Drone Fly

This might look like a bee happily getting its afternoon fix of daisy nectar, but it's not. It's a big, fat, slow moving fly which lives mostly on nectar and has a penchant for hovering around the flowers which provide its favourite tipple. It would make a tasty little smackerel for a passing bird, except that, to the bird, it looks a lot like a sting wielding bee. It survives, in other words, by pretending to be something it is not, which, is something most of us do, at least some of the time.

You can tell it's not a bee because it lacks a bee's antennae - those large, angular protrusions on a bee's head which the bee uses for communicating with other bees. And the fact that it is missing the organs of communication is sort of symbolic, when you think about it.

You can't be in relationship to someone you're lying to. Not a real relationship, anyway. Many of us have doubts about sharing the self we know ourselves to be. Sometimes, I guess, we have very good reason, as we are all prone to doing shameful stuff from time to time. But sometimes our secrecy runs pathologically deep. Perhaps when we were being formed as little children, no one delighted in us and affirmed who we were, so we leapt to the conclusion that there is something unlovely about our very being, and, if that's true, we'd better not let anyone see what's really there. So we formed a mask to show the world. Or, more likely, a series of masks which we got adept at switching to suit our company. We got good at it. Like the drone fly, we chose worthy disguises and we learned our craft of mimickry so well we were able to fool all those around us and, even in the end, ourselves. But no one can form a relationship with a mask. We can put on a pretty good show most of the time, but our disguises must always lack the organs of communication. So the relationship is one person interacting with a work of fiction ie the invented mask. Or, sometimes, an interaction between two works of fiction. Sometimes these exchanges are hard to spot and go on for years, but the clue, to ourselves, that we are drone flies and not bees is the profound sense of aloneness we carry with us always, even into our most intimate moments.

Drone flies, admittedly, have things in their lives which are pretty disgusting and I can understand them not wanting to talk about it at dinner parties. They breed in stagnant water and have young which are accurately named rat tailed maggots. But, really, who cares? They are useful pollinators and they are harmless and they are exceptionally pretty.