in fact, comprised of many thousands of ants, little rust-colored insects swarming on the concrete. Where the ants were congregated most densely, they formed writhing piles that entirely covered the pavement, a cloudy mass that was frayed at its edges where I could make out individual insects hurrying toward, and away from, the gravitational center of swarm. At the heart of the swarm, the insects formed a nebula or galaxy of innumerable ants rotating slowly on the cement.
I had seen similar swarms, always at the crevasse between sidewalk slabs. In those cases, the insects had bubbled to the surface in vast multitudes, forming a solid-seeming core with stubby tentacles extending in all directions. Within an hour or two, the ants vanished entirely – not even a scout made sortie over the pavement. At the place where the swarm had been, I found traces – a lateral hatchmark of dirt smeared indistinctly along the edges of the fissure between slabs. After a day or so of foot traffic, or after any rain at all, the dirt hatchmarks vanished. I thought that there was something about the weather – the relative humidity or the imminence of rain or a change in barometric pressure – that drew the ants from under the concrete slabs to swarm across the concrete sidewalk. (Perhaps, it was the vibrations from the high-pitched whine that I had heard a few days earlier.) Generally speaking, if I saw one swarm of ants during my morning walk, I might encounter several other examples of this phenomena in the course of 15 or so blocks. However, the swarm where my sidewalk is jointed next to the alley was the largest and most impressive that I came upon, a wonderful display of... what?
Perhaps, the ants were foraging for food. But, if so, what were they eating? Before they appeared at the crack near the driveway, the concrete was dry and clean, at least to my eyes. In another location, I saw the same kind of ants, tiny red- or rust-colored insects, dismantling a fleshy arabesque of dead worm glued by its juices to the cement. The worm was fixed to the sidewalk at the center of a dinner plate-sized swarm of ants. Individual ants don’t exhibit purpose or intent – rather, they seem to oscillate randomly across surfaces with a jostling, nervous energy that looks like Brownian motion, that is a perfectly randomized tremor of individual particles vibrating on the pavement. However, individual ants, seemingly moving randomly, occasionally encountered the carcass of the worm – upon stumbling upon the worm, a mighty blue whale as far as they were concerned, the ants, then, assumed a purpose, clambering all over the corpse and, apparently, carving it up with their tiny jaws. I don’t know how the ants were recruited from their subterranean galleries to the surface (chemical relay by pheromones?) but, once emerged, the insects, then, darted about randomly, colliding with one another and bouncing back and forth vigorously, an agitated pattern that assured that, at least, some of them would run into the dead worm. However, I saw nothing like that in the big swarm on my sidewalk – there was nothing dead at the center of the mass of ants, no focal point to the swarm – it was simply an orb of ants, a kind of spiral galaxy casting out streamers of insects across the concrete.
Research informs me that these tiny red- or rust-colored ants are a species called tetramorium caespitum. Curiously, the ants aren’t native to the New World. They seem to have been carried to our continent in the holds of ships departing from Europe – ships often had soil as ballast in their holds and, therefore, transported ants as well as dirt to the New World. By 1800, entomologists agree, that the tiny red insects, called “pavement ants” in the vernacular, were well-established in the Americas. (Even this account is complicated by the fact that recent genetic testing has shown that there, apparently, sub-species of the ants and the mostly widely distributed variety is called tetramorium immigrins.) The insects are social and live in nests with multiple queens. Each queen is capable of laying up to 15 eggs a day and some colonies are believed to contains as many as 500,000 members. The insects live in galleries excavated under pavement – these are the ants who produce minuscule volcano-shaped mounds around a central orifice at the point of access to the nest, generally at a crack in the paving stone.
But why do they swarm? If the temperature is 70 degrees or more, the ants are known to emerge en masse from their nest. In the Spring, the ants swarm to reproduce. Winged queens will be visible in the writhing mass of insects. The winged queens are exogamous – this means, they must mate with members of a different nest or colony. A mating swarm is characterized by the presence of winged females preparing for their nuptial flight. However, the ant swarms that I inspected didn’t contain any larger winged females – therefore, these were not mating swarms. Other writers claim that the ant swarms are, in fact, battlefields where two separate colonies are fighting for territory. The ants are said to be intensely territorial and will attack other ants that don’t bear the scent of their nest. Warring ants in a swarm will display individuals gripping one another, dismembered body parts and wounded soldiers with crushed abdomens. I saw nothing of this sort. Although at the center of the swarm, the insects were clambering over one another, I didn’t see them gripping other individuals with their jaws. There were no corpses of ripped apart ants and no individuals limping or dragging their squashed abdomens behind them. (Some writers say that swarming ants that are fighting leave no corpses because the dead and wounded are dragged off to the nearby nest to be eaten. I submit that there are no corpses at all, because the swarming ants aren’t fighting at all.)
Other authorities say that ants will swarm to hunt together. Or they might gather on the surface in times of drought to look for moisture. Or, if there has been too much water, they may evacuate flooded tunnels and come to the surface to dry out. In fact, the more I read about the subject, the more I became convinced that no one knows with any certainty why ants swarm when they are not preparing to disseminate queens by nuptial flight. Certainly, the swarm of ants that I saw was peaceful, not associated with reproduction, and had nothing to do with foraging or evacuation of flooded underground galleries. Several writers concede that ants may swarm for no known reason. In fact, the phenomenon looked downright convivial to me, a social event like a picnic or an outdoor rock concert. The swarm served no practical purpose. After an hour, it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
There is an image in my mind, or, perhaps, more accurately, the idea of an image, that is part of my personal history. When I was much younger, the picture was more vivid but age has, not so much blurred it as turned the image into a verbal formulation without any visual correlate. This is how it goes: I am daydreaming in the warm sun, seated on a grassy bank. The bank is rounded and forms a green curb to an old sidewalk – the sidewalk is cracked and, perhaps, my eye has been drawn to the puzzle-pattern of fractures in the concrete. For some reason, I associate the bank sloping steeply to the sidewalk with mowing – it seems too steep to be mowed with an old push lawn-mower. Gradually, I become aware of a shadow on the grass next to the sidewalk. The shadow is grey and, although I am very little, nonetheless, I possess the knowledge that a shadow is cast, that there must be some shape intervening between the sun and the darkness that it produces. But I don’t see anything from which the shadow is formed, and, then, as I look more carefully, I see that the dark patch is writhing with motion, that it is a mosaic tessellated with tiny insects and that they are swarming on the embankment slope and next to the cracked pavement. I behold this with a mixture of horror and fascination. I wonder whether this is taking place in Ames, Iowa, where I lived as a toddler, or, perhap, in New Jersey. The impressions that form this image precede language it seems – they were once purely visual but, now, have become a swarm of letters and words on a page.
I can’t be sure whether this insect swarm was dreamed or merely imagined or something that I actually saw. Uncertainties abound.
I stand, with my dog on her leash, on the sidewalk near the park. Mist rises from the river. It is early morning on a weekend. There is no traffic and morning is very still. I listen with my eyes shut, tuning the dial of my listening to the high frequency where I expect to hear the whine in the air. But there’s nothing. There’s no breath of wind, no rustle of leaves in the trees, not even a cricket singing. The whine is not at the place on the spectrum where I expect it, but, there is a very faint hum, a drone that probably signifies the radiation of my thought, the sound of neural impulses, the background sound to existence that can be heard sometimes, but never understood.
