The Dead Dragonfly
I do not exactly realize what it is until I peer more closely at the object lying atop the worn white plastic garden table: it is a night-blue dragonfly corpse, upside down, its four golden-marked gossamer wings adrift. It is not often I get to glimpse a dragonfly fluttering around in the garden; it is the first time I have seen one’s corpse, which has happened to float down onto the table.
It was not crushed, for its wing and torso are still intact; it simply seems to have had its life snuffed out, leaving the body to drift away, now ephemeral, insignificant, and superfluous in the scheme of things. When I lift the rolled-up newspaper from the table, the corpse briefly trembles, momentarily leading me to think that it is merely in deep slumber, only to quickly have the illusion dispelled.
Lying in the makeshift grave of unsympathetic, gruff plastic, it has already become detritus, and I do not know what to do with it. I cannot brush it away from the table, as I would have done with a deaf leaf or flower; I do not have it within me to crush it into fragments and prematurely enact the process of decay. Perhaps I will have to leave the task of disposal, as much as I hate to use the word, to the wind, allowing the air to blow it away onto the nearby bushes or the tree-top, or to the marriage of three different creepers where it will become immured in the branches, its wings glimmering in the light and briefly catapulted into living out an artificial life, the pretense of being aloft. And what the wind could not accomplish, time would: eventually, the dragonfly would become brittle and shatter and turn into dust, the fragments falling and intermingling with soil, nourishing it for birthing future plants.
For the time being, the newspaper leaves twinned open on the table, I let the dead dragonfly remain there, pretending to myself that it is in fact asleep and has asked not to be stirred; see how peacefully it slumbers, upside down in oblivion, the wings like fragile flower petals. It probably was a dead flower that I had originally mistaken it for.
When I was three years old, I remember how without hesitation, I plucked deliciously scented pink roses from my botanist grandfather’s richly maintained garden; I loved denuding plants of curling, drying yellow leaves and withered flowers, and enthusiastically crunching them into nothingness beneath my feet. When I grew older, I rejected destruction and preferred petrifying them within pages of heavy, unread encyclopedias, only to instantly forget about them; months later, while consulting the encyclopedias for research, I would be startled to discover browned, asphyxiated flowers staining the text, and wonder why I had made sepulchers out of the books.
Nowadays, though, secretly subscribing to magazine snippets about Feng Shui, which counsels against using dead flowers as ornamentation or otherwise within the house because they injure efforts to preserve and harness energy, I discard flowers the moment they wilt. Even potpourri is less a pleasant visual space-filler than a collection of energy-sapping ingredients. After all, why focus so passionately on death, decay, destruction, and the inevitable destination of dust when there is so much life to be admired and lived?
Sometimes, admittedly, we have no choice, such as when we are compelled to seek a middle ground between death and life: plastic. Living in an irrigated desert country, where roses and chrysanthemums are flown in from the cold-storages of European capitals and spend much of their lives being transported and inhabiting artificially chilled environments, we turn to plastic: to imitations of real bouquets filling cut-glass vases. These flowers are not dead; after all, plastic is immortal and frighteningly so. Even now, having grown up with notions of plastic natural beauty, I still cannot stop myself, when dining in restaurants, from touching the flowers that bloom in the vase, reassuring myself of the difference between nature and plastic, life and deadening immortality.
Dead flowers, dead dragonfly, trees killed to create paper, and a dead mummy: The newspaper this morning features an article about the supposedly most famous Egyptian pharaoh of all, King Tutankhamen, the twelfth ruler of Ancient Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty. His magnificent gold and cobalt-blue death mask was among the first objects to leave an indelible impression on me, and initiated my obsession with ancient Egypt in third grade.
I read the newspaper article and learn that Egyptian antiquities experts have decided to shift King Tutankhamen from his original sarcophagus to a transparent, glass, climate-controlled box in an antechamber of his Luxor tomb, fearing that, if left in the sarcophagus, the mummy will eventually disintegrate due to visitors’ breathing and attendant humidity. “The only good thing left about the mummy is its face; we have to preserve the face,” Dr. Zahi Hawass, the head of Egyptian antiquities, says in the article, and in order to save the face, they must insulate it from human contact.
Does anyone not notice the irony? Living people causing a dead mummy to vanish into nothingness, turning it into dust, erasing the last physical reminder of a being that once lived—breathed, thought, dreamt, loved, ate, drank, and walked. They rest King Tut in a new sarcophagus, providing him with different accoutrements than those that accompanied his first burial: the power to ensure immortality of flesh, if nothing else.
I wonder if King Tut has any sentiments to express regarding his worldwide posthumous popularity. Only fifty people reportedly glimpsed King Tutankhamen when his tomb was first discovered in 1925; now, the experts’ decision means that we, the world, can see him in flesh, so to speak, glimpse him in newspapers and magazines and on the Internet. We will encounter the face behind the mask: a leathery, blackened visage with prominent buckteeth, the front teeth being typical of his royal ancestors. The slumbering Rip Van Winkle of King Tutankhamen must awaken to confront a world that he departed from 30,000 years ago; while he was still in deep slumber, the world awakened to his existence, and now it is his turn to make polite cocktail chatter with that very world. Is it necessary though? Could we not leave him in repose as he had originally been left? We have already violated the sacred underworld of his chamber and played with the objects left there, as if they were toys meant for children. Could we not extend the courtesy of leaving him veiled in death, at least? I wonder what is that curiosity or fascination we seek to satiate by unmasking a body from death and briefly rejuvenating him into life. We may think it was justifiable to flesh his life into existence: how he died, how he looked, how old he was. Is it of utmost necessity, though, to subject his dead body into re-living a life already lived and then extinguished? Let him sleep, let him sleep, for he no longer needs to awaken.
I close the newspaper, and the breeze immediately and gently blows the paper down onto the ground; the ink-printed paper sits alongside its more raw and primitive cousins, ersatz rotten-egg-yolk yellow autumn leaves, fuchsia-tipped white bougainvillea flowers, and other physical reminders of the fact that I am sitting in a garden, dynamic and cyclical; birth, death, and rebirth occurring in the same breath. I look up to see that the dead dragonfly has now inched closer towards the edge of the table, two of its wings appearing to lift themselves into flight. If I lean over and blow, it will float in the air and then descend to the ground, preparing itself for imminent destruction, if not now, then a minute later, ten minutes later: my breath, an exhalation of air that signifies and confirms my existence, will be the cause of the corpse’s destruction. Let him sleep, I think: I instead coax the dragonfly corpse onto my palm and then gently set it down in the rich, moist chocolate soil of an avuncular potted plant, leaving death in repose, untouched and unseen.
Copyright © 2008 by Priyanka Sacheti
