"From Treetop To Treetop"

Early one morning last week, I was startled awake by the sound of what I originally took to be fingers or perhaps needle-nose pliers seeking larcenous entry through the bay window on the east wall of my bedroom. Pulling myself out of one of my typically twisted postures of slumber, I sat and, rather than reaching for the Louisville Slugger I keep underneath the bed, listened in the stillness of my own anticipation. And as my eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, I noticed the shadow of something vaguely bullet-shaped on the slats of the mini-blinds. It crept very gingerly towards an unknown target. Pulling back the blinds as if they were drapes -- I did not think to raise them -- I saw that what had raised the alarm was just a cicada that had wriggled its way in between the window and the window screen. What I had taken for the initial crepitations of breaking and entering were, in fact, just the nervous, perhaps even distressed, unfurlings of large, delicately-veined (and nearly useless) wings rattling against glass and tin. I fell heavily back to my pillow, and eventually drifted back off to sleep, comforting myself with thoughts about how, at the height of summer, these damn bugs never give me any rest.

If there is any sound that I associate with summer, it is cicadas. I'm not talking so much about the 17-year variety here -- periodical cicadas (Magicicada septendecim; Magicicada Cassini; Magicicada septendecula); a soil-aerating plague -- but the so-called "dog day" variety. They aren't locusts, as they are absent horns; still, their mud-brown molted shells, left crouched on any number of vertical structures, look like locusts. (As if Nature were telling you a parable about evolution as the sloughing off of lesser character.) The ones you hear then, I suppose, on July and August days when the noon sky is as white as a felled sycamore tree, and the temperature seems to ascend with each little amplification of the insects' synchronized "oooo-wheeeeoo-oooowheeeeoo-oooo-wheeeeoo". When the cicadas hit a certain pitch -- and they invariably do, over and over again -- it is almost as if your immediate surroundings, the very environment that both sustains and threatens you, is a giant tamboura. Each protracted chirp is an immeasurably tiny length of taut string, the air itself is a resonating chamber… music by colony. Amazing to think that it is all due to a membrane, a loose lid vibrating on a deep barrel. Dead, cicadas fold up and become oddly weightless, despite their girth. It is as if their song -- not the ability to sing, but the actual tones themselves -- accounted for the great percentage of their mass as well.

Does one hear in these cyclical melodies naught but Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw", the story of creatures that have endured, if not peacefully then through sheer, impassive procreative virtuosity, the extinction of generation upon generation of predators and pests? When I was a child, I used to humor myself with the thought that the cicadas' whirring, whining refrain jumped from tree to tree, that there was some relay or even responsorial at work. Over their very long life span, cicadas climb from (silently feeding?) grub state to the most outspread of branches, and so, from treetop to treetop, the frequencies would double, then quadruple, and the sound would overlap itself. Distances as they were measured back then -- back in the yard, down the block, to the school playground, past the stop sign, over the chain link fence -- would become confused. Now I know that this call is exclusively male, and a mating song. A competition. Cicada song, then, even if studied by hobbyists in the field of bioacoustics, is not music for leisure. It is sound as pheromone, and, like the raining honey-dew that is the cicadas' urine, this discharge is mediated sap.

Serious matters of survival are tied up in this languid buzz that hurtles towards a scream around sundown (Have different broods joined in? Or are the identical bugs now using different parts of themselves -- hindlegs or forelegs, thoraxes, wings -- to make and modify this familiar sound?). There's nothing really lazy about it, not even with the smells of weed-wacker gasoline, Good Humor popsicles, and pool chlorine wafting on the breezeless air. What must this song, so repetitive, sound like to the cicada? I don't mean "sound" here so much cognitively. I mean physically. I think, too, that I mean in terms of a substance in which you are plunged, or which radiates through you even as you are only an apportionment of its forces, by virtue of your anatomy. Is this sound visited upon your arthropod consciousness like a divine madness, or Greatness? Does your blood slosh about in sympathetic vibrations? Does the song seize your nerves through your senses; does it make you engage in helpless behaviors? As you sing, do you have to beat time, or is your rhythm entirely natural, a compulsion that displaces your individuality (as much as you, hiving and dispensable, can be said to possess one)? And, most of all, this noise, what does it set to tingling -- and where, and how?