My mind is deep in a wired, transcendental, meditative state, exploring the deep buried nooks and crannies of my brain’s gravel bedrock – following some sage Lockdown survivalist advice of everyone from ancient Taoist masters, to the enigmatic RZA from the Wu Tang Clan – when, after what seems like hours but is more like minutes, I open my eyes gently and spy a fly resting peacefully on my right hand.
The fly looks up, with its two gigantic mesh reflector eyes looking piercingly in my direction, and green metallic body buzzing, vibrating, it wiggles its hips, shakes its legs, and stares boldly, brass necked even, into my eyes.
And for a minute or two, we lock antennae. Two immaculately diverse specimens of DNA caught in the same moment, on this revolving rock floating in outer space.
Eye to eye. Face to face. Soul to soul?
And as I stare into those huge reflective eyes, thinking of Bono’s sunglasses and that gory ectoplasmic David Cronenberg film, I wait for the insect to fly off, to join his mates on a shared pile of dog turd. But it remains. Stationary, immovable, immortal even, like Peter Tosh’s Rock of Ages.
My thoughts twist and turn to ‘The Metamorphosis’, a short story I read in my teenage years, all about a German salesman who turns into a huge insect overnight. I remember the vivid and visceral horror of the transformation: how he lived this shameful new life in solitude, abandoned by his family, eating only rotten food, forever doomed to crawl round the walls, ceilings, and windows of the confines of his room.
Meanwhile, the cheesy sounds of natural meditation strings and relaxation tunes are streaming on my headphones, somehow enhancing this weird love-in between man and fly.
I feel a strange tickle of guilt wash over, of a loose regret at all those times gleefully charging round like a madman with a rolled-up newspaper, swatting bluebottle brothers for sport, till their liquid insides explode on the walls and windows of the house.
This deranged practice became frighteningly amplified in the 2020 Lockdown Summer of Discontent, when I would watch on with violent irritation, sweating on a leather sofa in the heat, as tag teams of flies would take turns to orbit in a heat vortex under the lounge light fitting.
But in this moment, graced with the worrisome sentimentality of a Buddhist monk, I feel a pluck and pang of the emotional heartstrings, for this oddly beautiful specimen of an insect, crafted and honed by the strange evolutionary forces of nature.
This brief and fleeting moment of wobbly enlightenment – of the fragile gift of life, of the precious thread that binds us all – is rudely intruded on by angry mob of home-schooled kids screaming blue murder if they don’t get a Mc Reward for their academic endeavours.
And, with a cynical bent, I wonder at how being out of it on meditation or medication has gone to the jugular of my mind.
Either way, the fly and I part company, to join our respective gravy trains of life.