Beetles

I have been thinking a lot about beetles. I have been, wherever possible, being a beetle.

To be a beetle, in this day and age and place, is a bleak and hopeless thing. Your prospects for a successful and fulfilling life are not good. In fact, by the precise virtue of being a beetle, you will never be successful or fulfilled.

And yet, here be beetles. Beetling. A beetle being a beetle might look, to the scrutinising eye of colonial capitalism, like apathy. Or just useless. But the beetle is the very opposite of apathy. A beetle is the epitome of radical acceptance. The beetle beetles anyway.

No, not anyway. Not in spite of or because of. The beetle just beetles. Full stop. No justification needed.

There are around 4,200 species of beetle in the UK. I found one in the garden. A dead one. This would be more or less unremarkable except that it was a Dumbledore Beetle (Geotrupes spiniger), which are not usually found in small urban gardens. They are dung beetles, and are found on pasture grazed by herbivores. There are no herbivores or pastures near our garden.

So I wove it a teeny tiny beetle basket coffin out of bindweed and ribwort plantain. And wrote it a poem and buried it in the garden.

If a beetle was cognisant of the seething boiling wide wide world and of capitalist-colonial Reason, would it give up on being beetle, as it became aware of its puniness and futility? What about the unidentified caterpillar that has been clasping its tiny body around a spindly finger of lavender bush by the front door, for almost a week in the cold bowels of February? What about a wildflower?

Perhaps they are aware. Acutely, exquisitely aware. Aware and wholly dependent upon their entanglement with the seething boiling wide wide world. And so they beetle/caterpillar/wildflower (these are all verbs) with fierce intensity until they are swallowed by each other and decay peacefully.

The beetle, like the artist, must know that there is nothing certain under heaven (1). Beetles, wildflowers, crows, all wild things know this. Beetle knows that to cling to the certainties served up by systems of oppression and violent power structures, is destroying us all. How does a beetle bear witness to this seething boiling wide wide world?

By being a beetle. By tending gently her beetlegarden, with all its beetleworlds and beetlestories and beetlegods and beetlecreeds, knowing that they and she will be earthy soil again soon.

Speaking of bearing witness and our entanglement with the seething boiling wide wide world, the Landworkers’ Alliance (a UK union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers organising for food and labs justice) have a monthly film club. This month they are showcasing a film called Sudan, Remember Us directed by Hind Meddab. I cannot recommend it enough. It is available to watch until Sunday.

All donations will go toward the Sudanese Resistance Front’s fundraiser for the “We Must Plant" campaign initiated by the Gezira and Managil Farmers Alliance.

This campaign aims to reclaim our agricultural legacy and secure food sovereignty, an essential step in resisting the neo-colonial and imperialist forces that continue to exploit our land.

As usual, if you’ve made it this far, thank you and I’d love to hear from you. Please consider sharing this with someone who you think might need a beetle or two.

Keep beetling.

With love and solidarity

rosa

therosaartist@gmail.com

(1) this is a James Baldwin quote, minus the beetles.