Jose Luis Borges comments in a talk about metaphor in 1967 how right it is for Chuang Tzu to have written that when he woke after a dream he did not know if he were a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. Borges, by then totally blind, points out how right “butterfly” is for the image. Had Chuang Tzu said “elephant” or “typewriter” the image would not have leapt into the visual space as “butterfly” and “dreams” do.
Tonight, the house having been hot and only now cooling off, I put on an album I had not listened to in some time: Appalachia Waltz, the cross-over album of some years back with Yo Yo Ma the great cellist, teaming up with Nashville’s Mark O’Conner on the violin, and Edgar Meyer on the bass. They play along at first as a kind of background to my meal preparation — grilled round squash wrapped in prosciutto, pasta salad and iced single malt scotch — until the slenderest wisp of a tune transforms everything. I leave the stove and turn up the speakers.
Surely I had heard this before. Yet somehow I had not.
Butterfly’s Day Out. I bend to press re-play and straighten, eyes playing at half distances while I try to take in what I am hearing. The sun is down now behind the western cheek of Mt Tamalpais, the enormous up-lift of ancient seabed, still dominating the sky after all its hilly cousins have been worn down and carried back into the sea. The leaves on the roses and lavender outside windows are barely beginning to stir, testing the present coolness against the draining heat of the day. Ma’s and O’Conner’s and Meyer’s butterfly is all over the house in its colors of cello, mandolin and bass, in the flowers, in my brain — not knowing whether it is a dream or a butterfly.
It is a 4 minute and 41 second flight, though as anyone who has ever watched a butterfly knows there is an immensity of space stitched together in such a time. It is, I suppose, what a true time-out is supposed to be — an out-of-time in which the creature perceiving — me– is suspended, in a waking nap, perhaps, when all the spirit and bodily attentions revert to the unknotted and untwisted.
Butterflies are more than songs of color. Many species are locally attuned to the temperature around them — opening their wings to absorb more heat on cool days, moving to cool spaces when it is hot. Recent studies have shown that over half of some 35 species of non-migrating butterflies have shifted their life-zones northward from between 34 and 240 kilometers during the past century.
Canaries were brought into coal-mines to drop dead from coal gas warning the miners to get out. The butterflies are merely moving north. Will we understand their flight?