By The Landlord
“Butterflies are not insects. They are self-propelled flowers.” – Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.” – Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures,” replied Estella, with a glance towards him, "hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Ballet in the air...
Twin butterflies until, twice white
They meet, they mate. – Bashō, Japanese Haiku
“Words can be like a butterfly effect.” – Hadinet Tekie
“The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.” – George Carlin
“As soft and gentle as a sigh, the multicoloured moods of love are like its satin wings ... a rare and gentle thing,” went the theme tune, covering a song originally by a certain big star, to the bittersweet (is that a synonym for listless and a bit shit?) 1970s British sitcom starring Wendy Craig, who plays Ria, a bored, middle-class housewife seeking meaning to her comfortable, but dull life with husband and two indifferent, ungrateful sons. As distraction, she toys with the idea, but never actually goes through with an affair with some rich, besuited businessman, instead sticking with her generally miserable, downbeat dentist hubby, who, as it happens, is an amateur lepidopterist. There's always a catch.
Obviously Ria is the metaphorical flapper seeking to take flight, but when I distantly recall this TV programme, it makes me think of an almost colourless, certainly dull brownish, soulless 70s Britain. But the bigger theme, and one we're collecting this week (hopefully not pinned in lifeless rows under glass like some, to be brutally honest, monstrously wasteful, disturbing Damien Hirst artwork, or like in the mind of the obsessive psychopath in John Fowles' novel The Collector), instead it will hopefully take flight in our musical meadow, capturing many fluttering mini-themes and contexts along the way – love, art, and other intangibles, whether with lyrics in metaphor or as literal, or even evoked in the music, and will hopefully entertain with a flickering mass of sunlit and iridescent colour.
But what do you think of when butterflies and moths come to mind? Beauty and fragility, or hairy horror? The obsessional lepidopterist chasing down the helpless with a giant net, or the extraordinary variety, but fleeting lives of these beautiful insects?
And why are moths in the shadow of their showier butterflies cousins, even though they are different, but also part of the Lepidoptera family? Because of their association with dark, dusty places, of flying out of rarely opened wallets, as clothes-eating pests, as creatures of the night with their fatal impulsions towards candles, or connection with very dark films such as Silence of the Lambs? And yet moths have just as many weird, wonderful and colourful species, and some are even prettier than butterflies.
Might literal references or metaphors take flight in your recollection? Both will count in this week's lyrical theme. The butterfly effect, that chaos theory idea by Edward Norton Lorenz on in which a small flutter and change a deterministic nonlinear system can result in an eventual large difference, such as a tornado? Perhaps there may be social butterflies, nervous butterflies in stomachs, or Muhammad Ali's famous floating butterfly metaphor? Ideally though, the butterfly or moth will feature prominently in the song rather than just be a passing, floating image.
And of course, as long as it becomes one of this week’s theme, there's also humble hungry, caterpillar, whose life, and appearance, undergoes a complete metamorphosis, part of a miraculous four-stage life cycle, from laid butterfly eggs into larvae, multi-legged munchers pupating into a chrysalis, before struggling out of a sticky sack to emerge fully formed for flight. It really is a transformation. As the great American architect, engineer and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller put it: “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.” And even in that earlier walking stage, not all of them look as you might expect:
Butterflies and moths seem to represent the intangible, the epitome of tragic beauty and mutability. Perhaps it's their short, dramatic, hurried lives. Or their daily pollination, some sexual dimorphism, or females emit pheromones and attract males, their infinite patterns and colorations that come all kinds of mimicry of flower petals as camouflage, or serve warning signs with eyes to ward off birds. For inspiration, let's land softly and briefly on a few species in no particular order, mixing the moths with the butterflies. Will they life longer than this week’s topic lasts? Which is your favourite?
Yet perhaps most remarkable story about these insects is some species' extraordinary inbuilt drive to migrate, not as individuals, but across generations, carrying a collective mission. There’s the extraordinary sight of the large-scale migrations anticipating monsoon season in peninsular India.
Yet eastern North American monarchs can travel thousands of miles south-west to overwintering sites in Mexico and come all the way back in the spring reverse migration in the spring. But doubling that distance, the British painted lady flutters a whopping 9,000-mile round trip in a series of steps via up to six successive generations, from tropical Africa to the Arctic Circle. How does each generation feel this collective compulsion, and know where to go? Is it the constellations of stars? As a child I used to imagine, fancifully, that they would see a hidden map on the patterns of their wings.
So then, whither your musical offerings? Tending the petalled Song Bar garden and pollinated meadow, and helping keep this topic in flight for its constant variety, colour, strangeness and beauty, are the sensitive ears and eyes of guest of the week, severin! So, fancy a flutter? Place your choices in comments below for the migratory deadline at 11pm on Monday UK time, for playlists published next week.
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