My wife Mil and I walked out along the bog this past autumn. A shaft of light lit up an incandescent cloud of gnats, hovering in what looked like mindless flight above the orangish dirt of the path.
"Once I was sitting in the Duke Gardens by myself, and I witnessed a metaorganism," I said to her.
She urged me to continue, so I did. "Just like that cloud there, they were just flying around. But then they grouped themselves, within about a second, into three perfect hovering columns." I gestured with my hands. "About three feet tall and ten inches wide. Like perfect geometric cylinders."
Mil, who takes me to task often, watched me more closely to see if I were fabricating.
"No, really," I said. "They stayed that way--a few thousand gnats--in three perfect columns, with no lost gnats in between. Just hovering there."
"No kidding," she said.
"It was a metaorganism," I said.
This led Mil into a series of speculations about the ordering principles of the universe. I agreed, and we ended up talking about African termites. How they build ventilated work and living spaces on a scale which to us resembles the palace at Versailles. Yet they have mote-sized brains.
"Metaorganisms,” I said, “especially termites and bees, must have a great life. As individuals."
"Really," she said. "They all know exactly what they have to do. They’re protecting the Queen."
We walked a little further, back toward the car. It was gloaming time. The crowns of the soft grasses in the road brushed our shins. "We humans don't have a Queen," I said.
It struck us both as an obvious truism, that we human beings, in our increasing billions, have no Queen to protect.
Something all of us agree is our Queen. Other things to protect came to mind. Our families. Our nations. Our religions. Our credit ratings. Our computer firewalls. That’s a fairly scattered
raison de’etre for a super-meta-organism like us, which from a distance organizes itself much the way termites or army ants do. Especially army ants, who stream past to devour things while their soldiers stand guard, their jaws open and poised to challenge anybody who tries to stop them.
"Who is our Queen?" I asked my wife.
"The earth," she answered simply.
We got in the truck and the engine blew my personal cloud of hydrocarbons into the ocean of atmosphere, warming things up just a little more.
