Everyone who grows up in a Christian-influenced culture has heard the phrase "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." Normally people take this as a comment on the childishness of humanity, but I think it's actually quite a literal statement - in most of what we do, we are blind to both the processes behind our actions and the consequences that follow. But on occasion, moments of awareness occur that give us uncommon insight, and often what we see at such times can be painfully absurd. Such happened to me today, when I killed a fly.
Normally when one kills a fly, it involves some kind of weapon like a fly-swatter or a rolled up newspaper, and the force applied is so overwhelming compared to an insect body that the blow feels no different to the arm delivering it than if there were no fly there. First there is a moving fly - annoying, irritating, pestilent - and then there is a non-moving fly; an object of no consequence that can be thrown into the wastebasket like a wrapper or a toothpick. Irritant removed, problem solved, event forgotten.
A fly had landed on my chair, so I rolled up a magazine and swatted it as I normally would. It was now apparently unable to fly, but its legs were still moving. Not thinking one way or another about it, I simply picked up the fly between thumb and forefinger, feeling it squirm, feeling its sad little insect version of desperation, and with no thought pressed my fingers together. I felt the tiniest, minutest little click as its exoskeleton imploded, and its sad little struggle ended abruptly.
At that moment, I was struck by an unexpected feeling of sickness and subtle horror. That tiniest, most ridiculously trivial sensation in my fingertips, followed by the sudden ceasing of the fly's intense movements, seemed like a microcosm of every act of murder ever committed. Don't misunderstand me, I know it was a fly, and that it wasn't aware on the levels that we are, so it's not as if I was in emotional turmoil - but I saw in what had happened the same kernel of meaning at the heart of all acts of destruction and death. I saw a meaningful, living process brought to an absolute and abrupt end by a totally meaningless and random intersection of forces. I felt its will to live in its struggle, and then felt the simplest little crunch when it ended completely - and for some reason that tiny sound had exactly the same inherent meaning as a gunshot.
In that moment, I no longer saw the fly as an annoyance perturbing my world, but something unto itself pursuing its own internal nature - a nature the basics of which are common to all living things, including myself. I realized I understood what a fly is, and without exaggerating or indulging in irrational sentimentalism, I understood that however minute the scale or minimal the relative importance of the event, there was tragedy in it - a basic, quiet, tiny little quantum of tragedy, like a single violin string plucked and then immediately silenced.
This does not mean I will never swat flies again, because I myself am a living thing, and cannot know all things at all times. Nor does this understanding cause me to turn to pacifism in my politics or my attitudes toward life, because though I grieve the fly, and the field mouse, and the cat, and the cow, and the dog, and the monkey, and the human, in ascending order of tragedy, and all other things that die violently at the unseeing hands or in the unknowing jaws of other living things, I am not a Buddhist monk. At some point you are no longer making honest moral decisions based on knowledge of what you do, and are instead simply running away from that knowledge by refusing to be part of the world.
Such is the conundrum of the humanist warrior, the liberal President, the conscientious architect whose ideas incite tumult when they begin to displace the old ways. Such is the paradox of all who would know what they do and still have the capacity to affect change in their world. I will never again kill a fly just because flies are to be killed, but nor will I allow its own blind pursuit of impulse to disrupt what I do. So if I am ever again in the position of swatting a fly, I will at least know what I am doing, and grant it the small moment of grieving it is due.