Signs left by lives long gone fascinate me. Invested with meaning, they encourage thoughts that wander their own tracks, sometimes well worn, sometimes branching into wild places, seldom with identifiable destinations. One inevitably discovers intimations of mortality — one's own as much as that of the life that left the sign — but often what's evoked is simple delight at the artistry of invertebrates. [Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily]All content © 2009 Pete McGregor
Pete, I'm intrigued by the thought that insects were Modernists many millennia before humans began drawing on cave walls. I stopped to look at a fallen log last weekend that was riddled with artistic huhu grub patterns.
ReplyDeleteAnd my ant can definitely do better than I. I can't draw for toffee.
Those ants are pretty remarkable insects, Lesley. Don't feel bad if they outdraw you :^)
ReplyDeleteIt's always made me wonder why it is that we are endowed with the ability to see beauty and the structures and forms that it is made of. If Darwin's idea that everything has a purpose for survival than what is the reason for being able to perceive beauty?
ReplyDeleteMiguel, good question, although I think it's a mistake to believe every characteristic has a purpose. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin put that idea to rest in their 1979 paper, The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptionist programme. Well worth reading.
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