The ant stops.

In the third season of this life, in this three-season porch afternoon, the floorboards, made of hay colored material neither wood nor plastic, (“composite”), stretch beyond in all directions. It must look Sonoran- bleak, arctic-blank, to this ant. But that’s your imagining, something out of The Incredible Shrinking Man. The ant sets out, indifferent to the terrain. Its progress is neither scurry nor march nor meander, a compound of halt and drive, improvisation and plan, straight ahead and double back that recalls your 1960’s High School Social Studies teacher, battling metal illness as he distilled the ant-like hive mind of Marxist philosophy into, “two steps forward, one step back.” He could have been describing the increments of his own paranoia, a slow-motion hop-scotch, mincing tip toe tilt, climaxing in his own Bolshevik revolution, a homicidal tango shot gun chase around the backyard after his screaming wife.

 

Now the ant shows a Lenin’s cunning at the precipice between boards, sees it’s not such a chasm at all, that the boards curve-cut gentle, easily straddled onward to the wall, five feet away on two sides and ten to twelve on the others. There’s life force here, surely, in delicate steps to Virginia Woolf’s moth in the window reel, yet equally unanswerable to Virginia’s or your idea of what for.  Oh sure, the ants have their collective plan, in trance of pheromones, multitasking burrow, feed and fight, breed and fight commands, nature’s pure communist utopia tunneled underground, busy with the dialectics of this way and that, trial and error until the river is forged on leaves and twigs, and the army Ho-Chi-Minh’s a trail to the Marxist queen.

 

This ant has a big rear bulb ass, what you read is a gaster, a storage sac, like the extra gas tank on the underside of a WWII fighter plane. This solitary ant must be on a mission to rejoin its own, bearing food, fuel, stuff for the hive, bloated as you feel with your own sac of culture stuff, media stuff, collective story stuff you are driven to bring home, wherever that is. Like the image of the ants riding leaves and twigs to cross streams,  taking them and you to the other side, and movies: Charlton Heston battling ants in something imperfectly remembered but demanding, like an ant tickling up your ankle, and your answering scratch or flick of attention that sends you on a quick google scurry after the name: The Naked Jungle, 1954, telling the story of “Leiningen and Ants,” where a plantation owner in the Amazon battles a rebellious mail order bride and an invasion of army ants, both overwhelming his every defense.

 

It takes you to another story of alien ants and horror, one of the scariest stories you have ever read, by the pre-Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings.” You note, perhaps, that The Naked Jungle was directed by Byron Haskin, and produced by George Pal, the famous film making team that also made Conquest of Space, War of the Worlds, The Power, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Haskin directed scores of other effects-laden films, like From the Earth to the Moon, and episodes of The Outer Limits, which did a very bad adaptation of Sandkings. Finding such associations with movies, science fiction, and fantasy comes effortlessly. After thinking about any subject at all, even something as small and incidental and spontaneous as the sight of this ant across the floor of this deck, movies seem an inevitable two or three degrees of separation away. But this can’t be truly inevitable, or especially rational. Surely it must reflect personal tastes, history, obsessions, the contents of your bloated gaster of cultural consciousness.

 

Maybe you’ve known for a long time that you are a “cinephile,” “movie nut,” “film buff” or whatever you want to call someone who thinks, talks, reads, writes and watches movies in autonomic key.  Yet the monikers sit uneasy, because with you there seems so little in common with others who glory in the names. You have never felt quite so lonely as in a room full of Cineastes, perhaps in between showings at a film festival or during intermission, or at a lecture by and about a director you especially like, but is becoming alarmingly popular, as Richard Linklater, David Lynch or Guy Madden once were. There is a sense of deepening loneliness: this passionate connection with a world can still not be something recognizably human, in the social, everyday sense, but rather a longing for a realm that is realer than real, like matte painted landscapes in Hitchcock films. Like love. This may sometimes depress you, like the Sunset Boulevard Gloria Swanson trapped in the movie past, or an old episode of Twilight Zone where the silent star melts into her old film of eternal movie youth, and you bemoan the epistemological quandary of describing movie inflected experience in movie metaphors. Is it mere nostalgia for a past time that animates absorption with movies? But the movies aren’t all old, often aren’t any good, are boring to watch and boring to think about, not to mention write about, and, you suspect, to read about. You would like to find other associations from this ant, which is well on its way to disappearing into the far crack between floorboard and baseboard to be gone from your life forever before you can give it, and this moment, its due in words. Virginia Woolf writes in “The Death of the Moth.” It was published, posthumously, in 1942, a year after she filled her pockets with stones and walked to her death in the Ouse River: “Nevertheless, the present specimen with his narrow, hay-colored wings, fringed with a tassel of the same color, seemed to be content with life… One is apt to forget all about life.”  You want your moth life back, before it’s too late. You look up, and the ant is gone.

And you drag this gaster, looking, again, for home.