Schrödinger’s Butterflies – by Dave Witty
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I cried, she says. I cried for an hour.
At that age, I was supposed to be curious, surveying the world with impatience. But in reality, I craved stability. And in that moment, I knew something was wrong. The world appeared to flicker.
Almost a year into fatherhood, I have begun to imagine a conversation thirty years from now with my daughter. She is recounting a memory from New Year’s Day 2022, just before her first birthday. Though our minds and our bodies may have aged, her thoughts (at least in this strange daydream) are as vivid as when she first experienced them. They have filtered through the decades, resolved and unbroken.
The sight she is describing could have been from a fairytale - thousands of butterflies dancing mercurially around a single tree. Maybe it was hundreds - it was difficult to keep a tally - but concentrated as they were within a few square feet, flitting between the bunched flowers of a sweet bursaria, they seemed almost infinite.
For a moment, I was motionless. This would have to be, I thought, one of the most delicately beautiful displays I have ever seen. Nature’s messengers, floating on the air like confetti, a ballet choreographed by the wind. But my daughter, stapled to my chest in the baby carrier, experienced a different kind of transformation. She screamed, the screams loud enough to be heard on the other side of the suburb until, holding her breath, her face reddening and her eyes agape, she continued to wail in silence.
At home, she explains, thinking back to that time, everything was calm. There was very little movement. Occasionally a curtain might rustle, and for a moment it would seem agitated, but pretty soon it would be at rest again. I lived in a picture book world where the characters moved while the backdrop remained constant. But every time we stepped outside that front door, the world would be so restless and troubled. Plants shaking, sometimes trembling as if they were scared. Trees convulsing as if they were angry.
I had never thought of it like that, and it upsets me now, in hindsight, when I recall the times she twisted in the breeze, discomforted and screaming. For the weary adult, the familiar is so drab that even the slightest novelty can be enchanting. But for young children, constancy is a relief.
Over the next few weeks, we saw the same butterflies on three, possibly four occasions. It is unlikely they were the same individuals - they live such short, hurried lives - but they were the same species. The common grass blue. Zizina labradus. A small butterfly not much bigger than a wasp. Its movement so fast and erratic, its size so slight, that when a grass blue comes into view, you notice only a flicker at first, a flicker that appears to jump several feet as it drops out of reality, only to reappear seconds later. Your eyes take time to adjust to their jinking motion. Only after ten, maybe twenty seconds, do you finally keep track of their passage.
It was so hot that day, she remembers. We had spent the past two days inside, keeping away from the heat, and I didn’t want to go out. And although I remember screaming at first, as you hoisted me into the carrier, I eventually succumbed. The air was calm and the world so still. Until the air flickered.
2021 had been our year of living hopelessly. The few months leading up to New Year’s Day had unravelled everything. My wife and I lay on the sofa, pummelled by two years of a pandemic, one year of parenting. ‘I don’t know,’ we kept repeating, staring up at the ceiling, our eyes half-closed.
We pushed that pram everywhere until we were as familiar with the local creek as Sisyphus was with that hill. Our life became an endless, peripatetic loop. The scratchy call of the willie wagtail. A white-faced heron sailing past. We could, on our daily walks, predict these events several seconds before they occurred.
I remember thinking of that saying: ‘happiness is like a butterfly.’ I had always attributed it to Buddhism (maybe I read that somewhere), but I have now discovered that its origin is more obscure. An old newspaper from the nineteenth century. ‘The more you chase it, the more it will evade you. But when you least expect it – when you are getting on with other things – that’s when it will gently land on your shoulder.’
We had chased happiness for weeks, thinking it would arrive gift-wrapped for Christmas, that it would naturally follow the end of work, the closing of our laptops for another year. But nothing changed. All we felt was the emptiness of words. The deflated hiss of post-exhaustion.
“We had chased happiness for weeks, thinking it would arrive gift-wrapped for Christmas, that it would naturally follow the end of work, the closing of our laptops for another year. But nothing changed. All we felt was the emptiness of words. The deflated hiss of post-exhaustion.”
And then the butterflies came.
The common grass blues. As abundant as their name suggests. Humble beneficiaries of Melbourne’s parks and gardens where, along with similar species such as the dusky and twin-spotted lineblue, they are more prevalent than the pestiferous cabbage white.
And yet no one notices them. They are almost invisible. After more than ten years of walking around Melbourne, I had no idea they were there.
Vladimir Nabokov was fascinated by butterflies. He studied the Polyommatinae blues, a subgroup of the Lycaenid family of which the common grass blue is a member. ‘If my first glance of the morning was for the sun,’ he says in Speak, Memory, ‘my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender.’
Members of the Polyommatinae family tend to display the same trick. When they land, pulsing on a leaf like a shimmering flower, they close their wings and it is only the drab underside you notice. A mottled cream enlivened only slightly by a stippled pattern along the edge of the wings. They are, from this angle, more like a moth, one you might discard with a piece of tissue.
But when they fly off with wings outstretched, the blue shimmers in their wake, a lambent blue, almost purple. ‘Blue snowflakes,’ says one of the characters in Nabokov’s novel Pnin. And yet this blue is an illusion, for the scales on the topside of their wings do not contain any pigment. The plates run parallel, with airspace in between. And through these gaps, the dark melanin reflects light. As the angle of your observation changes, so too does the radiance of the blue.
You always taught me to seek happiness in nature, my daughter says, thirty years in the future. You never said those exact words, but it was implicit in everything you did. Remember those animal cards you used to show me, and the songs you made up to accompany each one?
There is one scene I remember clearly, about four or five weeks after New Year’s Day. We are in a loungeroom dominated by large, wraparound windows, and, as I hold my daughter close to my chest, I sing her songs and whisper those Seussian rhymes, chant-like, to ready her for sleep.
‘The buttery fluttery butterfly. Flutters along in the breeze. It flutterly butterly flutters by. And flutters the leaves of the trees.’
Dusk is falling and as I stare out the window, watching the evening wash away, I notice a butterfly pressed against the glazing. I think it is a moth at first, but it has little nodules on the end of its long, whip-like antennae. From the stippled pattern of its underwings, I can tell it is a common grass blue.
It is stuck in a spider’s web. Motionless, as if resigned to its fate. Such a cruel irony. This butterfly, which during its larval stage as a caterpillar, survived predation from spiders, has, after the jolting of metamorphosis, succumbed to its original foe.
The next morning, the butterfly has disappeared, and I am left guessing at its fate. My first assumption is that it must have been eaten overnight. And yet the more I consider this idea, the more it feels wrong, for I have always imagined spiders to be, like butcherbirds, incremental feeders that return again and again to the same meal.
I asked an expert for his opinion, but the response was inconclusive. It was possible the butterfly had broken free, the expert said, but it was equally possible it had been eaten overnight, or at least taken away and stored somewhere for later consumption.
It made me think of Schrödinger’s thought experiment: that sometimes our knowledge of the world can be as incomplete as our observation of energised electrons. The butterfly was, like Schrödinger’s cat, both dead and alive. Without observing it flying free or seeing its wings ingested by the spider, there was simply no way of determining what had happened.
People talk about childlike wonder, says my daughter, her future self now beginning to philosophise, as if she has broken free of my imagination. But there are still times when adults experience that wonder. You did that day, she says to me. I was struck by it. The cynicism was gone and you quietly rhapsodised about those butterflies.
She is right to describe this wonder as childlike. We imbue the trembling dance of the butterfly with utter promise, while we deride the skittishness of flies as an agitation. As far as we are concerned, their flight is not borne of the same poetry; and yet both flights have evolved for the same reason. Both creatures are trying to avoid being killed.
I have read that when a courting male grass blue chases an attractive female, the latter might, if they are unmoved by the advance, land on a surface and slyly close their wings. Observing only the pale, dreary underside, the male calls off the seduction, quick to forget the radiance of its target. It can only perceive one characteristic at a time, similar to how, on New Year’s Day, I could only perceive the delicate artistry of the butterfly’s dance. How common it can be to see, in one moment, only beauty or its antithesis, despair; and yet these dichotomies of life do not alternate. They co-exist.
The life of the butterfly is both arduous and romantic in the same way memories, especially those from the last two years, can be ambiguous. To label the two sides of the butterfly’s wings a trick would be incorrect. They are an expression of life in all its complexity and contradictions.
I call them Schrödinger’s butterflies now. Every time I see them. ▼
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.
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