The insects of Hatuga are the most fascinating creatures. Touting numbers as vast as sand on the seashore, yet with species varying more than the clouds in the sky, they go about their day-to-day-lives, engrossed in miniscule projects, unaware that all the effort they put forth makes hardly an impact on the forest’s designs. They are as inconsequential as…well, insects. But, as inconsequential as they are, it does not mean their lives have any less worth within Hatuga’s complex ecosystem. They are a necessary factor; the health of the forest relies upon them.
Among Hatuga’s insect species, the most beautiful is unarguably the Luna Moth. Every night, when the moon climbs high to shine in orangeish glory, flocks of Luna Moths on their luminescent wings act as paper lanterns of the forest. The floor would be awash with fluttering blue-green ripples, as though the Caribbean itself was reflected along the trees. Hatugan Luna Moths live three years without eating, content to spend their lives in a flight propelled by electricity that sparks inside them with every flap. They do not bemoan their lot, regardless of what you might think. It is a sweet, short cycle – to live and perish in the service of beauty.
There is fulfillment in that.
One day, a new batch of Luna Moths were born into this cycle. As larva, they are solely dedicated to consumption, feasting on knowledge and resources until the trees in one area are almost entirely bare of leaves and wisdom. When they finally realize the extent of their destruction, these larva form a cocoon from an awareness of their emptiness – a cocoon of shame, you might say – so that they might grow up. From this cocoon…a miracle! The larva are reborn as matured Luna Moths, complete with a new perspective on the world. They become desirous of nothing else but to light the way for their fellow creature, through the midnight darkness of Hatuga. They fill their emptiness with moonbeams.
Or, so is typically the case. There was born into one batch a break in the cycle. That day, from two parents who loved him very much, a Very Ignorant Caterpillar was born. No one quite figured out why he was so ignorant, or if that’s what he chose to be, but there was no doubting that ignorance was his lot in life. He ate more than any other larva, but was never full. He lived on the ground, though he knew he would be happier in the trees. He drank water from the stream rather than from dewdrops on leaves, and was half-drowned each time. But, worst of all, he hated his parents, and tried incessantly to become anything other than a Luna Moth.
As the time of shame fell upon the Luna larva, the Very Ignorant Caterpillar was overcome with fear. How could he draw his cocoon, and resist the metamorphosis from child to adult? There was no logical or biological way around it, so he sought out other insects of the forest. In them, perhaps, he would find some sort of final form he could aspire to, a construction that would be entirely to his liking and against his lot. The Very Ignorant Caterpillar began his search for the perfect metamorphosis.
The first insect he happened upon was the Flower Mantis. Besides Luna Moths, Flower Mantises were the most beautiful species of insect in all Hatuga. Their abdomens resemble billowing vines, their thoraxes are like the thorny stem of a rose, their heads blossoming petals. The Very Ignorant Caterpillar sought out one of these brilliant specimens, preening its patterned wings on a branch.
“Hey! Pansy! Tell me, how can I become a Flower Mantis like you?
The Flower Mantis cocked its head, dumbfounded, and marveled, “Well, now, aren’t you a novel breed of fool?”
“A lot of insects call me that,” replied the Very Ignorant Caterpillar. “But they are just insects. What do insects know, besides eating and flying and breeding? Honestly, it’s all just a pathetic existence to me.”
“But you’re an insect, too.”
“I am what I call myself. And I call myself an aspiring Flower Mantis.”
The Flower Mantis failed to see the logic in this, as a Flower Mantis was as much an insect as any other. But he was busy trying to look beautiful, and so wanted to get the Very Ignorant Caterpillar off his back as soon as possible.
“Well, the first thing about being a Flower Mantis is that you must be beautiful.”
“Check,” affirmed our scholarly bug-worm, though he was objectively quite ugly. But it is hard to tell with compound eyes sometimes.
“The second thing is, that you must be an extension to the glory of the tree.”
“Check,” affirmed our discontented larva, though he was confused in thinking that robbing the tree of its glory was the same as prospering it.
“The third thing is,” swooned the Flower Mantis. “Your beauty must captivate a female, so that she might devour your head and ensure our mutual beauty survives.”
“Che…Wait, what?” exclaimed the Very Ignorant Caterpillar, who did not expect that being beautiful required such a finite end.
“I said –“
“I heard what you said,” he interrupted hotly, “ and I refuse to believe it. Give my valuable head up to be eaten? Ridiculous. Laughable! No, I refuse your way of doing things. You are stupid to be content with that sort of life. Where is your desire for freedom? Where is your love of free will?”
The Flower Mantis shrugged. It was not his problem that this immature little insect refused to understand how most insects live and die in fleeting beauty. Instead, he used his free will to fly off to a higher branch, hoping any more argumentative bug-worms searching for reasons to be angry wouldn’t bother him up there.
So, having your head devoured was what it meant to grow up? The Very Ignorant Caterpillar needed no more interviews. This Flower Mantis was enough to make him realize that his species was not the problem; it was the entire insect population itself. Why bother growing up, why take on the responsibility of life and action, why serve the forest by furthering the glory of the tree or lighting up the jungle, if it ended in such cruel ends? It was a predicament that bore heavily on the bug-worm’s mind, which could now focus on little else but finding a way to live forever.
The Very Ignorant Caterpillar decided he would not be an insect any longer. And, weaning off the last essence of the withered tree he called his new home just yesterday, he was struck by inspiration.
To insects, the tree is the essence of life. It is where they are born – it is where they live –
it is where they die. They were formed from the tree, and so, in gratitude, they live for the tree. It is the thing they worship, the thing they adore, the thing they strive to be closest to. Insects may pass on, naturally, but the tree lives forever, growing stronger and yielding more life each passing year. Even though they try to be like the tree, never, not in their wildest dreams, do insects dream they can actually become a tree. That would be too brash. That would be too stupid.
The Very Ignorant Caterpillar decided he would become a tree.
While all his brothers and sisters were wrapping up in their cocoons – their cocoons of shame – his parents realized their son’s absence. They knew that this particular larva was a problem child; yet they loved him all the same. They only desired, despite his objections, that he should become the brightest and most beautiful Luna Moth of all. They found him on a tree, trying his hardest to become a tree. Or, rather, thinking hard on how to become a tree.
“Why must I grow into one of you,” lamented their child when questioned about his lack of shame, “doomed to serve the forest and live for only a brief, beautiful moment? I denounce you both, you and your way of life. I will live as this tree does! Even if it means my life is no longer beautiful, but ugly as the lifeless dirt.”
The parents of the Very Ignorant Caterpillar were confused – they didn’t know how to respond to such anger – but they trusted their son. They asked him how he would go about becoming a tree.
“Don’t rush me,” he spat, “I’ve just begun to find myself.”
Having finally made a formal declaration to his makers, our little bug-worm began a journey through Hatuga. He witnessed the bird and the beast, their relationships and their way of living. He marked the smoothness of the pebble in the running spring, the crunch of death in browning leaves; he wondered at the falling of pollen from the air, and the flight of spores released by fungi. Hatuga was a big place, and, the more he questioned it, the bigger a question it appeared to be.
Why were things the way they were? The more he looked into it, the more he felt he understood…the less sense anything made. It was during this endless study that the Very Ignorant Caterpillar discovered something: he hated the forest of Hatuga.
The parents of the Very Ignorant Caterpillar fluttered in frequently to see how he was doing. They asked if he had discovered what he would become. He insisted that they give him more time to find himself, but, truly, he was just stalling. How fearful he was of death, and what his hatred of life itself implied! His mother and father, two beautiful, caring Luna Moths, worried over their son’s conflictions. But they trusted that he would work things out soon, despite his breakout of nervous sweat every time they questioned his progress. Inching back and forth along the branches, bullying his brothers and sisters while they slept inside their cocoons by rattling them from outside, the Very Ignorant Caterpillar reached a boiling point of panic. He knew a day of reckoning would soon be fast upon him if he did not come to a conclusion.
But, then, finally, inspiration! Or, at least, we shall call it inspiration because of how it arrived and prompted action; in reality, it was not a very inspiring thought at all.
His thought was this: Breaking from cocoons was the beginning of all misery, of the short-lived pointlessness cursing Luna Moths and other insects. Therefore, in order to avoid it, in order to remain a consumer who lived forever, the Very Ignorant Caterpillar had an epiphany. An epiphany that made his wriggly self tremble in defiant glee.
He would refuse to grow up!
The writhing bug-worm’s second declaration was met with even less understanding by his worried parents. “But what do they know,” he jeered, as they tried to convince him of the error in their ways. “They chose to grow up. Whatever pain they feel now is their own fault!” Little did he guess that the source of their pain was his anger and self-loathing. But he was a Very Ignorant Caterpillar, after all. We cannot expect too much from the likes of him.
At first, the Very Ignorant Caterpillar was not sure how he would go about not growing up. He decided to eat more than usual, growing larger and larger than most Luna Moths in the canopy. But, the larger he grew, the more obvious imperfections woven into the patterns lining his skin. Nevertheless, he kept on eating. These imperfections only fed his hatred, anyways, and hating had become second nature to him.
The Very Ignorant Caterpillar lifted his spirits by berating his entire flock of Luna Moth, denouncing their way of living as “despicable” and “ignorant.” He would lounge about in the highest leaves, hurling down a constant tirade of insults from above. The Luna Moths were too busy doing what nature decreed to hear him – this was a personal outrage to the Very Ignorant Caterpillar. They only began to take notice when he would drop sticks and fruit on them from above, for then he was actually being harmful.
His parents tried, once more, to parent him. They couldn’t bear to watch their child’s degradation, and tried a final time to help him see reason. His way of living was no way to live, and he risked never being happy by refusing to grow up. They did not object to his interrogatory nature, but, by destroying the stability of everything around him in his own mind, he was leading himself to self-destruction. “Self-destruction?” questioned the Very Ignorant Caterpillar. “The essence of maturity is finding fault in the world. It is you who refuse to grow up and understand that growing up is the source of all things problematic.”
He did not necessarily elaborate on what was problematic exactly, but instead chucked a Brazilian nut at a poor Tarantula who wasn’t bothering anybody.
This conference enlightened the Very Ignorant Caterpillar, though. For some reason, no one in Hatuga took him seriously. He couldn’t put his antennae on the reason why – that is, until his parents came to visit. Surely, they did not take him seriously, because they knew it was only temporary! They were secretly plotting in the underbrush how they might force him to grow up with their superior numbers! This revelation terrified the Very Ignorant Caterpillar. How could he preserve himself, since taking on the entire insect population was impossible?
The Very Ignorant Caterpillar discovered an occupation to counteract growing up, and it was in this occupation he found his calling. It was with great pride and pleasure that the Very Ignorant Caterpillar found a calling in educating future larva, to understand just how unfair growing up was. They would become his defense against the Luna Moths.
Seizing a perch on a prized branch, with plenty of space accounted for by an intricate array of crisscrossed twigs, our rebellious wriggler became a professor. He was no longer the “Very Ignorant Caterpillar,” but “Professor Caterpillar,” and school was in session. Few insects came when they first heard the call, but newcomers arrived every day. It helped that Professor Caterpillar spent all his time complaining, desperate to be heard; his rabble-rousing voice was a call to action, a call to seize a new day for the little bug. Some came because of rumors that he held the secret to living forever, but these are unfounded.
Now, there are teachers, and there are professors. The difference between the two is that the teacher teaches, and the professor professes. Some professors are wise, professing wisdoms that expound upon or complement teachings. Some professors, on the other hand, are ignorant, and use their position to tell students semi-truths they want to hear, to leave a legacy of students following their miserable lifestyle.
Professor Caterpillar professed a breed of miserable thoughts. All species of insect larva from all over the forest came to hear him rant and rave on the evils of Hatuga, and how it wished to make them miserable by forcing them to grow up. The secret behind growing up was responsibility – the dignifying of fruitless labor. Or, rather, that the fruit was healthy but didn’t taste very good. Time was much more fun spent on proving how growing up was a bad idea, how adults wanted to make them as hopeless as themselves. His misery was defined so eloquently by big words and academically credited by scholars of the same emotional strand that his class soon became “flying-room-only” by interested youths. Professor Caterpillar had found himself, so he thought, by forming a nest of the classroom.
In the middle of his seventh class, Professor Caterpillar’s mother and father entered through the back. They were surrounded by stinkbugs, blister bugs, centipedes, mealworms, roaches, butterflies, beetles, dragonflies, horseflies, mantises, ticks, and countless other arthropods. The only difference between the Luna Moths and their son’s pupils was that, like their professor, the pupils had refused to grow up. They adored that vehement figurehead. Casting off the pressure to grow into their destiny, they had become like their intellectual idol; defiant, bitter, and cruel.
Speaking of cruelty, Professor Caterpillar saw his parents the moment they fluttered in. With a leer fit for the worst of foes, he aimed the stick-bug he used as a pointer directly at them. It was a challenge to those that bore him into this cruel world.
“Why,” questioned Professor Caterpillar, “have your kind oppressed us so? We refuse to go quietly into the adulthood you have forced upon us!”
Recognizing adults in the room, the students swarmed up to them, forming a wall of disdain.
“Boo! Boo!” The bugs-who-refused-to-grow-up hissed in unison.
The Luna Moths were frightened by unwarranted hatred that they did not understand. But they had to get through to their son. They had to see eye-to-eye with him, no matter what.
“We didn’t force you to do anything, dear. We love you. But that is how Hatuga is, and it’s not a bad life if you look for the beauty in it.”
“Boo! Boo!” shouted the students in disapproval.
“Your Hatuga…” Professor Caterpillar was feeling hot in the head; he had waited for this moment his whole life. “Your Hatuga! Without us to consume it, to take from it and find happiness in eternal youth, it might as well not exist! I denounce a forest that we have to work for!”
“You could have left anytime you wanted to.”
“Boo! Boo!” shouted the students again, though something made sense in what these Luna Moths said.
“Leave? I don’t have to leave! I will do as I please!”
“But you’ve chosen to do nothing.”
“What do you call this, my pupils? There are many of us who agree on Hatuga’s cruelty. You two are in the minority. We question your stupid, selfless way of life, ignorant insects!”
“And have you found the right answer?”
“Boo…” The opposition from the pupils had grown fainter. The opposition was collapsing.
Professor Caterpillar inched back. He wanted to tell them all he had learned. He wanted to tell them the right way to live. But he couldn’t – he had only been looking for what was wrong with Hatuga to condemn it, not to suggest solutions.
With glistening eyes of pity, the Luna Moths glided across the classroom. Not a single bug reared up in their way. The reached the front of the classroom, where their son was quaking with shame. His eyes glowed with the dullness of one who refuses to believe they are in the wrong, yet must tune out to prevent their opponent from showing just how wrong they are.
But the Luna Moths enfolded their son in their wings. They met his screaming heart with a whisper.
“You have done nothing but question and question and search and search your whole life away. Not once were you looking for answers, but just a reason to keep your dissatisfaction alive. You know you cannot solve anything until you become an adult. Then you have a choice: to settle upon your endless questions, or to flap your way far from Hatuga. But at least you will have that choice. Hurry, son! There is not much time left.”
The electricity from his parents’ wings cooled Professor Caterpillar. He began to feel very silly at having spent all his life hating life. Surely there might be something he could find happiness in? There must be something more than this!
Then he realized it, with a burst of glee. Shoving his parents away, he spread all his little legs out, as if embracing instead the entire classroom.
“I don’t need answers, I don’t need happiness. I have my students, my real family, and the solidarity of our hatred!”
The Luna Moths looked at their son, and his fake, condescending grin. For the first time, they saw their son as less than a caterpillar.
In that moment, they saw in him a leech.
“We’re sorry, son. But that sounds just too miserable for us.”
With that, they flapped away to join the flock of Luna Moths overhead. As he watched their figures fade, Professor Caterpillar’s forced smile faded away. The weight of their words hurt his heart, but it had long since frozen over.
He turned back to his students for refuge, but found his home greatly shaken. Not just the words, but the tone, the very nature of the Luna Moths had impacted their outlook on Hatuga. There was a sense of urgency tangled up in reassuring emotions, freed after watching the interaction between parents and son: the urgency of growing up. While his back was turned, many concluded on their own the despair in the Professor’s way of life, the life of always doubting and never being satisfied. Those flew away to form cocoons. Only a few remained behind, and, even then, not with full confidence.
When Professor Caterpillar discovered this wound on his legacy, he seethed with the fury only known by a stricken hornets’ nest. So, they dared attack his source of meaning? Right! Then, he would attack their source of meaning! Professor Caterpillar raised the buzz of war, declaring that the rebels of Hatuga would sneak into Luna Moths’ nests everywhere and force them, one way or another, to reject their old way of living. They would, by his thunder, give up their habits of illumination. So long as one moth had the freedom to practice life without constant questions, life resting in tradition, professor and students would have no peace. Before his infantile army, he bellowed a call to battle:
“My students! My fellows in intellectual ponderings and wonderings! We have frightened the Luna Moths, for they know we know of our knowledge that knowledge means nothing. They know that, by not growing up, we refuse to slave away for Hatuga. And yet, still! Still they stick to it as though their lives depend on it, flitting around in blissful ignorance, while we are mired in sloughs of truth. Today, we open their eyes! We pull them down to our level, by argument or by force, and show that they have every right to be just as miserable as we are. The life of adulthood is just too cruel. Better to eat all you can, and work for no one! You and I, we know that the meaning of life is to be aware of Hatuga, to criticize it, and to become joined in hatred against that mysterious entity. For by its mystery, we know nothing! Let us now shake the larva from their cocoons, shoot down those deplorable moths, and teach them exactly what life should be all about!”
With roars of united fury, the Professor and his remaining disciples prepared for their onslaught upon the Luna Moth population, with sharpened mandibles and as many projectiles as they could carry upon their backs. It was a mob of the worst quality: obsession.
Professor Caterpillar might have succeeded in the onslaught he practiced over and over in his head, except he failed to take into account one fact. It wasn’t the fact that prepubescent insects are very weak, and can’t hold much with their flimsy legs. It wasn’t the fact that the Luna Moths, with their cocoons, were too fast and too many to be intimidated. No, the fact that Professor Caterpillar ignored was none other than timing – the ficklest of all coincidences. The whole purpose for Professor Caterpillar’s parent-to-teacher conference was so he might see his one last chance to grow up, before it was too late.
Only adult insects, you understand, can sense the forthcoming winter.
Upon the eve of the attack, Professor Caterpillar was stunned to find cocoons abandoned, and not a drop of bioluminescence left behind by his species. He and his comrades were even more stunned to be swept up in an ice storm not seen before in lower Hatuga, only in the extreme North beyond. It was as though Hatuga was aware of the fallacy that rocked its goodness, and came to deprive the Professor Caterpillar of the very thing he hated most: life
Shrieking about how unfair it all was, how this chaos was all orchestrated by the Luna Moths out of spite, the Professor and his pupils were swept up into the freezing cyclone. Insects in a tornado, the majority were dashed to bits by hail and branches; Nihilistic splatterings all washed away by that pure white fist from the North, come to wipe the slate crystal clean.
When the Luna Moths migrated Northwards again, they found not a single remain of the Professor’s pupils, or his classroom. There was, however, a hint of where it was once constructed.
That hint was the Professor himself, encased in a solid block of ice.
Professor Caterpillar was now no more than the Very Ignorant Caterpillar once again, on account of he had lost all his pupils. In the thick of the great ice storm, he retreated to his safe haven, the classroom; round and round it broke apart, round and round it was whisked up into the air. Watching his source of meaning vanish, as ethereal as the thoughts he dwelt upon, the Very Ignorant Caterpillar froze from the inside out.
That is the reason, even though he was an adult in age, he did not sense the blizzard; his obstinate anger had long ago frozen his heart thrice over. Thus, he did not sense the cold because he was always cold. This balancing force of internal and external chill preserved him, forever, trapped in the middle.
The Very Ignorant Caterpillar’s mother and father were sad, disappointed – but they did not abandon their son. Every day they would visit them, try to help him see the wonder of life. They taught him that finding solidarity in misery, a thing that can never be wholly solved, is not worth investing one’s precious hours in. Little by little, the ice seemed to melt away from the Very Ignorant Caterpillar. It was a new metamorphosis, one in which the mind rather than the body goes through change, finds new life. The Luna Moths saw this, and eagerly came more often in the hopes of giving their son the love he needed to thaw his heart.
Then came the day of offspring, a beautiful celebration in which new Luna Moth caterpillars find their way into the world. It was a lovely time, full of laughter and the crying of new voices; the Luna Moths were eager to share this miracle with the Very Ignorant Caterpillar. It was the last burst of hope he needed, they were sure, to break free of his icy prison. They all fluttered, as fast as they could with larva in tow, to reach the block of ice. They presented the children to the Very Ignorant Caterpillar with loving smiles and warm feelings, ready to have their son restored to them.
To their amazement, before their very eyes, it was the ice that restored itself, freezing over a new coat. A cruel smile had creaked across the Very Ignorant Caterpillar’s face as he watched these new thinkers, these new minds to mold into ruthless projections of his own failures.
In these children he saw the vehicles for vengeance upon anything that might find peace in a world set against him; in them he saw the next line of Very Ignorant Caterpillars. Nothing gave him more hope, than to continue gnawing away at Hatuga alongside them.
Morning's Early Dark 