lights

I sat on the back deck with P. in early June, sipping cabernet and watching the day’s slow metamorphosis into the blues and purples of dusk. She and I had just lapsed into an easy silence after more discussions about work; the troubles of the office couldn’t compete with the lazy settling of the evening, after a hot day, into a cooler quiet.

Her backyard, staring west, stretches past a watchful maple into a broad semi-mown field, curling grassy fingers around the roots of the woods bordering its three sides. Over the dark strip of trees poised on the edge of the sharp bank that tumbles into Christiana Creek blazed the remnants of a seashell-colored sunset, reflecting the sunken light in streaks of fading cloud.

It was that startling time of evening when the sky still holds the day, but the trees and fields have already yielded to night. As the darkening light crystallized into stars, P. and I rocked absentmindedly on the bench, holding our wine glasses, and picked out the condensed shadows of browsing deer.

"Look at all the fireflies," she said.

Michigan boasts a number of beauties, but my favorite by far are the vast, uncountable numbers of fireflies that limn the fields in summer. Like scattered strings of Christmas lights they hover over the grass, flashing the softness of their bioluminescence in an erratically orchestrated rhythm. As the bench creaked under our rocking I shifted and waved my hand at the field.

"It's all about mating," I said.

"Really?" she said.

"Yeah. The males fly, the females hide in the grass. Each kind of firefly has its own particular pattern, and the males fly around looking for a female whose light pattern matches theirs. Then they go at it, and get back to searching."

We watched the strewn web of sex-crazed insects arranging themselves at counterpoint to the stars, and I laughed and told P. about the tricksy females who, bored and hungry, imitate the pattern of another species to lure a male in and eat him.

"I've met women like that," she said.

"How 'bout it," I said.

I stared over the field, wondering how the human dating scene would look if everyone had glowing rumps. Compared to the pushme-pullyou games of modern mating hunts, the fireflies' ambitions looked simple and old-fashioned. For the males: Light rear. Take to the sky. Scour the earth for a female just like you. Do as God intended. For the females: Light rear. Send out signals. Wait for the male to come along who matches you. Do as God intended.

Sitting there on that porch, looking back on my past blunders, I envied the little buggers. If people have a light pattern, they don't know it. For people, the system looks more like, Guess. Get it wrong. Guess. Get it wrong. Try again.

It's often brutal, often ugly, often boring, and seldom pretty. But it's the system we have, rather like language, and we use it because it's the only way to get to the other side of the field. The best aspect of humanity's long history of lovelorn heartbreak, and the unspeakable joy of love found and returned, is its art. We can take our experiences and forge them into books and poetry, paintings and sculptures, strains of music. For us, the beauty comes, not so much from the search, but from the aftermath of the search's results, from the touch and the go, the losing and the finding, and, often now, the losing again.

But these uncomplicated insects are art. They don't sing, they don't dance, they don't write. They merely do what they were made to do, and in the doing create some of the most striking panoramas of the Platonic Form of Summer.

There's value to the process. There's learning, and becoming, and continuing, there's the development of a resilient determination that proclaims, as Sufjan Stevens writes, I'm not afraid to get it right; I turn around and I give it one more try. There's a certain gladness in the knowledge that nothing is wasted as we cast about looking for the things we want most.

I couldn't help but feel a little swell of hope as I leaned forward and stared into the dark, my eyes fixed on the rippled cadences of color enlivening the field, the thousand breathing lights making the hunt for reproduction beautiful.