imago

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

She came to me on a Wednesday, while I was picking carrot greens for pesto. Harvesting is a meditative act for me; my hands moving through the feathery greens, fingers testing the maturity of each one to find stalks that the still growing carrot won’t miss, while my brain stepped back its freakout cycle triggered by The Apology (see last week’s post). I shifted a bunch of carrot tops…and there she was: green like the tender new growth on our spruce tree, banded in black with yellow dots; all awkward pudginess and concerned only for her meal. I had never seen a caterpillar like her before. Not a monarch, but close. She was lovely.

And, she appeared to be of a size to pupate. My girls had never watched a butterfly’s transformation, and I had a ready supply of what this caterpillar seemed to enjoy eating, so the decision to bring her inside was quickly made. I picked the bunch of greens she was feeding on and called the girls. Rena took one look and ran to fetch her insect house, which hadn’t yet been inhabited by a living creature. We dipped the carrot greens in water, added a few sticks from the apple tree, and called it Samantha’s new home. Rena, who had named the caterpillar and insisted that it was a “she,” put herself in charge of bringing in fresh greens twice a day and making sure that they were nice and wet. We watched carrot tops disappearing and little brown pellets take their place in the bottom of the cage. Friends of ours visited the next day and one of them took it upon himself to web search pictures of Ohio caterpillars. He said it was a type of swallowtail. I pictured the lovely black and yellows I have seen gracing the summer skies of everywhere I’ve lived, and smiled. A butterfly would feel like a good omen this year. I needed this little one to thrive.

imago

ĭ-mā′gō, ĭ-mä′-

noun

1. An insect in its sexually mature adult stage after metamorphosis.

2. An often idealized image of a person, usually a parent, formed in childhood and persisting unconsciously into adulthood.

From The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

A few days later, Samantha took up a pose on one of the apple sticks, gripping the stick with her hindmost legs while the rest of her stuck out stiffly like a ripe ear of corn on its stalk. Within hours, Samantha was gone; replaced by a delicate green envelope. We tried not to disturb the insect house where it sat on the windowsill above my kitchen sink. I worried she would get too much sun and overheat. I worried about moving her, so I didn’t. When I was a kid I had tried to hatch several monarch butterflies I had captured on the milkweed that grew by our pond. One after another I had watched them become chrysalises, and then turn the icky brown of transformation gone mortally wrong. Eventually I stopped trying. I watched Samantha and hoped, and the girls watched with me. We waited together.

How a Caterpillar Turns into a Butterfly

First, the caterpillar digests itself, releasing enzymes
to dissolve all of its tissues. If you were to cut open
a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar
soup would ooze out. 
     —from "How Does a Caterpillar Turn into a Butterfly?"

She doesn't know for certain that it hurts,
but speaking from experience, she imagines
that it does. 
~Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose, Imago, Dei

I, too, have always imagined that it must hurt. I know the work of digesting myself so that I have the materials to build something new. I do this work every day. I have been doing this since I was sixteen.

There is one particular sort of tissue that remains: in a number of places in the insect’s body are collections of special formative cells, which…have stayed hidden or protected during this partial death. Each of these groups of cells is called an imaginal bud…¹

Is she aware of the transformation while it is happening? I wonder. Will she recognize herself at all once the transformation is complete? A butterfly, newly hatched, is called an imago. This same word is used to describe the moment when a baby first recognizes themselves in a mirror.

In the ‘aha’ experience that characterizes the mirror stage, the infant grasps the connection between the image and its own existence. The infant experiences the imago as…a meaningful form. It is important to note that the imago is external to the infant. The ‘I’ comes into being not as an emanation of the individual, but as the result of an encounter with an other².

From this moment on, according to Jacques Lacan, who was known as the “French Freud,” the individual knows itself to be divided; a rift having formed between the inner self and the outer self. We never look quite like we imagine ourselves to be. Perhaps, even as different as a caterpillar and a butterfly.