the end of the european pastoral

 

When I was an adolescent, embedded in metro Atlanta, I dreamed of Europe. The Europe I saw in movies. The Europe I read about in books. The Europe I saw in paintings, or to be more specific, reproductions of paintings in books.

In this Europe, people strolled in meadows. Hell, sometimes they lounged naked in meadows. And, significantly for a child of suburban development in land that was once half junkyard, half forest, these Europeans never seemed to worry about being bitten. They swam in streams and didn’t think about water moccasins, they skipped about in meadows without slapping down mosquitos and gnats, and, significantly, they could plop themselves down anywhere without inspecting the area for ant mounds – that is, for fire ants.

I have plenty personal experience of fire ants, and they do disturb the pastoral mood. And o my droogs, they are always on for a skorry up the legs and a little collective stinging. This they are amazingly good at. I remember, once, doing a landscaping job in Louisiana, when I was out of my pissant teens, and somehow rummaging up a metro of the fuckers. It was not a good time to be me.

So imagine my horrors when I read in Liberation that pastoral Europe, the Europe of picnics, prime vacation and retirement spot for cavemen in the paleolithic, the Europe of my teendreams, is going going gone. Fire ants have landed. In fact, there are now metros of them in Sicily.  

“In September, an article in Current Biology revealed the presence of 88 nests near Syracuse. Monday, the same researchers in the same journal confirmed that the species, an especially invasive one, has in reality put down its hooves in the southwest of the island since at least 2017.”

Of mosquitos, the turn of the climate has delivered a nice soupy warm niche for them in Paris and all over France and one gets bitten even in the winter, now. But this dread footfall of the fireant on Sicily is truly the forenote of bitterer things. The last time the order of nature was broken up by some underground force in Sicily was when Proserpine was raped by Hades.

“Neare Enna walles there standes a Lake, Pergusa is the name.

 Cayster heareth not mo songs of Swannes than doth the same.

A wood environs everie side the water round about,

And with his leaves as with a veyle doth keepe the Sunne heate out.

The boughes do yeelde a coole fresh Ayre : the moystnesse of the grounde

 Yeeldes sundrie flowres : continuall spring is all the yeare there founde.

 While in this garden Proserpine was taking hir pastime.

 

In gathering eyther Violets blew, or Lillies white as Lime,

And while of Maidenly desire she fillde hir Maund and Lap,

Endevoring to outgather hir companions there.”

 

The end of that rape story was the start of the seasons – which, as we know, we are now seeing the end of, seemingly frozen in shock. It was another fiery insect – the fire fly – that was lamented in a prophetic essay by Pasolini: Where have all the fireflies gone? This was written in 1975.

“In the early sixties, because of air pollution, and water pollution in the countryside (our blue rivers and limpid irrigation ditches) fireflies began to disappear. The phenomenon was swift and terrible. After a few years the fireflies were not longer there. (They are now a painful memory from the past; and an older man with yet such a memory can no longer see himself in the face of today's youngsters, as he once was, because they have no store of such memories.)”

We all know that extinction is the price of prosperity. But what happens when the prosperity turns, finally, on us? For are we really more useful than the fireflies? A question that the fire ants can answer – we’ve been o so useful to them. Ring down the curtain on a world that endured from Ovid to Pasolini, then. It brings juice to me glazzies, it really does. Finis.