My Little Bee-Brain

Dilettantes make life better

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I do not have any tattoos. The reasons for this are many. For most of my life, I probably never believed in anything solidly enough to have permanent symbols etched into the deep tissue of my skin.

At this point in life, I do believe I've hardscrabbled actual values together and I can imagine making them part of my body.

However, I am also of an age where I think that getting into ink culture would be cheesy and just a bit sad. For me. Do as thy will. Nonetheless, my tattoos will remain theoretical. For now at least (recall my above confession about the depth of my convictions).

So let's play a game. If I were to get a tattoo, what would it be? I have two responses to this.

First, I would probably have some verse of Matthew Arnold written (in a nice cursive) on the underside of a forearm. Maybe this bit from “The Buried Life:”

And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.

Bees

Second, I would have a bee, a bee scratched upon me. The tattooist’s stinger would mark me with a powerful symbol of my life.

I've come to love bees. I've dedicated large parts of my yard to bee propagation, letting the grasses grow wild and keeping my neighbors' lawn chemicals far away. I'm also looking for local pollinator plants to encourage the flourishing of the bees. What works in central PA? Let me know.

All of this is my small, pointless effort in trying to connect my passing life with nature. I grow more and more repulsed by the machine age and I see no path forward that doesn't include some backward movement, back to the material world of land, plant, insect, and animal. The bee is a lynchpin in that ecosystem and I want to do what I can on my own property to help the queens and their workers out.

But as I've gotten older and come to understand myself better, I think of the bee's life as a kind of ideal too. Part of me has always been a bee and I resisted that inclination for too long, and to my peril.

A bee floats from plant to plant, from bud to bloom, feeding itself and its hive on what it finds as it hops merrily across the fields.

Academia always made me ashamed of my own inclination to flutter about here and there, following my nose. What I took to be a bouncy life of joyous curiosity had me labeled a dilettante, a slur in the profession I chose.

I never cared for deep specialization, which academia feeds on and pushes us all to pursue. A life spent cultivating a careerist professionalism is a life inside a machine. Disciplined focus and expertise is a life I was never suited to. My sustenance has always been found in bouncing from one pretty thing to the next.

But the bee is not just a consumer and I hope I'm not either. The bee’s value to to the world is it’s function as a pollinator. But the thing is, we can’t tell where the dabbling ends and the pollination begins.

In the bee’s munching here and there, it enriches its environment, cross-pollinating all the plants of the field, making life in the field healthier and, frankly, possible. The bee’s consumption is not an act of taking; it’s an act of giving. An act of “UnTaking,” if you will forgive me.

I don't know for sure that my own dabbling does anyone else any good, but I suspect it does. I hope that whatever work I produce at the end of my jolly, directionless explorations enriches the world of culture and creation in some small way. Like the bee.

So when I look at the hairy top of my right arm, I see an image of a creature that isn't there. I see a bee, stinger in tact, yet sheathed. Creating its world, even as it consumes it.