GODSTUFF

CICADAMANIA: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE GODLY

“It’s a bug-eat-bug world out there, Princess. One of those Circle of Life kind of things. This is the way things are supposed to work.”
— Hopper in the 1998 film “A Bug’s Life”

They’re late.

The cicadas.

I’ve been sitting on the chaise all week, staring at the grass in anticipation of their creepy arrival.

Each time a blade of grass moved, disturbed by a busy worker ant, a gentle breeze or the odd butterfly, I leaned over the side of the lounger expecting to see an army of arthropods fighting their way through the top soil, all alienesque and icky, before attaching themselves en masse to Henry, my mulberry tree, where they will sound like an opera of lawn mowers for a few days before they die and become one more thing we have to sweep up and an after-kibble treat for the kitties.

But alas, after 17 years of waiting, as of late Thursday, the cicadas have not landed, er, surfaced. At least not in my sunny patch of Oak Park.

They have, according to a colleague who was bemoaning the havoc cicadas have wreaked in his yard — “My lawn looks like it’s been aerated in a thousand places, and they’re destroying the ornamental grass and the hosta!” — made their unwelcome debut in Glen Ellyn.

“Tell me this,” he shouted (he really is fond of that hosta), “What exactly is the point of a cicada?”

They live more than a foot underground for 17 years before finally tunneling to the surface and then the slimy-white, red-eyed disgusting things molest the vegetation, make an ungodly racket for a few days, have sex, lay eggs, die and leave crunchy corpses all over the place, he said. “What kind of a life is that?”

I think what my colleague was trying to express, in essence, is something Socrates was getting at when he testified at his heresy and sedition trial in Athens about 2,400 years ago: “Examining both myself and others,” the great philosopher said, “is really the very best thing that a man [or woman] can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living.”

In other words, is an unexamined bug’s life not worth living?

Magicicadas, as these particular creatures are formally known, don’t appear to serve any helpful purpose — although in Chinese medicine their ground-up skeletons are used to treat high fevers, cataracts and even the common cold. They don’t harm humans or animals or, according to several scientific reports I’ve read, vegetation (despite what my hosta-loving friend seems to think).

Cicadas are not exactly traditionally beautiful, either, although I have read some descriptions of cicadas after they molt their exoskeletons that call them “ethereal,” “fantastic” and “ghost-like.”

Most folks, though, just think they’re gross. Although there are certain cultures that find them delicious, which is a whole other realm of the subjective. Some folks — not many Midwesterners, though, I’d venture to guess — find the intestines of newborn lambs and tree bark delicious, too.

The ancients, however, revered the lowly cicada as a symbol of resurrection and rebirth, a totem of spiritual fulfillment and their song — so much racket to our modern ears — a hymn of transcendence. Apparently, a couple of thousand years ago, the Chinese used to carve cicada totems out of jade and put them in the mouths of dead people.

The Greek philosopher Plato, in Phaedrus, one of his famous dialogues (with Socrates, in fact) creates a romantic myth around the cicadas that are serenading the philosophers from a tree as they have their dialog. Plato says the cicadas are actually men who fell in love with the music of the Muses, and were so obsessed with the goddesses’ songs that they stopped eating and died singing. Then, Plato says, as a reward, the Muses turned the men into cicadas.

Another ancient Greek — a poet — describes the bugs this way:

“We know that you are royally blest
Cicada when, among the tree-tops,
You sip some dew and sing your song;
For every single thing is yours
That you survey among the fields
And all the things the woods produce.
The farmers’ constant company,
You damage nothing that is theirs;
Esteemed you are by every human
As the summer’s sweet-voiced prophet.
The Muses love you, and Apollo too,
Who’s gifted you with high-pitched song.
Old age does nothing that can wear you,
Earth’s sage and song-enamored son;
You suffer not, being flesh-and-blood-less,
A god-like creature, virtually.”

God-like creatures? Summer’s “sweet-voiced” prophets?

Perhaps there is more to these insects than meets the eye — and did I mention cicadas have five?

One Christian-themed Web site, www.hiscreation.com, uses the cicada as a device to describe the spiritual transformation a person makes from non-believer to believer. Out of darkness, into the light, if you will.

“Once the cicada has emerged from darkness, it never again returns to its earthly home,” the unidentified writer says. “Now free from its soiled skin, the cicada soon flies to a higher spot in the tree, using its new wings. It then takes up a lofty position of worship that no one can ignore, except the deaf.”

Pest or blessed, cicadas might have a thing or two to offer us mortals, even if it’s just a metaphor.

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An Addendum
One of GG’s savvy Sun-Times readers sent her the following explanation of why the “prophets of summer” haven’t shown up in her back yard. Fascinating stuff.

The reason you have not seen any cicadas in Oak Park is simple. They are no longer native there (where I also live). The nearest you will find them is at Dominican University in River Forest, where the grounds are the remnants of a virgin forest. Those trees are the descendants of trees from thousands of years ago, and there has been a continuous habitat for the cicadas over millennia. There are also lots in Riverside, where that community was planned out by Frederick Law Olmstead in the late 1800’s out of virgin woods.

Oak Park, on the other hand, was cut over for farmland perhaps 150 years ago, killing off all the subterranean cicada nymphs. When trees were replanted as Oak Park became a village, there were no nearby cicada populations to utilize them. Cicada populations spread very slowly, perhaps only a tree or two wider each 17 year generation. Many stay on the same tree. This is an advantage to them, since it keeps the population concentrated. That is their only defense against predators: sheer numbers in a dense population, where the birds and squirrels cannot possibly eat them all. That is called “predator satiation”. If they spread a few blocks, those isolated outliers would be easy pickings for predators

If the cicadas in River Forest are spreading at perhaps only 50 feet per generation, then it would take over 100 generations to move a mile, or over 1700 years. To move the two miles to my Oak Park house would take three and a half millennia. If you wanted to establish them on your block, for seventeen years from now, you might take a mated female over to one of your trees. That, however, probably would not work, since the four hundred nymphs she might produce would not overpower the resources of all the birds and squirrel on your block. You might have to put hundreds of mated females on each of the several hundred trees in the blocks in your entire neighborhood. Or you could let nature do the job over several thousand years.

In fact, habitat change from clearing woods has made some cicada “broods” extinct out east. Cicadas come out in different years in different parts of the country, and there are seventeen possible “broods” for Seventeen Year Cicadas, and thirteen possible broods for Thirteen Year Cicada. Some broods which were known to exist in the past have now disappeared.