Axiom of Swarms
By Nathaniel Sandler
I once saw an enormous colony of yellow jackets stinging en masse a terror stricken boy from another cabin at my summer camp. My memories of the details surrounding the incident are blurry. I feel like he was picked on often; maybe his clothes were somehow not acceptable to the unspoken status quo of whatever normalcy a band of puberty addled children demanded. But of the attack I remember his purple swim trunks teeming in angry yellow and black darting movements. His face, red with nascent infection, expanded upon itself as two brave counselors ran in and carried him out. I know he did not die, but I never saw him again.
Swarms are the ultimate spectacle. They can be beautiful or terrifying, moving in no particular direction with each part of the whole understanding the undulation and lulls needed by the others. Birds appear dancing in mega concert, with hundreds of thousands of voices thronging in discordant unison. Fish shoals swirl in harmonic fast paced balls, each a whirling dervish of the reef. Ants in the army tingle over each other: building, hoarding, working.
From the swarm we learn the basic lessons of togetherness and community, yet we understand any attempts at containment or control to be feckless.
Yet, we have created control through naming — collective nouns and quirky descriptors for the composite group of each species, each separate thing coming together as a whole.
Read this slosh of words:
ambush, army, array, badling, bale, band, bank, barrel, bed, bevy, bind, bloat, bouquet, brace, brood, bunch, business, busyness, cackle, caravan, cartload, cast, cete, chattering, clattering, cloud, cluster, clutter, cohort, colony, company, congregation, convocation, corps, covey, den, dole, dule, dopping, down, doylt, drove, erst, escargatoire, eyrar, fall, family, fesnyng, fleet, flight, fling, float, flock, flush, fluther, gaggle, gam, game, gang, gaze, grist, gulp, head, herd, horde, host, hover, husk, kit, knob, knot, leap, lepe, lease, leash, meet, meinie, mess, mews, mischief, mob, murmuration, mustering, nest, nide, nye, pack, paddling, pandemonium, pantheon, parcel, parliament, party, peep, phalanx, pit, plague, plump, pod, pride, rabble, raft, rag, rake, rangale, richesse, rookery, rout, sawt, school, scold, scourge, scream, scurry, sedge, sege, shoal, siege, skein, skulk, sleuth, sloth, smack, sord, sore, sownder, span, spring, stable, stalk, stand, streak, string, stud, suit, sute, team, tiding, tittering, tok, tower, train, tribe, trippe, troop, volary, waddling, wake, walk, watch, wedge, whisp, wisp, whiting, whoop, wing, yoke, zeal
The eye and brain understood that, but most likely the whole was good enough, and each part was not read. The list of swarms becomes a swarm.
Picture now a wooden boat unmanned floating listlessly to scuttle in calm seas. The boat is old and has seen many a crashing wave. On her last trip to port she was unsuspectingly overrun by a termite colony. As the bugs tirelessly horde over a weak spot in the hull, a murmuring crowd of birds begin to form above, uncurious of the boat as it moves closer to its final destination. Underneath, a school of fish — their wet sociality a contrast to the two separate multitudes above.
The ship finally sinks gracefully and everything brilliantly and quietly disperses.