Today I’ve rescued a fly. Actually I’m not sure what it was – it looked like a big ant with large, fragile wings (I’m somehow embarrassed with the scarcity of my knowledge. Maybe not embarrassed – plus it’s no longer vital to be perceptive about real nature… reality seems to have changed its nature – it’s more like I’m missing out on something; I carry this feeling with me ever since traversed by Ernst Junger’s Radiations /"Strahlungen".)
Anyway… what’s sure is that this fly didn’t know what a window was, and obviously wasn’t prepared to learn individually, in that instance, from repeatedly banging its precariously assembled body against the invisible barrier. (Although… what about those fish that, long ago, landed on earth and finally developed lungs... Was there a particular instance… a particular fish…)
The recurrent action took place in a tram. Just a few centimeters away, from time to time, the doors to freedom (the fly’s natural reality, with “transparency as usual“) were opening, and closing on the fly’s inability to look around the corner. Must have been very tiring: bursts of sheer determination were followed by progressively longer sessions of recomposure.
So – perhaps also in the wake of my previous post – I took action: got out a piece of paper and, quite effortlessly, helped the fly leave the tram the same time I did. Ok, I didn’t get to see the fly actually flying afterwards (I had – ?... – to blow it off the paper: now I think it was kind of cruel), but nevertheless felt content.
A couple of hours later, I took the tram on the way back. Inside, the same play was going on. Starring: a bee (unable to look over its shoulder at the door on the opposite side), this time. Plus me. I took the same paper out (a “sublime object”, by the title it was bearing), only things weren’t running as smoothly as previously. And the bee looked increasingly drained. People started to take an interest in the rescue effort. “She’s helping the bee!” cheered a little girl, answering some question of her mother. Now I think it could have been rewarding to stop for a few seconds and look around, but back then it didn’t even cross my mind: I was intensely into gently catching the bee. I knew time was running out, nevertheless a confidence of some kind was radiating from somewhere inside of me.
All was in vain. The tram stopped, and I had to rush out with bee-less hands. And… I still felt content. Like after rescuing the fly. Only now, thanks to the bee, I knew it had nothing to do with the result of my action. It had something to do with not looking over my shoulder (it’s childish, what will people say, I’ll make a fool out of myself, it’s just a fly/bee) or around the corner (will it even work). No, I wasn’t really feeling content: I was rather feeling myself. No… not even that: I simply was.
