No Time, part 3

Bzzzbzzzbzzzzz. O abellón. O avellón. O abe…

She was drifting off to sleep, having said what had needed to be said for years. She could return to her years of silence. Unfortunately, the darkness that surrounded her refused to remain silent. A soft, infinitesmal buzzing appeared at the edges of her consciousness and could not be blocked by a swat from the hand. She thought there were no bees this time of the year, so the bzzbzzbzzz must be coming from a different source. But what source? All she could see at that ungodly hour was air the color of ink.

Or maybe there was a bee, one that was directing her attention to some unspoken meaning. Bees symbolized so many things, and she knew she’d have to make an attempt to understand that symbolism if she wanted to figure out what the insect(s) could possibly be doing in her room. Didn’t they need to sleep? 

Author’s note:

I decided to assist her in finding information about the member of the Apoidea family and would try to get it to her somehow . And with a brief search, I found that bees have long been associated with death. This results in several rituals; in some cultures the mourners circle around a cadaver, walking and buzzing. It is not clear if they are accompanying the bees, trying to attract them or dispel them. Or maybe they were role-playing and being bees was their role. In other cultures, the movement of the bee becomes a dance - the abellón of Galicia happens to be an example of this.

I had never read the poem “O abellón” written in 1884 by Alfredo Braña, who used a satirical style in order to poke fun at its rusticity and pagan nature, with no reverence at all for the occasion (the death of an individual). He was from Galicia, so his disdain for popular culture says something about him.

Meanwhile, she couldn’t shake the image that flew out from the bzbzzbzzz and began to move rhythmically before her eyes.

Author:

I found that the members of the hymenoptera family were also the bearers of souls that leave the body when it expires. Some people, living in several parts of the world, thought the buzzing heard on Christmas Eve was of a different nature, sounded different. Others - like the Portuguese - believed the insect understood music. (I didn’t have time to find our more about how those people figured out the understanding music. But I still wondered what kind of music it was that bees liked?

The Basques, I discovered, think the soul, dressed as a bee, leaves the body and flies back to its hive. Maybe all cultures saw the bee as symbolizing community, focus, a strong work ethic, shared purpose, things like that. I’m not sure how all the positive characteristics mesh with the relationship to death, but it’s possible there is one. 

Feminists are drawn to bees for their matriarchal social structure, associated them with the Land of Milk and Honey. (That made me laugh.) Of course the old sages would know even way back then, that milk and honey were life-giving. 

I’m going back a bit because I left one of the death-related concepts: the dance at the edge of the non living world but also as expression of strength, creativity, life. The strength, the success, of the bee in gathering pollen and sharing it with the others in the colony is admirable, hence the ancient reverence for the insect and the good it could do. What better, more trustworthy means of helping souls find their place in the afterlife than to use the bee to carry out an important task. 

Maybe the abellón custom arrived in Iberia via the Romans. In Crete the bee was considered to be a monarch, a queen. Bees fed baby Zeus. In The Plague of Thebes, Sophocles describes a swarm of the dead flying off. Bees are sacred in some cultures, have spiritual significance. The Bible, which is multicultural, saw bees as divine blessing, abundance, life-sustaining. The list is eternal.

She was thinking: a bee may be associated with the soul that escapes from a person who dies, but bees have positive associations as well. They should be worshipped, not feared. She hadn’t done any research on that since she was in a dark bedroom. Still, she figured it out on her own, lying there. She had realized that bees could be associated with departure and arrival, with death and with life. 

[Then she closed her eyes even tighter and allowed herself to find the answer of why the bee(s) had appeared in her room in the middle of the night, humming and performing a jagged dance that produced something good for the world (honey). Both the bee of the dead and the dancing bee were a representation of her own life that was buzzing in the air and at the same time seeking the solace of pollen.]

The bee of the deceased was my childhood, is my childhood. Years far away now, in the past, yet not entirely in the past. 

Author:

It stung her still and she knew why she kept running. (To escape, get far away.) 

I need to go back, if only in my mind, to the place where I never belonged. Understand why things were the way they were. Sometimes we shut a door to keep things out of us, out of our thoughts. Sometimes that is not a good decision. 

She was going to trace her steps and begin answering questions instead of running away from them. It was going to be a slow process.

She would explain it all to him after it had happened, the going back. This made her think about how, for him. there was always time to read. What sustenance for the body was in a book? You get strong when you use it, lift weights, shoot baskets, and as always, when you run. Just don’t run forever in the same direction.

Then something else happened. In her jeans pocket she remembered there were a couple of sheets of paper with poems in longhand, copied by him for their last venture out together, to go rock climbing. One sheet had some poems by Emily Dickinson, who apparently is the person who wrote the most poems about bees. There it was - “The Bee” - the one that ends:

His labor is a chant,

His idleness a tune;

Oh, for a bee’s experience 

Of clovers and of noon!

Author:

I wonder if she will figure out that her experience with a buzzing bee at three o’clock in the morning is not unrelated to the poem. His having given her the poems, and asking her to read them aloud to him, surely provoked the vision brought to her by the Sound of Silence. The pages with endless words that are never heard. Pages best read surrounded by a blanket-like darkness.