Wasp in the Window

Six postings in, and invariably the "elephant in the blog" shifts its weight to another foot, crushing you against the wall, and you feel some vague explanation of the title at the top of the page is due a mention.

Wasp in the Window, was the winner, because of twenty extraordinary minutes in Mid Fall 2009, when circumstances came together to freeze time, space and clarity of thought into some Einsteinium serendipity that comes under the banner-name, of my eventual autobiography title; 'You had to be there'.

It could have so easily been called 'Cow on a Motorbike' or 'Ground Squirrel by Canadian Lake' after two stunning photographs that appeared on the Net this year, that both encapsulated the running metaphor for my human view of what I can only term the Ultra-natural, which is the antithesis of "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist, right?"

Indeed it could have been any photographed pet or wild or Zoo animal staring down a camera lens, in blank incomprehension of what is going on, or of the world that their image is transported to, a world where they operate only within their own wondrous lines of feeling and function, but a world where they don't know about Australia, or of Martin Luther King, or that I have a strawberry jelly setting in my fridge right now, all the million myriad things I know, because I am a Human.

Yet in the vast mind numbing calculus of the Universe, I am but a Chihuahua forced to be pictured wearing a dolly's dress at a kid's party in a Mexican Suburb. I can claim to know what I know, but like the eponymous wasp, bumping against a window pane, there is a sheet of the same incomprehension that may well let the light in of where I want to go, but that's where my brains ability to understand, or get through it, ends.

Wasps rank the highest on my respect-to-size ratiometer, not least that I tend to swell up alarmingly when stung by them. Tragically too, a pal from the village I was born in, when he grew up, died on that most ignoble of lists; that of folk who at a garden party chug a drink into which one of the hapless striped jacketed fiends has fallen, and being stung on the tongue, chokes to death amongst the sunny chatter of floral dresses and paper plates.

My own last involvement was at a Blenheim Palace Horse Trials, when in a sudden rainstorm a wet, and far from nest, wasp headed up, and tangled in, the sleeve of my Belstaff coat and jabbed me, and I have never been so glad to see a St John's Ambulance tent in my life.

So all this background brings me to my best "Wasp in the Window" moment that I trailed at the start of this post:
4pm Saturday 19th October. I was due downtown at an "all day" Music Event, a five mile bus ride through the suburbs from my home. I figured I'd eat later, in between the shows, but before setting off I ironed out my creases by downing a bottle of Poachers Ale, the dark licorice taste setting me at one with the world.
Unusually, the single deck lo-rider bus was empty when I boarded it. Empty of passengers maybe, but when I sat down midway along the left hand side, I found myself right next to a wasp in the window, airborne in that Harrier jump-jet like way they have, calmly working all its senses overtime.

Immediately aware that Vespula vulgaris and myself had history, I stood up with a "whoah" and decamped to a few seats back on the right-hand side of the bus, spreading myself across the bench with my back almost against the window so that I had a clear 180 degree view of everything the critter was up to. Relaxing, I waited for the next person to board and watch the results.

Extraordinarily no one did, the entire journey, and the driver took every opportunity of this freedom to speed up and hurtle and undulate towards the city. At this point, everything appeared to polarize; my blood swimming with beer, the houses and Syringa bushes of the northern suburbs a blur of redbrick and green, and the interior of the bus appearing vast with the tiny being of the wasp leaving the window to hover quite stationary in the aisle.

The bizarreness of the whole cosmos seemed to now come down to just me and the wasp, as if we were both transfixed and rushing through our own Deep Space, which on a wider scale I mused, we were; on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in an expanding universe, and yet, the wasp, poised in the air, still as it was, didn't even realise it was really travelling at 35 mph in a street, or even at 17,000 miles a second on a yearly orbit.

The end came sweetly. Above each large pane of glass on the bus, was a smaller, long thin strip, that hinged inwards on its base. At each end of the openings, to deflect the airflow from the passengers, were triangular sections of metal, so the chances of the wasp ever making it down to the opening and out, without being swept back into the bus were next to none. Amazingly though, on the fifth attempt butting the window strip and feeling that the coolness of the outside was at that point, it arced perfectly into the one place of dead air in the gap, and was gone... liberated, miles from wherever its nest was, but free to do whatever wasps do with their time. Spontaneous applause from me, and a quizzical look in the mirror from the driver, unaware of the philosophical drama that had been played out behind him. So now you know. Its simply not knowing.