Out of the marvellous

UFOs, the ecological and the paranormal

UFOs are rare in cities. With all the aviation, street and home lighting, there’s too much else going on. Still, roughly once a week, an eerie blue-green glow and a hovering cylindrical object outside my window, let me know I can expect extraterrestrial visitors.

In my case, it’s not clear whether the visitors are the aliens or whether I am. After all, I put the “royal blue and pure green” light there and hung the bucket up. And the unidentified objects that land in the bucket while I sleep could easily be experiencing the ultraviolet light as a sort of irresistible tractor beam. But unlike my ancestors, I do not pin and spread my catch on a table. No, I wake like a child on Christmas morning, and peer at them out of wide, gooey eyes.

In the morning, the uncertainties of nighttime fade, and they become unambiguously alien. Feathery antennae, hypnotic braided wings, down-covered heads, ambling slowly along the egg cartons I’ve laid out for them. The names they’ve been given hint at their strange presence here: the Hebrew Character, the Scorched Carpet, the Dark Spectacle.

Despite the fact that there are 40 times more species of them than butterflies, that 90% of flowering plants depend on them for pollination, and that they are perhaps more important than day-flying insects for plant reproduction, moths are either ignored or maligned. If they’re thought of at all, it’s as destroyers of clothes, invaders of pantries or, at best, as something to compare uncontrollable attractions with (like moths to).

In the rare moments they have been mythologised, moths are satanic, evil incarnations. Take the encounter with the Mothman in a small US town in the 1960s, “a huge, bird-like creature, with glowing red eyes [making] flapping, gurgling” sounds.

The only ecologically significant way moths are known is by their absence splattered against car windows (we’ve lost 40% of our moth species since the 1960s). In this way, they herald ecological doom. As the psychoanalysts would say, there’s something of the abject about moths. Even their champions, people who write adoring books about them like Tim Blackburn, are only able to compare them to inert, dazzling objects, rather than beings with agency.

Which, when you think about it, is probably how they like it.

Moths are furtive creatures. Their wings are intricately designed to be mistaken for tree bark, fallen leaves or bird poo so that they can sleep during the day undisturbed by birds. They are made of microscopic scales (giving them their scientific name Lepidoptera from the Greek lepis, lepid- ‘scale’ + pteron ‘wing’) which, along with their fluffy heads, absorb and confuse the echolocation of their primary predator bats. They fly under the radar.

These scales bring to mind dragons. Of which, it is worth quickly observing, there are two competing versions in our mythology. One (think Tolkien and the founding of England with George’s draco-cide) paints dragons as marauding and senseless. The other understands dragons as a secretive part of an older, wiser world, their intelligence and behaviour beyond the reach of human minds. This is the version of Ursula Le Guin in the Earthsea series, where the wisdom of dragons, and a rare interspecies coalition, becomes essential for the survival of the world. We have a similar interpretive choice to make about moths.

With all these hints of the extraterrestrial and the fantastical, moths could conceivably be admitted to the recently designated category of ‘magical animals’ one day. In a paper in an international conservation journal, Smith, Holmes and Ward, explain that ‘magical animals’ are those which have become so woven into human mythmaking that they are essential to preserving biodiversity. In Accra in Ghana, the vulture, which it is bad luck to harm, is a magical animal. In Madagascar, it’s the lemurs who are believed to be ancestral spirits. In the parts of Brazil where people believe dolphins can transform themselves into humans, the dolphin is a magical animal. In a fun and rare recognition of other worlds, the author’s category also includes animals which science says don’t exist. The effects for example, of the Loch Ness monster or the Icelandic huldufólk, are huge on protecting the land near where they are believed to exist.

Next week a London book club is discussing Greening the Paranormal, a book which explores ‘the ecology of extraordinary experience’. The book (which opens with the epigraph from Le Guin: “people who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”) collects essays by people who want to see more made of the connection between the paranormal and the ecological. Magical animals are just the start. The history of alien encounters, extraordinary creatures and inexplicable experience is full of supernatural forewarnings of the destruction of the planet. What’s more, the patterns of mind that shape the UFOlogist -a sense of mysterious connection, of a hidden totality that most people are missing- are the same patterns that enchant the ecologist.

Moths don’t get a mention. If they did I’d have talked about dragons and Mothman and UFOs, because Moths can do for us what the Airships of Clonmacnoise have done for centuries of Irish people.

In a story that goes back to the 8th century Ulster Annals, the airship of Clonmacnoise describes a ship sailing through mid-air over a small Irish town. A sailor is seen swimming down through the air to free the anchor which has been caught on the Church’s altar. Seamus Heaney retells it in a poem that helped him win the Nobel Prize in literature:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Heaney’s words on the meaning of this poem are all I would want to say about moths:

While on the one hand, it’s "about the way consciousness can be alive to two different and contradictory dimensions of reality and still find a way of negotiating between them", and "it's about the negotiation that goes on in everybody's life between what is envisaged and what is endured – between the dream up there and the doings down here…”

It is also about “the necessity of keeping the lines open between the two levels of our being, the level where we proceed with the usual life of the meeting and the decision, and the other level where the visionary and the marvellous present themselves suddenly and bewilderingly”.