Chrysalis Time
I recently saw a monarch caterpillar become a chrysalis, and I have to tell you, if you have not seen this, you have not lived. (Also, welcome to my substack where I have officially become a knock-off Mary Oliver — all of my life observations will now be couched in nature metaphors and peppered with awe.) But seriously. Did you know that butterflies don’t make a cocoon *around* themselves (that’s moths), they split their skin and the chrysalis comes OUT FROM INSIDE THEM? And then the chrysalis writhes as if possessed until it SHAKES OFF ITS SKIN??
It’s a visual shock, yes, but the more destabilizing part of the experience is the moment of confusion about where to locate the “I” of this creature. The caterpillar is creature-y in a way a we recognize: it has a head, legs, it crawls around, it eats. But then, what we see as creature turns out to be just a thin covering around something that is alien, lime-green, object-like but still animate. The shapeshifting is so extreme that it challenges the consistency of selfhood. Or maybe it surfaces my need for a consistent self: how unsettling, the idea that by eating and growing the caterpillar is building this thing inside that will split him open, overtake him. Watching it happen forces you to locate this creature’s “I” not in a physical shape but in a pattern of transformations. The forward motion from one shape to another is the monarch.
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Lately I’m noticing that a lot of what slows me down (in art making, in writing, in life?) is the desire to be legible to others, to make sense. It’s one of this substack’s major engines — the desire to explain myself and what I am doing to the people in my life who I sense are confused by my choices. But it’s not just others I feel the need to make sense to. I spend a lot of time trying to make sense to myself. I have never, exactly, understood why I would choose art making as a life’s work when I feel such a strong desire to be useful. (Does everyone want to be useful? Some people seem gloriously free of this need. I both envy them and judge them harshly.)
I have tried multiple paths to make sense of my choice: I’ve tried believing that art is, actually, definitely useful in the world. I’ve tried making art that is more directly politically engaged. And, when both of those are failing me, I’ve tried accepting that art is potentially useless and that I just need to commit to being politically active, being helpful in my community, and otherwise doing penance for choosing a selfish line of work. (This last one has maybe slowed me down more than anything else, since the condition of both having to make a living elsewhere and do penance for your selfishness elsewhere leaves very little time for the art making itself.)
What would it be like to be the caterpillar, who doesn’t stop to wonder why he needs to build a chrysalis inside his body to then dissolve his insides to goo to then build a butterfly to then fly south to then start the cycle all over again? The caterpillar chews forward, knowing somehow in his DNA that this is his task, not needing to have a brain big enough to understand the whole web he is a part of. And really, is there a reason for the caterpillar? Could you justify the caterpillar, other than saying that each small piece of life supports other life?
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I was reading recently about performance art movements of the 70s and 80s, including artists whose work focused on extreme bodily acts: a man who suspended his naked body over various landscapes from a set of hooks. Two people who tied themselves together for a year. Marina Abramovic and Ulay walking to meet each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. I find myself thrilled by the illegibility of these works: why?? I also notice the distorting quality of fame — the way I experience less resistance to the logic of Abramovic’s work, knowing her to be a giant of the performance art world. In this way, reading about Abramovic is less useful, because my brain is so quick to apply the lens of validity to her eccentric choices. When I read about these two people I’ve never heard of living at either end of an eight foot rope, it brings me face to face with an energy that exists in all art-making, in different concentrations: the willingness to do something that doesn’t make sense, either in economic or interpersonal terms, to follow a logic or a curiosity outside the bounds of the known. The thrill, then, that I get from reading about these artists is the thrill of coming in contact with such an undiluted concentration of this energy. Not contained by the logics of beauty, functionality, or morality, it shocks the system. It pulses with some energy almost too strange to behold.
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I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to drop the sense-making. To go off the deep end, just for a while. (Can you go off the deep end “just for a while”?) Not because I’m no longer interested in being useful, but because I’m beginning to sense there are types of work you can’t make when you’re tethered to legibility. I have begun privately calling the coming year a chrysalis year. Something about the metaphor — its defined shape, its limited duration — makes me feel I could undertake the experiment of turning to goo. What if I gave myself a year to stop questioning whether writing was a worthwhile thing to do? What if I gave myself a year to stop worrying whether other people look at me and see idleness, or failure? What if, for one year, I stopped feeling guilty for the various privileges that have allowed me to still be pursuing art making at this point in my life?
You might think that a year is an arbitrary length of time, or that setting a start date for an activity like going off the deep end seems, well, contrived? What the caterpillar reminds us is that change has a shape, and you may have to build your own container in which to change. Me telling you about all this is a way of trying it out, testing its validity. This is me building the chrysalis.
This reminds me, actually, of a panel discussion we had in grad school with several successful playwrights. I think they were supposed to be giving us career advice, but at some point the conversation turned strangely raw. (It was on zoom, during Covid, and in retrospect feels particular to that time, when the mask of normalcy was thin.) Perhaps the most well-known writer on the panel, a middle-aged experimental playwright whose work had already influenced many of us, began talking about the difficulty of both making your art and making the conditions for your art. “You have to be the monk and also make the monastery,” she said, and she began to cry.
Afterward, some of my younger classmates were frustrated — they felt the panel had been both lacking in practical advice and also a total downer. For me, it was one of the most deeply connecting, and frankly useful moments of all grad school. I’m still considerably younger than the playwright on that panel was, but I feel like I’m beginning to touch into the exhaustion and the grief of finding that the structures for receiving and validating your work don’t exist. Being allowed to see that grief in someone both older and more successful than me was a huge gift; the image of the monk and the monastery has accompanied me ever since.
If the monastery is the larger, infrastructural project of lifestyle and career, the chrysalis is perhaps a smaller, protective room within the monastery. The inner chamber where the mystical stuff happens. This past year I’ve been running around trying to do maintenance the monastery’s various wings — the creative-side-jobs wing and the applying-to-stuff wing and the keep-some-connection-to-New-York wing the seeking-local-theater-community wing and the managing-your-emotions-and-expectations wing. It’s a sprawling set of grounds; the upkeep is endless. I feel concerned that if I enter the chrysalis, some of these other wings will fall into disrepair. Maybe that’s another part of the preparation I am undertaking: accepting that I can’t do it all at once, and there will be moss, mold. Deciding which practicalities I can afford to neglect.
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It’s funny, I missed all three of our butterflies coming out of their chrysalises, and I wasn’t that sad about it. Maybe because that stage of transformation has been advertised to me, and feels more familiar. Or maybe because that’s just not the stage I’m at. I did enjoy seeing the empty chrysalis shells, still attached to their leaves. I wonder how the whole thing went for them, and where they are now.
Maybe word will reach them that they’ve been written about in an obscure online publication about performance-making. Maybe, in their exhausted state as they are winging their way across south Texas, this news will be just the validation they need, a little spark of encouragement that someone out there is paying attention, and it’s worth continuing on their strange an arduous path. Or maybe they’ll never know.
Even more fascinating and telling that the constant contribution of Lewis Carroll's Caterpillar should be the question "Who are you?" Maybe he demands this of Alice because he knows he, too, could only begin to guess at himself!