TETRANYCHID JUD EVANS

Copyright © 2007 Jud Evans. Permission granted to distribute in any medium, commercial or non-commercial, provided author attribution and copyright notices remain intact.

(*Tetranychid* - web-spinning mite that attacks garden plants and fruit trees.)

I had to kill some ants this morning. I was painting some fencing-panels with green preservative. I removed each fence-panel one at a time, carried it into the garage, placed it upon two trestles and painted it in a flat horizontal position which is much easier. As I was painting I noticed some ants scurrying away from my relentlessly encroaching brushstrokes. I pondered what to do.

I don't like killing anything, and although I am not at all as fanatical as say the Jains, who carry a brush with then to sweep the floor ahead of them as they walk, in case they inadvertently crush an insect, and hold a muslin cloth over their mouths lest that breath-in and kill a fly, I always put a towel over the bath in order that a trapped spider may escape up the cloth-ladder and escape.

I wrote the piece below some years ago about my unconscious killing of a tiny  red spider and the crimson smear it left on the page I was writing upon - it was [as usual] a piece of ontological musing about the entiatic change in the way the spider existed from being a mobile living unity to a smear of protein on its white *mortuary table*, etc. For logistical reasons connected with manhandling a half-painted awkwardly balanced fencing-panel there was no option for me to save the ants and I painted over them. OK, I could have stopped painting, waited until the paint dried and them shook the ants off the panel and resumed work I guess, but my incipient ingrained *Protestant work ethic* won-out. I did not enjoy this murder either.

A quick glance at my watch - it's 4.20 pm on a warm, sunny afternoon. I sit under the willow tree in my garden by the lakeside. As I lean forward in my seat the white swans swerve expectantly towards the grassy verge, then seeing no bread crusts in my open hands turn abruptly and sail aloofly towards the moorhens and the shade of the far bank.

I settle back in my sunlounger and scan the page. A tiny bright red spider-mite crawls slowly across the page, I recognise it instantly as a *tetranychid* - a tiny red web-spinning mite that attacks garden plants and fruit trees. Instinctively, without thinking about it, my finger stabs the page, and in an instant the *insect* becomes a bright vermilion streak on the snowy white paper.

I should say what WAS the *insect*, for the tiny arachnid that existed a few moments ago no longer exists - or rather it is not extant in the existential modality that it enjoyed antecedently, but has metamorphosed or has been transfigured by me into a streak of rapidly decomposing biologic matter, a red comet of moisture and tissue on the lily-white necropsic slide of paper on my clipboard.

The moist parts are already drying in the sun and being absorbed into the paper - but is the *insect* still present? My little boy sidles up along side me and pushes his rabbit-doll in my face to kiss. "Look!" I say, pointing to the red blotch on the page,

"Look Connor! A spider." "Pen." Says the child, "Daddy's pen."

It is obvious that my son has taken the red trace to be the mark of a pen. The debris of the *insect* remains on the page - the detritus is there present in the sunlight in an altering entiative modality as the red turns slowly to a dull brown.
What is the ever-changing existential state, and how does it differ from simple presence? The mite's *insect*ness is no more - it has changed its state of existing. Is it now a 'smearness,' or perhaps a 'bloody - smearness,' or something else?
What about these suffixes - these 'nesses' and 'hood's and 'ships?' they all mean a state or condition, an instance and instant of existential modality - having membership of a collection or group, or having a quality or condition of some state of existence. Can we say that the accumulate of organic molecules and proteins and DNA that comprises the smear of biologic material on the page represents features of 'smearness' or qualities of 'bloodness' and what are these stages of 'nesses' and 'hoods' and 'ships' that we go through as we pass through life, and is not life itself an 'aliveness' or long term modality of existence - the course of existence of an individual entity - the actions and events that occur in 'living out' the existence of one's presence in the cosmos?

We can say what we like about the smear of what once we identified as a *tetranychid*- we can attribute all the descriptive classifications we like - but the smear of matter on the white page simply exists in the way it exists regardless and irrespective of our human linguistic

Why is it so problematical to talk and think about that which exists? Why do people often become confused when thinking about the simple fact of existing on the one hand, and of the activities, states and modes of existential behaviour and experience on the other? Why do some think that the 'Being' of a doctor or the 'Being' a gambler is the *existence* itself and not merely an ephemeral event or series of events that a given entity undergoes as part of its [fleeting] presence in the cosmos? Why do they think that so-called 'Being' is existence, and that there is an ontological difference between the *being of a being* or the fact that an entity exists and the way it exists?

"So," I whisper to myself, "then the insect is an insect no more - but just a smear.  But at what stage in its death-by-crushing did it lose its *insectness?* The fact of the matter is of course that it never had any *insectness* at all - the *insectness* is a feature of the way that the human observer exists as his brain cognises of and classifies the *insect*.

Was the quality or condition of *insecthood* still retained by the *insect* as my finger-pressure increased to and beyond a certain point? At what stage in the compression process and bodily disintegration did it lose its unique quality of existing as an *insect*?

Was it as the soft carapace slit open spilling the red claret of its lifeblood onto the white page? Was it at the moment of death - was the instant of extinction the nanosecond when *insectness* departed? Did it pass through a stage of *dead insecthood* before the total destruction of its form signified its modal change to oblivious *smearhood?* Yes, the *thing* called the *tetranychid*is dead. And what is a thing?

My dictionary tells me that a "thing" is an entity that is not named specifically. Then it suddenly hits me - the tiny, red entity that we call a "tetranychid" is not REALLY a "tetranychid" at all - its just an entity that exists in the way that it exists... it's only a "tetranychid" because WE CALL IT"tetranychid"... and it's not REALLY an "entity" either - it is only called that because... but my thoughts are interrupted...

My wife runs towards me brushing her hair with her hand in an agitated manner.

"HELP!" she shrieks, "I've got a thing in my hair!"