Speak Truman. Speak Virginia. Speak Moth ©

by Lauren Elise Daniels

A moth flew in my ear and woke me at 3.45 this morning. It fluttered and yanked me from a sound sleep. I didn’t know what was happening and tore into sheet-kicking, head-slapping panic. I ripped back the blankets, got up and winced around in the dark, but never found the moth.

It’s a freaky thing, a moth in the ear at 3.45am. Once, a friend of mine had to have a tiny spider, who took up residence while she slept, flushed out of her ear. Nevermind the idea of egg-laying.

After a dizzy, fruitless search, I eventually went back to sleep, but the moth was the first thing I remembered when I woke in the morning and all day, it lingers. I’ve been noticing them about the house. Tiny brown triangles flattened against walls, another taupe and motionless on the ceiling. Who are they? What are they waiting for? How many times do they go unnoticed? What else don’t I notice?

Even as I type this, one is perched on the cornice above my desk. Blending, it must believe, into the convex wood, unassuming in its stillness. Waiting.

Elusive creatures, moths are not showy like butterflies. They’re secretive. Suggestive of dark places, perhaps even topics I’d rather avoid.

In Music for Chameleons, over a glass of absinthe with his Martinique aristocrat, Truman Capote determined that ghosts ate them. In fact, ghosts preferred to eat moths, he said. Now would the moth even notice if a ghost had eaten it, or would it just keep fluttering?

I thought of Virginia Woolf and her moth. It struggled on her window pane and she righted it with her pencil. A month ago, I asked five little old ladies in my memoir workshop to read Virginia’s essay, ‘Death of the Moth’ and share their thoughts. What does Virginia mean with her moth that distracts her as it dies so close to her, stealing her, with its ‘hay-coloured wings’, away from her writing? What is the moth, really, to any of us?

‘We need to pay attention more,’ one lady said.

‘And we’re all gonna die,’ said another.

Just then, a great big moth flew into the room and ba-zinged off the ceiling fan. One little old lady ducked. We were over time and that concluded our discussion about Virginia and her moth. We smiled and packed up. But something lingered. It’s always undeniably weird when something like that happens, and acknowledge it or not, we all feel it.

So what did this morning’s moth mean? And have I seen the culprit as I’ve inspected the walls today? Did my ear look like the perfect nursery to house its larvae? Or was this moth trying to tell me something?

After thinking about it all day, after musing with Truman and Virginia, and skirting around the walls and cornices and architraves, I think my moth was saying just one thing in this whirling, narcissistic human world where everybody’s talking too much about nothing.

I think the moth was saying, ‘Listen.’

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Published in Global Paradigm Magazine, October 2006