12 September 2024
9:12 am Thursday
“The imaginal disk is the part of the caterpillar that remains when everything else turns to mush, when it is in the cocoon, as it becomes the butterfly,” a colleague from a different department tells me, as we sit on the roof of the museum for lunch. I believe she says something about how this disk stores the caterpillar’s memories, to carry these memories to butterfly-hood, or at least this was my interpretation of it as she held up her hands to form a rectangular shape in the negative space while describing the surrounding mush.
Rather than mush, I had previously imagined metamorphosis to more closely resemble the journey from tadpole to frog – a journey in which the creature one day bears enough resemblance to the preceding day, that, when following the chronological thread of consecutive days, it is apparent how it has reached its final amphibious form. The change from tadpole to frog is stark, however incrementally it makes sense. There is not too terribly much that changes at any given time. However, to completely break down into an unrecognizable clay, to be reformed into a new sculpture altogether, feels, well, science fiction.
It feels like science fiction that a crawling insect could possibly become a shapeless formless mush, and re-piece itself together with the ability to fly. It feels like science fiction that a venus flytrap can carnivorously digest — closing like a sea anemone when its mouth senses movement. It feels like science fiction the way that one year to the next can feel so exponentially different.
Rachel and I walk down Driggs, speaking in amazement at how everyone begins life as a child. This type of conversation always makes me think of subway cars – a place where people convene for function, not enjoyment. It is often a place of great impatience, of discomfort, annoyance, and irritability. Within my first few subway rides, after first moving to Brooklyn, I began imagining everyone around me as a baby. If the car was full of children, I am certain more people would converse with those around them. The conversation with Rachel leaves me wondering: Who shares better, children or adults?
As we continue our Driggs walk, Rachel marvels at how her kindergarten students lay on the carpet, more specifically, at how that is not considered out of the ordinary when you are five years old. I don’t recall if I said this aloud or if it was only a passing thought, but it is remarkable that everyone does something for the last time. There will be a final time that a kid will lay on the carpet in a classroom as the thing itself. Sure, there can be recreations of that – say, in high school if there is a carpeted area where kids can relax – however at that point it will be an intentionally curated space for that sort of behavior, that, perhaps brings upon an even greater feeling of comfort due to the child-like aloofness it calls upon. It is no longer the single action of absentmindedly laying on the floor during the school day, it becomes an act layered with memory, changing the expected behavior of a classroom rather than being the expected behavior of a classroom.
I now recall laying on my back on the ground in Gordon’s studio, not long before graduating from undergrad – I believe it was a rectangular carpet that sat upon one section of the concrete floor. If I remember correctly, we were invited to sit, dance, lay, stand, move about this area however we wished – shoeless. How does an intentional space provide different potential than an abundant space? How does an eight foot by five foot (I am guessing on the size) carpet encourage unique movement, while I encounter countless fully-carpeted rooms in a given day that never once bring dance-like motions to mind? (How does one notebook and one pen create more hunger to ‘make’ than I feel when sitting next to a seemingly-endless supply of printer paper and writing supplies?)
Watching Cleo grow up feels both frog-like and butterfly-like. How is he this three-year-old kid? How did this happen? It’s not that I thought he would stay a baby forever, but I can’t wrap my mind around how quickly ages one and two flew by. Surely, week by week I would watch small changes amount to larger ones, yet it feels like just yesterday I was amazed when he said my name for the first time. I feel so lucky to know this kid, and to watch him grow. He remembers all of our little antics, those which began before he could speak. Last October and November were a dream. Halloween, out on the stoop, swinging on the swings in chilly November air, walking to the park making up songs, the coziest Thanksgiving. I couldn’t imagine it ever ending, and it is not that it has ended, it is just that no two seasons of childhood are ever the same. I suppose that makes no two seasons of adulthood ever the same either, if a child is part of your life. I wonder how it feels to be a teacher, there must be so much to learn from witnessing the same life stage repeatedly, a control variable of itself. I imagine those school years to be a form of metamorphosis, though I suppose life involves continuously reentering the chrysalis.
I look up “caterpillar to butterfly” to see if it is true, if the transformation from one to the next is truly that different from that of the tadpole. The diagrams show egg to caterpillar, caterpillar to chrysalis, chrysalis to emerging adult, and then the adult butterfly with outstretched wings. I did not realize that a cocoon is made by a moth, and a chrysalis is made by a butterfly. “Pupa” encompasses the entire in-between stage. I watch a video titled “Monarch Butterfly Metamorphosis time-lapse FYV”. It doesn’t provide any information on if the ‘goop’ state is truly reached, however after scrolling to the comments I am surprised to read that someone, six years ago, wrote “Insects go through the most incredible changes between infancy and adulthood. The pupal stage is particularly amazing. Inside the pupa's shell is goop with DNA. That's it. The larval animal that went into that shell is no more. It dissolved. Essentially, it died. Soon, the goop reorganizes itself into something totally different, and soon after that, the adult insect emerges, looking totally unrecognizable compared to its previous form.”
It does seem that the imaginal disc (disc, not disk) is responsible for storing memory of some form, but rather than memory of any sort of event in the caterpillar’s life, the imaginal disc stores the memory of what it is supposed to do, what it is supposed to become. The disc encompasses various parts of the larva, throughout the length of the body, rather than one solid rectangular mass of information.
On a scientific level, this is all subconscious to the developing insect itself, and the imaginal disc is simply a collection of cells with low potency (very different from the pluripotent cells in the human blastocyst, which could become various different specialized cells in the body, the imaginal disc stores instructions within those parts of the larva of what those exact parts would become when the butterfly emerges), though it feels as if it is fundamental to the human experience. Our earliest memories and ways of being shape what we feel drawn to do, drawn to become. Our earliest selves create an ‘imaginal disc’, whether consciously or subconsciously, pulling us closer to what we wish to become and pushing us further from what we dislike, as we grow into different moments of life.