Every couple of months, I am overcome by the fear that I’m wasting my youth, whatever ineffable substance that youth is. I worry that I should be taking myself less seriously, that I should be having more sex (or at least, having sex with a wider variety of people), that I should spend more late nights skulking around the East Village (I did try this last one the other night and I can unfortunately report that most people out and about on Avenue B after 11 pm on a Friday are just as fratty as the ones I encountered on late nights walking home in Hoboken, just clothed in fancier brands). I’m an artist dammit! Where are the hot Juilliard dancers desperate to give me their numbers?1
The fact of the matter is I’m not very good at dating. My particular skills in the area of romance lie in allowing my desire to build over the course of days, weeks, and months, as it forms a pearl around a kernel of dust, at which point I offer it to a potential beloved to look at, to examine. Look at this desire! See what little speck it came from! Look what beauty can emerge from the least likely of places if we just give it time! I wrote a poem about it! The registers in which my voice carries don’t communicate well on Hinge. I’m not pithy or funny or witty. I’m just curious, I think. And it’s hard to be curious about a well-curated dating profile.
So instead, this summer, rather than whiling away the hours on Hinge, I’ll be pursuing the metaphorical existence of one of my favorite Southern creatures - the cicada.2
Cicadas spend most of their lives underground, emerging in the dog days of summer (which gives one of Houston’s most common species its name, the Dog-Day Cicada), to sing (read: scream), mate, and lay eggs. And it’s a special summer for our six-legged screaming friends, since two of the periodical broods (Brood 13 and Brood 17, indicating the number of years that they live underground prior to emerging) will emerge in the same summer, where they will also be joined by their annual comrades. And while I don’t intend to die at the end of this summer (at least not of my own volition), I see it only fit to honor them with some screaming of my own.
The song of the annual cicadas provided the backdrop to my summers growing up in Houston. Even in the manicured lawns of West U, their screams would remind me that the world was still a wild place, that if I set my mind to it, even amidst the constant crush of suburban whiteness, I could still be heard. One year I found the shell of a cicada nymph clinging to the tree out front, a replica of the life that it once encased but for the evidence of rupture, the casing split along the spine where the nymph had emerged into its adult form, its voice (not unlike a poem, I think). Little freak that I was, I took the shell inside and put it inside my box of treasures.
I understand the reason why their mating calls are typically referred to as “songs,” in part as a common reference term for animal mating cries and in part from anthropomorphizing impulse that one should sing to a potential mate rather than simply scream until a mate appears. I’ve also heard them referred to alternatively as buzzes and cries and whines. And it may have the effect of a song on the mates it’s seeking to attract, given that female cicadas can’t even process loud noises (maybe they hear the little strum-strum of “Wonderwall,” I don’t know). But one cicada produces a sound of 100 decibels when heard from a yard’s distance; they’ve even been known, at times, to cry out loud enough to damage human hearing. As each of them raises their voice, they fill entire skylines with their cries.
I think cicadas understand my condition as a poet. Though they serve as a sonic backdrop for the arrival of spring and summer, they lack the popular appeal of the robin or the warbler. Likewise, I’m not a songwriter, not an actor, not a maker of films, things that the broader populace seeks out or even understands. Yet I speak. I plead. I shout in search of someone, anyone that can hear me. In this life, I am called to love the world and to tell about it, and when the world looks like ours does, sometimes the only sound that could potentially emerge from my mouth is a scream.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to feel certain, to write with any sense of sureness. When I need to keep myself humble, I remind myself of the time in college when my poetry professor told me “I get carried away by the sound of my own voice.” What she meant was that I tend to write with a forcefulness that needs to be backed up by discipline – otherwise it’s just noise. Cicadas, I think have arrived at that discipline. Their volume doesn’t satisfy a simple need to be loud, but the requirement to survive. Their biological need to produce, yes, but in doing so, a belief in a future.
The cicadas remind me that this discipline, this belief, is my separating principle. I don’t need to be beautiful; I need to be heard.
Currently reading: For Now by Eileen Myles
Spinning: “When the Rain Starts,” by Infinity Song
Can you tell I binged three seasons of Mozart in the Jungle recently?
I must warn you, if you choose to Google cicadas after this, there a number of studies articles that index first about a recent study on how cicadas pee. Just saying.