noumenon / phenomenon
Jamie Etheridge
The light appears suddenly. A thin, startling slit where once darkness reigned. The ants notice. They are a curious lot. Some pause in their digging, sniff the air. There is no scent and nothing else happens. So they go about their work, busy as always.
Over time the light expands, the slit becomes a wedge, then a block, and finally a full shining window opens and in pours the smell of bleach, of soap, of human skin and that most precious of gifts in the desert where I live—water. The ants frenzy in excitement, tracking the odors up the side of their cavern, through the crack between the wall and the bathtub where the light hovers.
To the ants, the crack is an opportunity, an invitation from the musicality of the water that leaks in tiny, rhythmic drips from the back of the basin. The ants climb up through the hollow, sluicing in a cadenced line across the seam where the tiled walls meet the tiled floor and head toward the fountain.
They are a symphony
Of explorers
Knud Rasmussen in search
Of the Pearyland channel
Of the sway
Light reflected against bathroom tile
Water is the destination.
Behind the sink, the ants collect their bounty, drop by drop, ant by ant and then retrace their steps, back along the wall, to disappear into the pinpoint of darkness from whence they came. Over time and with the new, reliable water source, the colony grows and expands. They develop not only diggers and nursery workers but explorers, the ones who will seek out, establish new colonies. Life circles and circles back upon itself.
***
I watch, perched on the edge of the tub, this daily collecting. I admire the ants’ determination and singlemindedness.
Each morning, as I brush my teeth, I see the ants queue their way through the fissure in the casement, down the side of the tub, across the stubbled caulking where the floor and wall join, and on to the back of the sink.
When I first saw them, I asked my husband to put out ant poison or seal up the hole. But he dithered and I let the matter drop. It is haram to deny water to any living thing. And who am I to claim this space for my own? Perhaps they were here long before we moved in. Perhaps they watched us heave the bed frame through the doorway, sweat pouring down our faces. They listen, half engrossed, half grossed out, to our raucous lovemaking. So I add ants to the list of sentients with whom I share a few square meters of this planet and decide that coexistence is the only way.
Perhaps the ants view us as gods or glaciers, gargantuan, fickle, and ultimately, something to be ignored. They might detect the shadow of my movements as I step from the shower or smell the shampoo I spill on the floor. But they never cower or scatter or give up or run away. They do not fear us and do not seem to mind us. If I lay a toothbrush across their path, they simply clamber over, continue on.
What if we are like ants to the gods above us? What if we are but a manifestation of nature, neither knowing or knowable outside our own finite selves? Perhaps we are not so different from the ants and their daily work. I ponder these thoughts as I brush my hair and get dressed for the day and wonder, who or what is noticing me as I notice the ants?
This morning I notice one ant pushing past her sisters, racing toward the dripping faucet. She is small, black with tiny antennae, a worker like all the others. And yet there is something unusual in her gait. She skips, she furrows, she flutes through the queue until she disappears behind the ceramic cover at the back of the sink. A few moments later, she reemerges with a massive, translucent blob on her back. It is thrice as large as the drops the other workers carry.
In the Umebayashi Shigeru waltz, Yemuji’s theme, a lone violin parses the string melody, separating love and hate, hope and despair, order and chaos. This ant, like the violin, slices through the artery of water bearers. She weaves and the line swells, she swerves and the line frays. Like the violin, she is uncaring of the chaos in her wake. She thinks only of the speed, the weight – the result. At the opening, she pauses, and a shaft of light glints off the water bead. Then she disappears into the cavity below, her work done for the day.
I stare in the mirror, dreaming for a moment of mountain cabins, quiet time to write, and yearlong sabbaticals. But not today. Like the ants, I’ve got Herculean blobs to carry. Laundry that needs doing. Work that won’t wait.
Still I watch these inscrutable beasts of burden.
Another ant appears at the opening. She descends the tub and plops onto the tiled floor, then veers off, away from the line of ants hugging the wall. I admire her freestyle roaming. She is an explorer, pilgrim to the unknown. I remember my own exploring, many years ago. The bravery of that first step into the strange and remote.
The ant races out into the middle of the room and edges up to the shadow cast by my foot. She stops at the Rubicon of light and dark for the briefest of moments—and then plunges in.
I lift my foot, the shadow recedes and the ant keeps going, toward the doorway and the room beyond. All the world before her.