Edging Toward an Ordinary Aesthetic (with thanks to Virginia Woolf)

Mid-spring: the cabbage moth balances on a lettuce leaf so new it is nearly translucent. The veins of this lettuce—maybe it’s black-seeded Simpson—are delicate, none of the bitter white juices in it yet that add bite to the greens before the plant bolts.

The moth is likewise a new life, exercising its wings on the breeze, testing the strength of each green perch. In its cabbage-worm form, it ate its way through leaves and spent the winter in a small, beige-colored chrysalis. Now, it examines the perimeters of foliage. It prefers members of the Cruciferae family, which abound in the meadow as well as in the garden; wild mustard thrives here, a European import (as is the cabbage moth).

The very tips of the moth’s white wings are a dapply grey, as though it had dipped them in an ash pit. The wings appear pure white otherwise, although they actually bear spots—one on each of the male moth’s four wings, with an extra spot on the female’s forward wings. The moth on the lettuce leaf is male and young, his wings smooth and whole. He has not done enough flying yet to have acquired a ragged look. Through a series of exchanges with the environment, of transformations and crossings of boundaries, the moth lucked his way to this vegetable garden in the second week of May.

As an egg, he emerged from a female moth’s ovipositor and was glued to the underside of a moist stem. The moth’s egg is a marvel of functional construction. Its shell, the chorion, is a kind of air-exchanging filter on a minute scale; the moth’s egg is porous and breathable, like a good cotton-knit shirt. Oxygen and carbon dioxide can be exchanged right through the chorion, a mesh border that keeps the incipient creature alive. Too much water in the egg’s environment can easily lead to drowning, freezing, or mildew, so the shell acts both as barrier and gateway. It’s the vital edge.

Having escaped undetected by egg predators, hatched without untoward incidence, and fed itself through the larval stage without becoming anyone else’s dinner, the moth eventually progressed to chrysalis-dweller and emerged less than a week ago to decorate the breeze and begin the next generation to decimate the cabbages. The moth’s survival relies upon a series of events, each one of which requires, at some point, a pushing-through.

Human beings tend to consider these passages obstacles. Isn’t that what we learn in literary analysis in high school, that there are a series of plot lines to encounter, all of which contain the word “versus” or “against”? Man against Man, Man versus Nature, Man against Society, etc. The moth’s life might be interpreted as Moth against Moisture, Moth against Predator, Moth vs. Starvation. Then again, the moth’s life might be seen as a series of lucky accidents, or proof of God’s Miraculous Plan, or an escapade of existential pointlessness. Who’s doing the interpretation? Surely not the moth.

Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Death of the Moth” comes to mind, a meditation on the strangeness of life and death played out on the tiny stage of a moth at a window. How carefully Woolf observes the “hay-coloured” moth in its strenuous moments of full life and encroaching death. The moth’s struggle is short to her; perhaps this is not so from whatever perceptions a moth possesses. The moth, while it lived, “was little or nothing but life” and insignificant in death, she says. And yet...with the pencil she holds ready to help right the moth when it falls upon its back, she “writes” the moth in another way, a significant way, to us, at any rate, with whatever perceptions a human being possesses.

The insect that cannot surmount the windowpane is confronting a barrier, living on the edge, as did the human woman who found herself on the fringe between life and what comes after, between persistence and despair. People find edge zones intriguing. It is fascinating to explore the thicket which surrounds the enchanted castle, to haunt seedy alleys between the main thoroughfares, to analyze the mind’s tangles between what is called ‘sane’ and what is termed ‘insane.’

Artists often choose to immerse their audiences in edgy environments, anything that shoves society’s nose into recesses and abscesses that “creep us out,” like sideshow exhibits. Baudelaire found this approach necessary, and 21st-Century folk are drawn to Pieter Breughel the Youngers paintings of hell’s torments probably for the same reasons his contemporaries found them awesome.

“Edgy,” after all, is generally a compliment these days for a film or literary work. A cabbage moth, though it confront a hundred obstacles and thwart fate again and again before its final posture “decently and uncomplainingly composed” (observes Woolf), is not an especially edgy subject. But its connection to the writer, and to the reader through the transactional experience of reading, is a marvel of balance along the narrow margins of boundary and obstacle.

And the moth is beautiful. But so is Breughel beautiful. Even his grotesque monsters in the depths of Hell are painted by a keen observer of the ordinary, someone who knows how firelight and shadow fall on skin, how the joints of a bird’s legs are positioned, how the human eye perceives a road, a tree stump, the curl of an ear. These ordinary things tend to escape the viewer engaged by one of Breughel’s infernal canvases. The fragile energy of Woolf’s moth is an ordinary occurrence, beneath notice; even the author declares the insect and its death “insignificant.” To write about the infinitesimal, to record the progress of a life along the borderlines, physical and invented, to paint or capture what no one bothers or cares to see,—those are among art’s functions, if somewhat overlooked of late. Does it matter that the male cabbage moth has four spots on its wings (and what do we gain by knowing this)? Whether or not it matters depends on context, perhaps on tone, and helps to establish authenticity and beauty in any artwork.

There is an aesthetic of the ordinary, and it is awakened when what is usual is examined from a new perspective—an edge perspective, where the divisions may not be just obstacles but also passages, like the chorion or any alleyway that is not a terminus, like the moth whose “gigantic effort” transformed Woolf’s strangeness of life into an equal strangeness of death. The aesthetic of the ordinary is not fashionable, current, edgy, but is compelled to explore barriers and permeability, the paradox of the porous border, the beauty of the insignificant, the bounty of life’s fringes. “Ordinary” includes the cabbage moth’s great luck in weathering vicissitudes enough to sup from the rapeseed flower, mate, and die in a bird’s craw or a writer’s window.

Such incidences don’t make up an edgy life, but rather life along the edge, which stays interesting longer than the former. Culture and fashion alter what’s considered novel or edgy; yesterday’s peek-a-boo blouse is today’s wardrobe malfunction. The actual and metaphorical borderlands, however, evolve coincident with history. There is always something to be gained by investigating and recording what goes on within the vital edge, crossing the pane between one space and another, no matter how insignificant the life.