the dead bee grants us very little

There is a dead bee sitting in the window where I write. She curled in on herself in the sun. Perhaps she lost her breath living on the inside, maybe it was the disease that turns her wings into crumpled rings, or maybe she was too far and too long from the flowers that don’t grow anymore. An ant crawls around her, smelling out something to harvest.

Years ago I moved to a house in Alabama where a paper wasp had set up her nest at the corner of my front porch. I was so scared of the wasps, I pulled my couch up to the big bay window looking out on the porch and I never went outside. I just watched the wasps multiply through September, watched them emerge from their cells brand new, watched their nest grow the the size of my head. My landlord came over one day and said to me, “This is no way to be, staring like this.” I wanted, for once, to let something live that I didn’t understand.

When she had sprayed it down with an entire can of Raid, I went outside for the first time in weeks. Their wasp bodies had dried out almost immediately, littered along the wooden boards, falling between the cracks into the red dirt below. I picked up the empty nest and marveled at the architecture, wondering if it would hold together if I cut a cross section of it to keep. I gathered the wasps into a velvet box, arranging them in a circle like the petals of a flower.

Before that, I am waking up at 4 a.m. with my uncle in Maine. He asks if I want to go fishing, and because it’s 4 a.m. and I’m wide awake and 6 months out from trying to kill myself, I wrap myself in two sweaters and row us out into the middle of the lake. It’s August in Maine and the stars are out. We don’t say anything, our silhouettes two heads hanging backwards, looking up. The water is calm, and I take us to a little outcropping of reed beds, where he knows the bass are at this time of night. I catch his directions through the fog, hear him point out the movements that show there’s a fish in the water. Sometimes there is no lesson, but it helps to point at the light straining through the trees and say, “oh” into the steam coming off the pond.

—

I find a lot of the writing we read on the internet easy to read but all in all uninteresting. It’s tidy, and neat, algorithmic. If it tells a story, there is a point to it, a lessons-learned, a nice wrapping-up with bullet points and key takeaways. These essays are optimized, as they should be in some cases - writers also have to pay their bills, and in a world increasingly defined by purpose, contribution, and efficiency in the face of the algorithm, this is the type of writing that needs to be written in order to be “seen” by revenue sreams. In other cases, the author is GPT-4 or Mistral, who reinforce a highly structured, highly purposed type of content. This is the difference between “writing” and “content” in my experience. I’m not arguing that writing is unrefined, but content has a predetermined architecture and goal, a predefined audience predicated on some transaction.

Sometimes I have nothing to say but to look, to look hard at something for a long time, or to remember something in such detail that I am always remembering it. There is no point to paying attention to the dead bee. She will not get me paid subscribers; nobody’s searching “dead bee” in any meaningful volume, and if they are, they’re probably looking for information on hive health and will be sorely disappointed that they found me writing prose poems about Apis mellifera. The growing wasp nest above my window serves no purpose, represents nothing. But it was there, a moment of pure observation, of all my human senses, of distillation in a way that only I can draw out.

I don’t believe that writing should get us some place, and I wish for more writing in online spaces that resists the very idea of purpose in late-stage capitalism. Writing that resists commodification, circulation, that resists the drive for virality, a machine that looks for the biomarkers of efficiency. Writing that is alive and boring and winding and useless. Writing that leaves us alone for its own sake as well as ours. Writing that lives and breathes in the world.

For all the things that I must do, all the things I must accomplish in a given day, the one place that can exist as it is, saturated, refined to be only itself, is here.