Who are we mistaken?
“Sure, he’s jes’ like a kid. There ain’t no more harm in him than a kid neither, except he’s so strong.”
Have you ever seen a metal cast of an ant colony?
Every once in awhile, The Algorithm shows me a video of someone pouring molten aluminum into an ant nest, and then digging out the subsequent sculpture created by the cooled metal. Oftentimes, these miniature silver cities are then displayed as art in someone’s home.
Truthfully, they make me pretty uncomfortable.
The average ant colony contains about 50,000 ants. And all I can think about whenever I see this colonial art is how strange I find it that humans are so willing to destroy life in the name of creation.
How willing we are to play God.
—
I’ve been thinking a lot about erasure recently.
And we haven’t spoken about it, but I think my father has been, too. At least, the recent stream of TikToks he’s been sending me about Lebanese identity might suggest as much.
My father has given me many things in this life, and two of them are the epigenetics of a people starved to death by a major world empire within the last hundred years, and an inherited nervous system attuned to the trauma of occupation and war.
He also once bought me a car.
Anyways, when I woke up today to the ongoing massacre that is the modern-day news cycle, with its tanks, and its bombs, and its bombs, and its guns, I wasn’t exactly super psyched about my day ahead.
But my first client made it worth it, as clients often do.
She and I were speaking about a body of work she’s been creating and her related fears around people stealing her ideas.
“What if they pass it off as their own, erasing me entirely?” she asked.
I suddenly heard my own voice responding with an answer that I think we both needed to hear.
“As if you could ever be erased,” I said.
—
I have a confession. I killed an ant while I was writing this.
And I didn’t even do it for something as noble as art.
I was sitting down to finish typing this note when I noticed movement out of the bottom of my periphery. An ant was crawling across my shirt, and in a panic, without thinking, I reached out and smushed it before it could crawl into the crevices of my chair.
How strange it is that humans are so willing to destroy life out of fear and confusion.
I wonder if all of us are afraid, on some level, of being erased. I wonder if that confusion is what all of the destruction is about.
If only we knew how infinite we are - more infinite than any anthill or empire ever could be.
One day, perhaps.
Maybe tomorrow.
Tonight, I have an ant funeral to attend.