---ESSAY---
Air and insects
I'm now reading books about animals for the preparation of the planned special pages of the summer issue of our poetry magazine "Mi-lyre-n". One of them is "Alien Worlds: How insects conquered the earth and why their fate will determine our future" written by Steve Nicholls (via the Japanese translation by Remi Kumagai). The hugeness of 600 pages of this book testifies how large, unimaginable, complicated and mysterious insects' world is.
One big wonder concerning insects is that they can fly. They acquired wings long before birds did. Miracle. Insects were the first to proceed in the air, and since then they have subtly developed and elaborated their wing mechanism. According to this book, the air is somewhat like water for small insects. Possibly they fly as if they swim and climb in the air. But imagine the first insect that came upon the idea of flight. Maybe it moved some parts of its body and felt the possibility of the air. Genius!
Poetry also flies in our imaginative space. Air for insects is silence for poems. Not vacuum silence but dreamy, dense liquid silence, I fancy.
Our genuine precious inspiration is the first unidentified flying insect some hundred million years ago.