david spooner

I spoke at the July 2008 Thoreau Society Gathering on "The Individual and the State: the politics of Thoreau in our time"
my specific Address was entitled:
METAMORPHOSES OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
The text can be read on the EVENTS page of this Website.

Also, the early part of the following is work in progress, ONE GIANT STEP FOR NATURE: THE QUANTUM WORLD OF METAMORPSHIC INSECTS. Ideally it is read in conjunction with the theories explained in my other books, which are listed in the sidebar of this page.
Do please explore my website. There is something for almost everyone, and I have cut the personal stuff to a minimum!
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from CHAPTER 1
The fact is that here in the insect world is the life science equivalent of modern physics` quantum universe. Metamorphosis occurs because the larval form, the pupal form and the adult form have evolved independently of each other to fit different environments. Insects such as Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera undergo this complete four stage transformation known as holometabolic. Some other insects merely go through three steps, reaching maturity by a series of moults omitting the pupa form. This is not merely an issue of the microcosm in relation to the macrocosm. It is rather a matter of organic changes that are common among the insects that have only a marginal echo in the life of mammals. Metamorphosis defines the core of quantum biology, a unique and multifaceted process that has implications throughout human culture, both directly and indirectly. (I have given some account of this in my The Insect-Populated Mind: how insects have influenced the evolution of human consciousness (2005)). Insects can destroy their former selves and build a new stage of growth. It is a sleight of nature, an unusual evolutionary mechanism, and it is built into the structure of our languages. When Descartes came out of the shadows where he had been incubating his theories, he sensed an insect parallel with his own intellectual development. Larvatus prodeo, he announced, “I advance masked.” From the ovum emerges the larva, which means mask, - or ghost of its former self. It is a caterpillar, the idea being that it `masks` its final form, be it butterfly or bee. Larva also signifies `person` in Latin, a being in a transitional state as Herman Melville defined Queequeg in Moby Dick. On its way to complete realisation, a larva next morphs into a pupa related to `pupil,` awaiting transformation into an adult and parallel to the insect pupa awaiting change into an imago.(1. Brown quote) The imago, or perfected insect, is the culmination of this fourfold metamorphic insect process. It is not merely an `image,` which is presented as the real thing in the prevailing celebrity culture. In life beyond the film and TV studios, it often disconcertingly appears as an eidolon as Helen of Troy was described, concealing and inspiring a more profound message. In ancient Greece the imago signifies the fourfold cluster of butterfly and soul and mind and breath of life in one, ψυχή.
Could this helix of growth not be what Kant had seen as the “schema” within humans that unifies understanding and the objective world? As he put it in Critique of Pure Reason, “This schematism of our understanding, with respect to its appearance and its mere form, is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true workings we shall hardly coax from nature or expose unconcealed to view.” (Crit 180) Hermann von Helmholtz supplemented by Henri Poincaré identified a quaternal pattern of scientific progress as saturation, incubation, illumination and verification, a more general example of the ova-larva-pupa-imago process. And as we shall see, in the sphere of human culture the development of the sonata and symphony follow a parallel course, but one that is more instinctive, an oblique enactment of individual growth. It is ironical that post-Kantian German philosophers from Wilhelm Schlegel to Hegel imagined they were entirely surpassing the original master.

The great atomic physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, remarked that every new philosophy is founded on a paradox. (Lindorff, c.120) Where the intellect is concerned, the double world of insect-mind corresponds to the wave-particle fusion in quantum physics. Electrons can be produced simultaneously as wave and particle, though no experiment can allow the two to be studied at the same time. So in life, the doublet of insect metamorphosis and mind processes can only be artificially separated. The particle equates with the living metamorphic creature such as butterfly, while the wave represents its transference into consciousness. After all, we do use the phrase `brain wave`. They constitute a fused duality. As the recent Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism somewhat archly and obscurely suggests: it is only “secret correspondences between the natural realm and the human mind that can activate true thinking.” The problem from the standpoint of formal and academic education is that this is a process of simultaneity, whereas academic education tends to encourage a procedure of division, separation and enumeration.

Certain `animal` structures inhere in the embryonic mind and are there in the ovum. The clues lie in strings of words conceived during the very birth of language, and apprehended before cultures had ossified into the Greek and Sanskrit mainstream, a type of molten big bang in the language world. It is not, pace Chomsky, that the embryos are forming for sentence structures. It is that as the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid put it:
“There lie hidden in language elements that effectively combined
Can utterly change the nature of man.”
Darwin only revealed the descent from the great apes. But as A.R. Wallace his co-founder of the theory of evolution saw, the intellectual and spiritual evolution of humanity follows a separate line of growth. So we dangle between ape and insect.(1 The Metaphysics of Insect Life, pp.)
It was in the Devonian period, some 370 million years ago, that metamorphosis began to develop in the amphibians. They came onto land in the same epoch as early insects evolved. Still today, tailed amphibians and anurans (toads, frogs) pass through a larval stage before they reach maturity. Insects with complete metamorphosis (holometabolic) diverged from a common arthropod ancestor some 300 million years ago during the Permian. The amphibians remain as makeshift creatures, at home neither in water nor on land. Their metamorphic stages are sometimes regressive. And many marine invertebrates revert to a larval character as late adults, so that sedentary lives are often the culmination.

George Wald has observed: “a free-swimming echinoderm or unchordate larva, specialized almost wholly for motility and hence dispersal, metamorphoses into a sedentary or sessile adult, specialized for feeding and reproduction [first on plankton and then on the benthos or bottom of the sea]. The winged insects reverse this order: the sedentary larvae, specialized for feeding and growth, metamorphose into highly motile, winged forms, specialized for coupling and reproduction.” (Gilbert, 4) So holometabolic insects, those that pass from egg to caterpillar to pupa to imago, prepare for flight through a full-scale growth. They are the only taxa that pass through a transformation taking them from terrestrial to aerial life. And the angiosperms, the flowering plants such as magnolia, follow their evolution and transform via spores to provide the nectar for the imagos, the perfected insects. This is approximately similar to Bohr`s idea of complementarity, with the spectral lines of the structure of atoms revealed through a spectrograph having its equivalent in parallel evolutions, or doublets.The flowering plants are thought to have originated in water and then taken to land.

This is a fourfold process. Why this is such a crux will become clear as we progress. As we shall see this structure in nature has been appropriated by some of the greatest poets and composers. Quite beyond merely descriptive or passionate expression, here the writer or composer threads into the natural world at his and her heart. The integration with that structure meets its point of fusion in the dialectic of microcosm (the poems, sonata) and macrocosm (the dimensions of the universe).


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bio
I was born during the Second War across the water from Wales at West Kirby Cheshire, and went to the University at Leeds. There I was awarded one of the original post-War firsts in literature, following on from the previous couple gained by Jon Silkin and Richard Hoggart. I studied theater and directed under Hugh Hunt from the Abbey Theater, Dublin. Also worked with Stephen Joseph, founder of the modern theater-in-the-round. My doctorate was awarded by Bristol University in 1968 on the subject of Writers and the Spanish Civil War. I lectured at Kent University for 6 years, and for a spell at Penn State in the mid-1970s. All my books have been published by American companies; interest from British publishers has been zero.

My fascination with lepidoptera spans 40 years now, and I am delighted to have been an advisor to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in the successful rescue of the El Segundo blue butterfly on the dunes at LA Airport. As a foreigner I am honored to have received the American Medal of Honor for Natural History, as well as the Congressional Medal for Excellence in Literature. Last year I was admitted to the American Hall of Fame.

I founded Borderline Press in 1975 which was designed to publish some of the great Scottish writers, many of whom were finding difficulty getting published at this time. This was an essential part of the lead-up to the movement for Scottish devolution which has been primarily stimulated by the creative writers. The writers published by Borderline - Tom Scott, J.F. Hendry (part of the New Apocalypse movement in the 1940s), Walter Perrie - were ahead of their time. And for good measure I published a Collection of John Cornford, out of print for 40 years.

I then lit out on my own as a writer, and only emerged fully as a writer in my 50s after the years of preparation, although some of my work had appeared in journals before that. Indeed my writings as a Trotskyist in the 1960s and 1970s were inspired by the work of perhaps the greatest literary journal of all time - the Partisan Review of the 1930s and 1940s, the epoch of Irving Howe and colleagues in their pomp. (It has been much remarked on that many of the British Labour Government`s ministers are ex-Stalinists, or offspring of Communist Party members and supporters, which is why the UK now resembles the old Soviet state). All writing of value redefines the nature of freedom.

Independent scholarship is an enterprise I`ve never regretted, despite the inevitable material ups and downs. Far too much writing is hide-bound, institution-bound, and tho I`ve reached pensionable age lacking a pension, I never hung "my hat on a pension" in Louis MacNeice`s words - and therefore am not dragging around the University cloakroom pegs! Books today are being misused as obscurantist power tools whereas "the beginning of wisdom," as in `Sartor Resartus,` is "to look fixedly on clothes til they become transparent" One of the most remarkable tellers of insect tales is Aesop, rumoured to have once been a slave. Adopting the beady eye of the insect allows the critical perspective.
For now, I have recently finished a translation of the Nobel prize winner and Swiss writer Carl Spitteler`s novel Imago. This is the first English translation since it was published exactly 100 years ago. This attracted both Freud and Jung at the time of its publication, and Freud named the first psychoanalytical journal after it. However Spitteler`s concept goes against the grain of the psychoanalytical sense of repression and "complex." The full translation is to be found on the Events page of this site.I am now translating, for the first time since its appearance in 1889, his remarkable sequence of butterfly poems in Schmetterlinge.

I am an associate member of the Welsh Academy, and member of the Thoreau, Nabokov and Benjamin Constant Societies, together with membership of the Fiat Lux Society at UC Santa Cruz. I also have membership of the International Diplomatic Academy and Académie Européenne d`Informatization. Also I`m on the Board of the London Diplomatic Academy.

My main theme as an author has been insects in relation to literature and philosophy, following a 30 year study of butterflies. The four main books on this theme have been published only in the States from 1995 to 2005. These were not actually influenced by Vladimir Nabokov`s great work in this subject, but the result of my own interest recording the creatures mainly in Scotland. Indeed in 2006, I was fortunate enough to record the first Small Skipper (Thymelicus sylvestris) to appear in Scotland for over 150 years. This was a rare day indeed for an inveterate lepidopteral fieldworker, and was acknowledged as a notable natural history event.

The central conclusion of my thinking has been that we humans are not only related to the great apes by reason of biological history, but also indirectly to insects. The insect relation is more difficult to grasp, because it has to take in metaphysics and aesthetics. This brief resumé is not the place to trace in detail what is embedded in my books, though it is the place to emphasize that natural selection needs to be supplemented by the entomological process of mimesis, something that Darwin`s co-founder of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, always delved into most determinedly. I say "co-founder" almost from rote, but as the New York Times writer and polymath Arnold Brackman showed in his book A Delicate Arrangement, there is plenty of evidence that after receiving papers from Wallace solving the problem that had obsessed Darwin for 20 years on the mechanism of the divergence of species, Darwin played for time in 1858 while he incorporated Wallace`s key findings into his Origin of Species. We would be referring to WALLACE`s Theory of Evolution rather than Darwin`s had not Wallace been intimidated by the position of Darwin and his Wedgwood relations in the British Establishment at the height of imperial power.

The ability of insects to imitate a leaf, as in the jagged Comma butterfly, or to present itself altogether as something other than an insect, as with the Buff-tip moth, is the same process of mimesis which is at the heart of all the arts, and more significantly, of the evolution of language. There is no dispute about natural selection, but the process of mimesis is far more significant because it feeds into all the creative arts which ultimately define the human. And beyond this, there are the key philological nodes.

As I argue in INSECT-POPULATED MIND, the Greek origin of the word soul, psukhe, imitates the sound of breathing. It also means mind and breath of life. And Barry Powell has pointed to the root of mimesis in the Greek discovery of the atomic theory of matter translated into a theory of language where "graphemes represent the `atoms of spoken language.`
The failure of contemporary Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins to integrate the significance of the arts and philology into evolutionary theory has led to the present futile impasse in thinking. The attempt to rescue the situation thru the invention of "memes" is banal and little short of desperate.

A propos Nabokov, I do believe he owed far more to Ouspensky (the pre-Gurdjieff Ouspensky) than ever he admitted. Passages in SPEAK, MEMORY where Nabokov writes so magnificently on mimicry in nature echo almost exactly Ouspensky`s: "In order to form an insect exactly like a leaf of the plant on which it lives, not one, but thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of repeated accidents would have been necessary." As Nabokov famously writes: "When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. `Natural selection`, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous...mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator`s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."
Here he echoes Ouspensky`s contemporary Evreinov who advocated the theatricality of nature. As the great playwright dramatizes the nature of the human, so nature itself is a great theatre. When Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Lewis Wolpert at the recent GECCO conference (July 2007) made their obeisances to natural selection and emphasized the utilitarian (medical and electronic) advances possible through an understanding of mimicry in nature, they also intended to dismiss any more fully rounded expositions of evolutionary processes. A huge apparatus has been called into being in biology, genetics, zoology, which intends the phrase "natural selection" to be as discussion-killing as subscription to the correctness of the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" used to be for confirming the complete loyalty of the communist or socialist. The puritan tradition with its moralising absolutism is a great enemy of nuanced intellectual progress, and constitutes as great a threat to democracy as religious fundamentalism.
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Hyatt Carter has the following from his Einige Kleinen Nachtmusings 2. This appears on his web pages at www.hyattcarter.com

THE HUMAN-INSECT CONNECTION:
"The emphasis that science has placed on our close “family” connection with the higher apes, a connection that becomes apparent when you visit the primate section of any zoo, can obscure the closer connection we have with insects on a developmental level or in terms of the evolution of consciousness.

I first became aware of this connection through the writings of David Spooner. One of Spooner’s main contentions is that the “primate connection has caused mainstream evolutionary theory to miss the all-round interrelationship of human development to entomology, and that this relation is enshrined in the greatest of the higher art forms and religion. There is a crucial oblique relationship between metamorphic insects and humans, a connection transmitted through the great works of music and literature, and through many of the paradigms of world religions.”

A friend with whom I aired this idea suggested that such a claim could be made only on the grounds of poetic license. There is surely something “poetic” about all this, agreed, but I believe it goes beyond poetic license.

Words with “psyche” as a component, such as psychology, express in their meanings an evocation of butterflies and an etymology that traces back to the Greek word ψυχή which signifies soul, yes, but also butterfly. If I am not mistaken, it’s the only word in Greek that does mean butterfly. The butterfly is an ancient and enduring symbol of the soul that finds cross-cultural expression in all forms of art. Twentieth-century Hispanic literature gives an almost sacerdotal role not only to butterflies, but other insects and other animals, such as frogs, that enjoy metamorphosis in their development.

There’s another etymological link between “pueblo” and “populus,” derived from the ancient Greek “papaillo,” meaning to flutter: the root of the French word for butterfly: “papillon.”

I believe people have always dimly discerned something of fundamental significance in the metamorphosis of insects and in the behavior of social insects such as bees and ants.

In metamorphosis, there’s a saltation, or a transcendence, that provides a metaphor that resonates with the soul, with the butterflies adding an aesthetic dimension that expresses the becoming of beauty.

And so I suppose what convinces me is the cumulative effect of this extensive network of interconnected meanings, one that I could keep extending, but the above examples should give a sense of the general direction.

Perhaps it would be better to claim less generality and speak not of all insects, but only those that express the fourfold cycle of complete metamorphosis. These are designated as holometabolous and this group of insects are four in number:

　1. Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths),

　2. Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps),

　3. Coleoptera (beetles), and

　4. Diptera (flies).

If the idea of developmental levels that Piaget discovered in children can be generalized to describe the growth or expansion of consciousness in adults, both individually and collectively, then two complementary processes seem to be at work: within the limits of any level, incremental growth becomes possible as the landscape of that level is explored and mapped; but the shift to a new and higher level requires a saltation, transcendence, metanoia, satori.

In our individual quests for growth, we begin as caterpillars, devouring what books, gurus, and teachers have to offer. But a deep understanding, when things start to fall into place, comes only with a chrysalitic phase wherein our slumbering dogmas are liquefied so that the imaginal cells of the new system can bring forth the butterfly of transformation.

Developmental processes, such as evolution, are impelled by at least two types of change that may be characterized as vertical and horizontal. The horizontal line is the gradual advance, step by small meandering step, sanctioned by those of a Darwinian persuasion, whereas sudden spikes give evidence of a vertical exuberance.

And so Newton’s metamorphosis of scientific thought kept scientists busy for centuries with highly interesting incremental work, whereupon Einstein comes along to invite us all to ride with him on a beam of light up to a new level. Celeritas!

Metamorphosis, a significant evolutionary breakthrough if ever there was one, exemplifies this vertical strategy and, in the case of the butterfly, does so beautifully.

In light of all this, perhaps I should sign off as —

Gregor Samsa"
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MY WORKINPROGRESS
In the wake of the French Revolution, the German writer Novalis posed a number of issues about language and consciousness that still await answers. One contemporary saw Novalis as a bird of paradise “without feet, condemned to hover evermore in the air.” The writer Margaret Fuller wrote in letters, “I wish to talk about such an uncommon person, - about Novalis!...the good Novalis, most enlightened, yet most pure; every link of his experience framed – no beaten – from the tried gold.” Novalis had realised that the mental GROWTH of the individual was the key to the value of their insights. So he was doubtful as to the virtue of the academic mind. Such an orderly trained intellect “goes in swiftly – but also comes out swiftly –He soon reaches the second stage – but there he usually remains. He finds the final steps difficult and, once he has attained a certain level of mastery, can seldom bring himself to revert to the condition of a beginner.”
Now what may these stages of intellectual progress be that Novalis is referring to, and why should this academic mentality need to return to “the foul rag and bone shop” of the mind before proceeding to the third stage? For Novalis, it is ordinary people who are best equipped to tackle the higher echelons of development. The “confused,” as he calls them, ““penetrate slowly, they learn to work with difficulty, but then they become masters and teachers for ever... Confusedness indicates superfluity of strength and powers, but lack the sense of proportion. Precision – and true sense of proportion, but scanty strength and power. That is why the confused man is so perfectable (sic) compared with the trained man who so soon finishes as a Pedagogue.”
Consider the following 4 language elements in their interrelationship. They reveal a tale of insect evolution, running in allegorical parallel to human intellectual and spiritual maturation. This is the metaphor that is humanity, and it coincides with the “peculiar property of language” which as Novalis says in his Monologue, “is concerned only with itself.” But neither he nor his predecessor Fichte can reveal it in detail as the “truly scientific” original language. But not only was language when fully revealed Delphi itself, the route to self-knowledge, but also “the dynamic element in the physical realm.” Language appears to be a mere utility. We use it as common coinage for every conversation. And in the world of politics and economics as Novalis shrewdly notes, “where there are many words, there must also be much activity – as with the flow of money.” This is on the same cultural lines as Keynes` percept that capital is generated by animal spirits in human action. But at root language is far more than these things.
If one can distinguish its inner structure, there appears an entire natural philosophy, elements of which were prceived by Norman O. Brown in his intellectual brainbuster, Love`s Body. So ovum, the egg from which all develops appertains to the child`s mind, which I shall argue is not a tabula rasa. The next stage is larva which means mask or ghost. It is also a caterpillar, the idea being that it `masks` its final form, be it bee or butterfly. It also signifies `person` in Latin. Whence larvatus, possessed by a larva and meaning `personality.` When Descartes finally announced himself to the public, he wrote `larvatus prodeo.` On its way to complete realisation, a larva next morphs into a pupa related to the word `pupil`, awaiting transformation into an adult, parallel to the insect pupa awaiting metamorphosis into the imago. The imago or perfected insect is the culmination and real deal in this metamorphic world. It is not merely an `image,` and although in human life it often disconcertingly appears as an eidolon (as Helen of Troy was described) concealing and inspiring a more profound message. Most commonly it is represented in ancient Greece by a butterfly.
Could this helix of growth not be what Kant had seen as the “schema” within humans that unifies understanding and the objective world? As he put it in Critique of Pure Reason, “This schematism of our understanding, with respect to its appearance and its mere form, is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true workings we shall hardly coax from nature or expose unconcealed to view.” It is ironical that post-Kantian German philosophers from Wilhelm Schlegel to Hegel imagined they were entirely surpassing the original master before Marx shortcircuited the process. Certain `animal` structures inhere to the mind. The clues lie in strings of words conceived during the very birth of language, sensed before cultures had ossified into the Greek and Sanskrit mainstream, a type of molten big bang in the language world.
It is not, pace Chomsky, that the embryos are forming for sentence structures. It is that as the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid put it:
“There lie hidden in language elements that effectively combined
Can utterly change the nature of man.”
Darwin only revealed the descent from the great apes. But as A.R. Wallace his co-founder of the theory of evolution saw, the intellectual and spiritual evolution of humanity follows a separate line of growth, and one I would argue via the insect. So we dangle between ape and insect.
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Here is the text of a letter of mine published in The Herald (Glasgow) newspaper this March 8th:
`A Westminster government is fashioning the very chains that Marx found everywhere imprisoned working people, and Labour is presenting them with customary spin and arrogance as a favor to "enjoy" - as the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith puts it.
Over a century and a half before ID cards were ever thought of, that great definer of what liberty actually means, Henry Thoreau, said: "There will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognise the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats [them] accordingly."
Individual rights have been expropriated by the Labour
government, and citizens are being stripped of the little power they once had. Since the virtual destruction of the miners` union after the strike in the mid-1980s, this erosion of rights has gathered pace, culminating in the present blitz.`
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