Margaret J. Anderson was born in 1931 in Gorebridge, a small coal-mining town a few miles south of Edingurgh, Scotland.  At 88, she is a beacon of inspiration for we who find ourselves looking down the barrel of our second half-century.  Independent, creative, endlessly curious, Margaret comes every month to our writing group to read her latest work in a lilting accent that immediately transports one to distant shores on the margins of imagination, steeped, somehow, in both mystery and comfort.  Steeped in childhood.

My next two posts are dedicated to mining the “analog treasures” hidden in Margaret’s writing and life.  But first, an introduction, in Margaret’s own words:

Although I loved reading and telling stories as a child, I never thought of being a writer. Most of the books in our bookcases were by people like Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens—people who were dead. Being an author didn’t seem like a healthy occupation. So, when I went to the University of Edinburgh, I studied biology and genetics.. 

Welcome to one half of Margaret’s writing life — the marvelous world of science.  She was also a successful author of children’s novels in the 1970s and 80s, but it’s her relationship to the natural world that shines, most particularly, with wonder.    For me, exposed as I was to science through the dry world of facts and figures, Margaret’s scientific worldview is revelatory.  Bogs, thickets, ponds and fields — these were the classrooms where she passed long hours with her younger sibling, discovering the hidden world of, among other things, insects. 

In recent months, Margaret has undertaken a series of short vignettes about our six-legged brethren, written in the first person, from the insect’s point of view.  This approach does three, wonderfully analog things. 

First, we bond with the insect; we become it, and thereby experience the hero’s journey that is its lot.  In analog terms, let’s call this “communion.” 

Second, because we have inhabited the insect, their heroism becomes our own, illuminating aspects of the human journey, stripped of its trappings to reveal only its most archetypal elements: birth, becoming, reproduction and death, all animated by some mysterious will.  We understand our journey through that of the insect not by holding ourselves apart, not by resort to labels and objectification, but by the resonance of shared experience.  The insect’s archetypal journey is a “distillation “of our own. 

Which brings us to the third analog aspect of this strange alchemy.  By stepping into the insect’s “shoes” and taking a journey which turns out to be our own, we come into contact with the greater mystery that holds us all — a  vast, wondrous well in which what we know so pales beside what we do not as to be insignificant.  There is nothing to do but surrender and find ourselves transformed. 

In order to bring forward the most analog aspects of Margaret’s piece, I excerpt it here.  Meet our ambassador from this extraordinary, hidden world:

I proudly bear the name bestowed on me by  the famous Swedish scientist, Carl Linnaeus, the father of classification.  He called me Magicicada septendecim, the magical cicada.  Cicadas are found all over the world—more than 2,500 different species, with others waiting to be discovered— but only the 13-year and 17-year cicadas have magic in their name. That’s because we spend long years hidden underground, then suddenly—magically—emerge exactly on time. We crawl out of holes in the dirt in tremendous numbers, covering entire trees, and filling the air with sound.

My story began 17 years ago when my mother made a tiny slit in the branch of a tree with her spear-like ovipositor. She quickly laid around twenty eggs and then moved on to another branch, repeating the process over and over again.  Days later, when one of those eggs hatched, a tiny creature covered in a transparent skin struggled along to the entrance of the slit and fell to the ground. And there I was, ready for the long road ahead!  I shed the transparent skin, freeing my strong front legs, and dug into the soil, where I would live for the next 17 years. But what was there to eat in this strange, dark world? Latching onto a root with my sharp, pointed mouth parts, I began to suck up the sap in the plant’s xylem. I soon discovered that the soil is full of nourishment if you know where to look. During the years that followed, I moved deeper into the earth, always finding another tangle of roots on which to feed. I ate and grew, ate and grew, shedding my skin every few years.

One warm afternoon, after I had reached my fifth instar, I felt the urge to dig my way upward. All around me the soil was moving. I was suddenly part of a great migration seeking the light.  It was almost dusk when I crawled out of the ground and made my way up the trunk of a tree. There I went through my final transformation, struggling out of my nymphal skin. I waited patiently through the night for my wings to slowly expand.  With the coming of dawn, I could see that I shared the tree with hundreds—maybe thousands—of other cicadas. What fine creatures we were with our bulging red eyes and transparent wings, veined in bright orange. We held our wings tent-like over our inch-long bodies.

Imagine!  Struggling into existence, then gestating in the womb of the earth for 17 long years, only to be born again. 

Unlike the dark underground, the shining, new world was full of hungry predators. Birds, squirrels, lizards, snakes, and cats were waiting to snap us up. Insects use a variety of strategies to escape predators. Some rely on camouflage, making them hard to see. Others are foul tasting. Still others bite or sting. But cicadas have no defense mechanisms. We put our faith in the safety of numbers. With so many of us appearing at the same time, we are too numerous for the predators to consume all of us. After they have eaten their fill, there are always plenty of cicadas left to ensure a new generation. We rely on predator satiation.

Our ambassador turns out to be one of the lucky ones, a survivor, and so takes up its song, producing a thrumming impossibly loud for its tiny frame.  

By vibrating our tymbal muscles we cause the tymbals to make a popping noise that is amplified in our hollow abdomens.  To the human ear this sounds like we are shouting PHA. . . . raoh! PHA. . . . raoh!   In some places they call us the Pharaoh insect.

The reason for all the noise I’m now making is that I am hoping to find a mate, and I don’t have a lot of time. My adult life lasts for only a week or two—provided I don’t end up as a predator’s dinner before that.  Even in the midst of the cicada chorus, I hear that a female is near by.  She beckons me with the clicking sound she makes with her wings. The female has no tymbals or tymbal muscles. Instead of being hollow, her abdomen is full of eggs waiting to be fertilized before she deposits them in a slit in the bark of a tree, just as my mother did 17 years ago. The clicking sound draws me closer.

17 years underground, and only a week or two under the sun in which to close the circle, to end as an individual and sow the seeds for life to begin again.  But how do they know when to struggle upwards toward the light?  We giants of the upper sphere conjecture with our instruments, our measurements.  Is it the temperature of the earth?  The cycles of sap in the roots of trees?  And yet, with what mysterious exactitude do the 13 and 17-year cicadas measure time: 

Both are prime numbers, which means they can’t be divided evenly by any number other than one. Our long life cycle gives us an advantage over our enemies. When we emerge as adults none of those enemies share out prime-number life cycle. We appear so infrequently that no predator or parasite has evolved to be completely dependent on cicadas.

Periodical cicadas inhabit the central and eastern United States, but we don’t all emerge in the same year.   We are divided into Broods according to the year we appear above ground. There’s a total of fifteen Broods, twelve of which are 17-year cicadas. The other three are 13-year cicadas. I belong to Brood IX, which won’t be seen again until 2037. Brood X, the Great Eastern Brood, which is more widespread than my Brood, will emerge next year (2021) in fifteen states.

Born into a tribe, the magical cicada is destined to reproduce in ancestral lands according to an algorithm that evokes mystery as surely as Pythagoras himself.  For it is hard not to feel the echo of the old philosopher’s intuition that the deepest, most mysterious strata of reality are mathematical in nature.  In the end, Linneaus himself accords this mystery its due, encoding magic in our ambassador’s designation as we also come full circle, back to the name.

I am Magicicada septendecim, the magical cicada. If I were to tell you the answer, my magic would surely be gone—and with it my magical name!

The alchemy is complete, the resultant compound more precious than gold.  We have encountered life through the cicada’s eyes,  dignified this humble insect only to discover heroic proportions.  We have given it back the world, and so the world can never look the same, can never again be merely an extension of human needs.  It is infinitely vaster, deeper, richer — as are we, toiling alongside our magical friend, compelled by forces which exceed our comprehension, held only in the invisible hands of providence as we struggle, ever-upwards, towards the light. 

Photo by Lee Townsend, UK; Kentucky Pest News