Cicada, Cicada

Daisy Alioto on cicadas, Flaco, and Lyn Hejinian.

It’s 5pm on Friday, my last Zoom meeting of the day. My companion shares his screen and pulls up a Bandcamp page for an album called Cicada. I can feel the tingling in my scalp that precedes falling down a deep rabbit hole. Then dinner. Then I finish the novel I am reading. At 11pm I wake up to my husband’s arm brushing over me. “The owl is dead,” he says.

In 2021, HODINKEE published an article about how 17-year cicadas know when it’s time to come out of the ground. They are, of course, not the same cicadas every time––these are new cicadas. Cicadas that spent the first 17 years of their life in darkness and will spend their last month or so in the light. For those 4-6 weeks they will be viewed less as individual creatures and more like an inferno of sound. An unwelcome orchestra that trains, not by practicing, but simply sitting in the pitch black concert hall. 

Their biological clocks, therefore, cannot rely on the sun for their precise accuracy. “One theory is that they can literally taste the passage of time,” HODINKEE explains, through the xylem fluid they suck off the roots of trees: “The composition of the fluid changes with the seasons, and somehow, the nymphs can sense and count the achingly slow, years-long swinging of this chemical pendulum.” They have a preference for prime numbers, 13 or 17, and as our climate warms (including the soil) they might eventually transition to a 13-year cycle. 

I don’t remember learning about cicadas in school. I do remember learning about Halley's Comet, the (then) 74-year event that also marked the birth and death of Mark Twain. Lately, when I want something, I have been saying I need it “like a 100-year event.” Why? I don’t know. 

Alone on Saturday, I navigated back to the Bandcamp page. Cicada (2024) is the first album from CST Imprint, a label by Oakland speciality shop and art space, Cone Shape Top. Various artists contributed works around the theme of post-2020 re-emergence, ranging from field recordings to samples of family sermons. 

Cicada 10 by producer/vocalist IDHAZ starts with a cover of All 4 One’s “So Much In Love'' and moves into spoken word lyrics about “ash and ‘rona” sickness and wildfire: “but my love is still potent, more potent than the orange glow in the sky,” the artist says. I especially liked the inclusion of Taiwan-based artist Peace Wong, with three works from her 2018 album, About a Stalker, repackaged as Cicada 04.

While many of the songs on the album bear sonic resemblance to a droning brood, they are conceptual—not literal—cicadas. The literalism comes through a limited edition of 75 USB drives cast in resin to resemble the insects. They look like something I would prank a sibling with and then become inexplicably attached to. The USB stick comes with bonus extras and a poster print of…you guessed it…a cicada. 

Naturalist Benjamin Banneker, the child of a former slave, was one of the first people to record the cicadas’ 17-year cycle: “If their lives are Short they are merry,” Banneker wrote in a diary which survived the intentional destruction of the rest of his papers, “The hindermost part rots off, and it does not appear to be any pain to them for they still continue on Singing till they die.” 

I have begun to think of cicadas as nature’s Oulipians. 

The Oulipo movement was a group of mid-century writers experimenting with, “rigorous formal constraints—often mathematical,” whose echoes can be seen today in works like Alphabetical Diaries (2024) by Sheila Heti. (The book reorders the author’s diary alphabetically.) 

In a review of Alphabetical Diaries for Dirt, Madeleine Crum writes, “Heti’s work, however high-concept, is interested in human limits: that we can’t help but be ourselves…that the irrevocable choices we make while living inside these bodies are what give our lives shape, even meaning.”

Alphabetical Diaries is included on a list of works recently posted by X-R-A-Y editor Joshua Hebburn, titled Reading List for a Genre that has No Name. The list also includes 300 Arguments (2017) by Sarah Manguso and Autoportrait by Édouard Levé (written in 2005 and translated into English in 2012). 

What unites these works is a self-awareness of form. Manguso tells a story in aphorisms—Levé narrates his life in fragments of memory and habit, sometimes evoking repetition, sometimes not. “I like doing things twice but the third time makes me sad,” he writes, and also, “I would like to communicate without using words or gestures, and just perceive everything that was in the brain of my interlocutor, like a photograph,” undermining the reader-writer relationship with a wink. If I had to assign a genre, I would venture neo-oulipian. 

To this list I would add My Life (1980) by Lyn Hejinian who died this week at the age of 82. In My Life, Hejinian unspools her girlhood in the Bay Area much as Annie Ernaux does Yvetot (Normandy) in The Years (2008). Unlike Ernaux, Hejinian works in poetry-shaped prose. “What memory is not a ‘gripping’ thought,” Hejinian writes, “Only fragments are accurate.” 

These books are more like editing than writing because remembering is more like editing than writing. “But many facts about a life should be left out, they are easily replaced,” says Hejinian. The craft derives not from inclusion but elision. Levé again: “Everything I write is true, but so what?”

I am reading an owl’s obituary. I am reading an owl’s obituary.

Across America, people are making preparations for the solar eclipse that will occur on April 8th, 2024. My stepdad will reunite with his brothers outside Cleveland in the town they grew up in, smack in the middle of the path of totality. 

Cicadas are the opposite of an eclipse. We do not seek out their path, they set themselves in ours. They intrude, they violate, they make us think about the passage of time—too short or too long. Cicadas are like bad lovers. Insistent. We hate them because they make us forget ourselves. No, because they make us remember. They crawl out from the place we’re destined to go but when we go we won’t come back––of course, it’s not the same cicadas every time. 

On Cicada 05, Joel St. Julien samples an interview James Baldwin gave as part of the documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. “What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years…How much time do you want for your progress?” Man’s time is not nature’s time. 

Flaco was a male Eurasian eagle-owl born into captivity in North Carolina. In 2023, he escaped from Central Park Zoo after an apparent act of vandalism but stayed on the Upper West Side, delighting residents and visiting them on their fire escapes. He died on Friday after a collision with a building. 

Re: Flaco, I have been thinking about another James Baldwin quote. “Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love…you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong.” 

Residents of the Upper West Side called in Flaco’s body. A dead bird in a city of eight million, where dozens of humans die every year unidentified and many more die alone. Flaco, however, unmistakable. Encompassed. His eyes like my favorite William Eggleston photograph, sun shining through a drink on a plane. His silhouette––at night, perched on a water tower––as recognizable as Totoro or Mickey Mouse. 

“It is not imperfect to have died, it is ever a matter of remembering the right thing at the right moment,” writes Hejinian. I thought about men and women all over the city crying about the owl and feeling a little silly about it because they couldn’t cry about something bigger they felt even sillier about. I thought about parents trying to explain it to their children. I thought about the voice of Allen Ginsberg: America, Flaco must not die. And I thought about how Flaco could be a metaphor for anything you wanted. 

Being a writer is the ultimate disguise for someone prone to obsessions. In that sense, all writers are Oulipians because we are hemmed in by the patterns of our own minds. My Life is filled with failed substitutions. “I couldn't get the word butterfly so I tried to get the word moth,” writes Hejinian, and later: “I wanted to see a mountain lion but had to content myself with a raccoon.” She describes thoughts first as waves and then cicadas with some uncertainty: “That was the break in my sentiments, resembling waves, which I might have longed to recover. I think they were cicadas, though off the trees.” 

In the beginning, Flaco belonged to the trope of the globalized animal escape—the animal you can root for wherever you are. Llamas in Arizona. A monkey in Kharkiv. In 2015, there was a mass escape of zoo animals––including lions and tigers––during a flood in Tbilisi, Georgia. A hippopotamus was photographed along a flooded street and one penguin swam as far as the border with Azerbaijan. Now, is it any wonder that similar images are recirculated as hoaxes during extreme weather or political upheaval? Despite the fact these incidents almost always end in tragedy, it is easier for us to imagine their liberation than ours. 

Thus, the scaffolding was there. It was only in time that Flaco gained specificity. We developed a new script for him. He wasn’t just an outlaw but a visitor. He wasn’t just triumphant but also lonely. In his natural habitat, he wouldn’t have merited such attention at all. The Eurasian eagle-owl is the opposite of endangered, marked as “least concern” to conservationists. 

So Flaco both could and couldn’t be substituted with another owl. Do you understand? Chicago and Hong Kong. The butterfly and the moth. The mountain lion and the racoon. The “you” and the “I” to the extent that there is one. “Love does not distinguish me,” writes Levé. But what is love if not being plucked from the category of “least concern”? We singled Flaco out for love. We chose him but he didn’t choose us. 

Reading Lyn Hejinian got me thinking about other San Francisco poets. I rummaged through my bookshelf for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind but I stopped at my friend’s inscription on the title page. April 2014. “Dear Daisy, for the memories of that beautiful, windy April day.”

I don’t remember much from that day. We went to Coney Island. We tried to recreate a picture of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. I am looking at that photo now, the images aren’t alike at all.