LIFE AS MYTH
JOURNAL
JOURNAL 2007
Following a white hart
Exploring myth & meaning
WINTER 2007
Open to my own humanity
The metaphorical rim of the glass
LIFEWORKS
ATLAS
WINTER 2007
THE METAPHORICAL RIM OF THE VASE
In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.
"The Divine Comedy" Dante Alighieri [1265-1321], author and poet.In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard recounts J. Henri Fabre's observations of the instinctual herding of pine processionaries. Pine processionaries are moth caterpillars which travel through pine trees along a group-generated silk strand. Their bug parade is head-to-rear in one long unbroken procession, hence the name. Fabre noted a troupe of such bugs, stuck for days on the rim of a vase in his greenhouse.
"The caterpillars in distress," he concludes, "starved, shelterless, chilled with cold at night, cling obstinately to the silk ribbon covered hundreds of times, because they lack the rudimentary glimmers of reason which would advise them to abandon it." Annie Dillard quoting Fabre, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pp. 67-68)
And what would happen if just one of those bugs had chosen the "road not taken"? Well, as it turns out, a lone caterpillar did navigate off the rim of the vase, a few caterpillars inching forward behind her. Fabre had placed pine needles within reach of these pioneers but it was to no avail. Mere inches from the pine needles they turned and rejoined the group in its caterpillar death march.
These processionaries seem an apt metaphor for the tendency of human groups to act collectively or to hold group beliefs which exhibit little or no individual conscious reflection. (Related terms are mob mentality, groupthink, herding instinct and bandwagon effect.) Fearing retaliation or isolation, desiring to avoid conflict, deferring to authority -- whatever the reason -- human herd behaviors can be just as entrenched as the circling of head-to-rear processionaries. The cycle can be broken when group assumptions are challenged and analyzed. But first it is required that one person consider leaving the metaphorical rim of the vase.
A Plan of the road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City (detail), 19th Century engraving for The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream (1678) by John Bunyan.
