Fly by Steven Connor

Author:Steven Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Reaktion Books

On one occasion, Aristotle imagines a kind of fly that is produced fully formed by spontaneous generation, reporting that ‘In Cyprus, in places where copper-ore is smelted, with heaps of the ore piled on day after day, an animal is engendered in the fire, somewhat larger than a blue bottle fly, furnished with wings, which can hop or crawl through the fire.’4 Pliny followed Aristotle, adding that the fly is called ‘the pyrallis, or by some the pyrolocon. As long as it is in the fire it lives, but when it leaves it on a rather long flight it dies off.’5 Now, the curious thing is that Aristotle knew the life-cycle of the fly perfectly well – copulation producing eggs, which turn into larvae, which pupate and metamorphose into flies. It seems that he thought that there were two kinds of flies, those generated spontaneously and incapable of reproducing themselves, and those reproducing by heredity. Lucian seems to share Aristotle’s confusion when he writes that the fly is born ‘as a maggot from the dead bodies of man or animals’, which seems to suggest spontaneous generation.6 But then he describes a straightforward process of growth and reproduction: ‘Then, little by little, she puts out legs, grows her wings, changes from a creeping to a flying thing, is impregnated and becomes mother to a little maggot which is tomorrow’s fly.’7

For many centuries, these two beliefs continued to coexist. Like other such insects, the fly, especially in its maggot stage, where it seems to have no determinate shape, exists between form and formlessness. Early religious attitudes towards the fly reflected this ambivalence about its constitution. Christianity saw the fly as emblematic of the imperfect world of mutable natural forms. St John Chrysostom was employing a common metaphor when he wrote that the soul absorbed in the thought of riches and other earthly preoccupations was ‘a soul full of stupidity, which does not differ from flies or gnats, a soul crawling on the earth, wallowing in mire, unable to contemplate anything great’.8 The fly’s love of the light made it useful to contrast earthly with spiritual vision among Christian writers. In his response to the Manichean arguments of Faustus, Augustine writes: ‘you swear by the light, which you love as flies do; but you think nothing of the light of the mind, so different from that of your eyes, which illuminates every person who comes into the world’.9 It became a traditional consolation for those losing their sight to be told that they should hold in contempt a bodily faculty that they had in common with mere flies. Didymus the Blind of Alexandria, a learned man of the fourth century, confessed to St Anthony that the loss of his sight at the age of four had been a grief to him. The saint replied that ‘he wondered how a wise man could regret the loss of that which he had in common with ants and flies and gnats, and not rather rejoice that he possessed a spiritual sight like that of the saints and Apostles’.

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