Estrangement from A Lover

Posted on September 12, 2004 in Anxiety Nature Sorrow & Regret

Some years ago, on an episode of Nova, I witnessed the story of a entomologist who loved bees. The trouble was that over the years, he had been stung by so many that he could no longer get in among them even in a apiarist suit or watch them close while they beat their wings and crawled over one another. Seeing them collect nectar from flowers was forbidden. One more sting could send him into anaphylactic shock: his heart would race, his throat swell shut, his blood pressure would drop, and severe asthma would choke him, culminating in collapse and death.

So he continued to work with bees, but only if they had been killed first. One by one he moved them around with forceps, studyng their morphology. But it was a kind of unsatisfactory erotica for him, pictures that did not move. He could not feel the flutter of their thousand wings or smell the raw honey in the waxen comb. Marking where the bees had knees or the variations in the veins on their wings just wasn’t the same as following the actions of the hive, seeing the individuals come and go, swarm and dissipate. Think of an old man reading about beautiful girls, surrounded by cadavers.

The story touched me. Today, twenty five or more years later, I still think of the bee man who cannot be with his bees. When I walk to the edge of Concourse Park and look towards the fragment of an anticline at the crest of Dreaded Hill, I feel removed from what I love. A reporter wants to know if I still hike in Whiting after the mountain lion attack of last winter. The answer is yes and no. Yes, I pass through Sleepy Hollow all the time, scouting the fringes for the deer who rest cross-legged on the flattened yellow grass. No lion will keep me out of there, but for now, my cardiologist can. So I do not hike in Whiting because I fear the suffocating predator inside, the beast whose nature I do not know for certain. Is it fat stuffing the tubes or a strangling defect? Whichever it is, I must remain on the rim, looking into the live oak clouded defiles, dreaming of snakes and deer and pumas. The visionary flashes of animation. The vultures soaring over the badlands. The dark waters of Upper Pond.

My lover is near but I am forbidden to visit with her, only watch the wind play with her sage and brown hair.