Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 19:04:53 -0400 (AST)
From: Stacey Maxine Armstrong <armstrsm-AT-is2.dal.ca>
Subject: Re: the bivouac


do you know the stangely encyclopedic _pseudodoxia epidemica_ by thomas
browne? he wrote around the same time as your montaigne.  He begins with
an address...a familiar you..."would truth dispense, we could be content,
with Plato, that knowledge were but Remembrance; that Intellectual
acquisition were but Reminiscentiall evocation, and new impressions but
the colourishing of old stamps which stood pale in the soul before.  For,
what is worse, knowledge is made by oblivion; and to purchase a clear and
warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much we know."
Depense-Non? There is so much for me to forget.  The postcards of souled
infused matter, the colourised black and white of all these ruins: i am a
living museum.  I want to keep these Bees for as long as i can forget.

you will think this strange. i had tea with Elizabeth Grosz when i lived
in Victoria.  she came to do a series of lectures and i was gardening for
one of my professors at the time...I will be reading her book _Volatile
Bodies_ soon if you have access to it.  I want to push the way i think
about the body...my body.  I will also be reading Gulliver's Travels by
Swift.  He seems to have a similar ripping attraction repulsion towards
the body as Bataille that i find intriguing.  

I have been reading about army ants today...in lieu of the insect theme i
thought it might be appropriate to share.  So did you read Caillois' piece
"Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia"? This relates to his studies of
insects and their 'ability' (anthropamorphism is so strange to me
sometimes) to mimic other animals or their surroundings. consider words as
a landscape and this menagerie of insects blending into the words.  the
landscape becomes integral to the formation of subjectivity...to the way
in which this body moves through the world.  But this is the really keen
part.  Callois says that mimicry is not an adaptive function but a kind of
evolutionary blip in the system...it simply hasnt been harmful to the
organism...it is like curly hair.  Mimicry becomes the poetry of mutant
luxury.  most animals hunt insects based on there sense of smell not
vision...and therefore mimicry has no use in the dark...   

Another colorished postcard.


In the fall of 1901 the entomologist Paige Bond wandered into a tapestry
of ants- a bivouac.  The migratory ants had constructed a domicile from
their own bodies with a structural integrity suggestive of a
superorganism.  Every rafter, beam, stringer, window-frame and door-frame,
hallway, room, ceiling, wall and floor, foundation, superstructure and
roof, all were ants - living ants, distorted by stress, crowded into the
dense walls, spread out to widest stretch across tie-spaces. She thought
it marvelous when she saw them arrange themselves as bridges, walks,
hand-rails, butresses, and sign-boards along the columns; but this new
absorption of environment, this usurpation of wood and stone, this
insinuation of themselves into the province of the inorganic world left
night walking impossible.

I am a bivouac.  Each ant a word.  The words are me and they are my house.

stacey