I lay with my cheek pressed against the warm concrete, watching the ants disappear one by one into a fissure so narrow that it seemed impossible for an entire world to exist beneath it, and yet I never doubted that one did. The ants awakened an intuition that held me there: beneath those tiny, lacquered bodies lay a world as complete unto itself as my own, with its own passages and chambers, its own hidden order moving below the threshold of human sight. Their scale rendered them nearly invisible to the adult world, but to me they seemed animated by purpose, and purpose suggested consciousness, or at least some inwardness, some mysterious center from which action arose and toward which their small lives bent.
Bug school, at five years old, required no curriculum beyond the eyes, the fingertips, and the willingness to remain still. I crouched there for what felt like hours, following the wandering contour of movement though it were an apprenticeship, and the questions arose without effort: What is it like to be an ant? What happens inside of the black sheen of its exoskeleton? How much can such a fragile vessel hold, and by what strange inheritance does it know where to go? Are we, across the impossible distance between our forms, nevertheless kin?
Before I knew anything of the unconscious, I understood that the visible world rested upon an invisible one, and that the crack in the pavement was a threshold, through which one reality passed into another. I sensed that life continued beneath appearances, beyond the reach of my perception, and that whatever I could see was only the smallest portion of what was there.
Within that fascination, however, I also began to feel the disturbing magnitude of my own power. In my careless hand, I possessed the ability to reroute their destiny, scatter their dutifully procession, and flatten their ant-highway with a single stroke. I could rescue, or turn away just as easily, and the consequences of my choice would remain within the confines of a minute empire and unrecorded by the larger world, or so I wondered. Somewhere in those early musings awakened the awareness that existence meant being acted upon and acting back, discovering oneself as a vulnerable creature beneath the hand of fate and as a force capable of becoming fate for something smaller and more vulnerable still. Then came a more unsettling possibility of an interior I could affect but never enter and know from. I had no language for this then, no concept of consciousness, alterity, or the impenetrability of another being’s interiority. There was only the feeling that another life existed less than an inch beneath my own, close enough to darken beneath my shadow and yet forever beyond the reach of my knowing, and the shadow, I would later understand, had already become a presence.
My body had entered the ants’ world as an event. The light changed when I leaned over them, the temperature shifted beneath the nearness of my face, and whatever invisible choreography had been unfolding beneath my gaze reshaped itself around the fact of my presence. It has taken me decades to grasp how often this occurs between living beings: we imagine ourselves approaching innocuously, believing that observation is a form of innocence, while all along our nearness has already altered the atmosphere, and the thing we hoped merely to behold has begun rearranging itself around us.
My sister and I rehearsed this mystery in the games of childhood, although we did not yet understand that our tenderness intentions carried its own shadow. The bathroom counter became our bug hospital, and beneath the hard white light of the medicine cabinet, we arranged tweezers, cotton swabs, eyedroppers, and alcohol pads with the ceremonial seriousness of surgeons preparing to enter the body. We carried beetles with damaged wings and caterpillars folded strangely upon themselves into a world of make believe. Our fascination entitled us to become healers, though in actuality we were merely interruptors. I suspect many of our patients would have fared better had we left them where we found them.
What moved us belonged to constructs in which compassion and cruelty had not yet divided into forms we could recognize. We wanted to shorten the distance between one form of life and another, to press ourselves against the membrane separating our world from theirs and remain there long enough for the hidden life within another creature to disclose itself. I believe the wish to heal begins somewhere near this budding awareness, animated by the beautiful and dangerous desire to enter what cannot be entered, and to make intimate what nature has placed at a distance. Yet the insects revealed none of their secrets. Whatever knowledge they possessed remained within a larger organizing principle, and they endured our devotion in squirming silence.
Some years later, at eight or nine, kneeling beside a tide pool, I remember same longing in the form of a sea anemone whose translucent tentacles drifted in the water as though the ocean itself were breathing through them. It seemed fashioned from a dream of contradiction, its mouth opening like a flower while possessing the unmistakable appetite of an animal, its soft body rooted to stone while the tide moved endlessly through it. It had no eyes to meet my gaze and no face upon which I could locate something recognizable, and when it withdrew from my touch, drawing its sticky tentacles back into itself, it offered no clue as to whether anything resembling fear, pain, or awareness accompanied the movement.
I lowered the tip of a bamboo stick toward its contracting body and waited for reciprocity, for some acknowledgment that we inhabited the same reality and that, across the silence between our forms, something within it might answer something within me.
Then a man’s voice punctured the protective realm of my captivation with the sudden, patronizing authority of an Oz-like god.
“Would you want someone poking at you like that?”
At the sound of his voice, the sea anemone retreated into the primitive sanctuary of its camouflaged verruca with its bits and bumps mimicking its tidal surroundings. Something in me folded inward too, however with no place to hide, a searing rush of sensation swelled into a throb.
I recognized the man’s face, having seen him often enough around our small town that recognition came over me as heat, rising through my throat and flooding my cheeks. With it, another awareness incipient, immediate and inescapable. I had spent so much of my childhood wondering what it might feel like to inhabit another living thing, while other people had been constructing and carrying versions of me within lives I knew almost nothing about. Now I understood that some image of me had already crossed the boundary of my skin and taken up residence in the inward worlds of others.
In the version of me carried by that man, I was certain he had seen me clearly. I imagined him returning home with evidence of my nature as casually as he carried his keys or groceries, placing it among the ordinary contents of his life, where it would remain indefinitely as a small but enduring fact. The little girl trying clumsily and earnestly to discover whether another creature possessed an interior life, would disappear from his account. The tenderness of the question, the confusion of the method, and the impossible longing beneath the act would vanish with her, leaving behind the monster I now believed myself to be.
I carried the strange conviction that somewhere in town another consciousness held a secret about me and that this secret, because it belonged to someone else, was somehow truer than anything I might offer in my own defense. His imagined judgment acquired the force of revelation, as though he had revealed a shadow I had not known belonged to me. I had encountered the possibility of my cruelty alongside the terrifying instability of identity itself, the knowledge that who I was depended, at least in part, upon the mind in which I appeared.
I remember walking toward my father’s house beneath the enormous California sky, carrying a disturbance for which I had no language. The sea anemone returned to whatever existence belongs to sea anemones, opening again, I imagined, when the danger had passed, its flower-mouth turning once more toward the tide. The man returned to his own life, which remained as unknowable to me as anything concealed beneath the water.
I had discovered that I could become someone inside another person’s reality without intending to, without consenting to the form I assumed there, and without possessing any means of correcting or retrieving the image. It occurred to me for the first time that every consciousness I had longed to penetrate had, in its own unknowable fashion, already been looking back.
In these obscure regions, I circled near the place where the self first discovers that it is both subject and object, observer and apparition, creature of light and shadow. It was the knowledge that I could no longer belong entirely to myself because some version of me had escaped my keeping and now lived beyond my grasp.
Even now, I cannot know what became of that other self, the child reflected in the mind of a man beside a tide pool, just as I cannot know what passed through the sea anemone when my shadowy apparition departed or what hidden intelligence stirred beneath the pavement when the ants altered their path beneath my hand. I know only that, for one suspended moment, the fabric of reality revealed itself as an immeasurable gathering of inward lives, each within its own form and yet continually entering the others, casting shadows, leaving images, changing the light. From that afternoon onward, the mystery of other beings’ unreachable interiors carried a second, more intimate revelation: I, too, had become part of what was hidden there.