Welcome to The Swallowtail

The Mystery of Butterfly Flight

For a while now I’ve been in need of a new home for some of my writing. The R-Word had become archived, mainly because the name of this venue was no longer appealing to me, as the whole point of The R-Word was to try and encourage a conversation on how revolution need not be violent to be fully and truly revolutionary, but that’s not a conversation many people were sincerely interested in. So eventually the name of the publication felt wrong for me. I had to move on.

The Swallowtail is part of my moving on.

A few weeks ago my partner and I were out walking on a mountain trail and a butterfly sort of dive-bombed me, heading for my forehead. Weirdly, instead of allowing the creature to land on my forehead, which would have certainly been a great blessing, I ducked. That I ducked perplexed me. Why duck a butterfly?—I wondered. I’ve been wondering ever since, rather gently, why I would have ducked. That’d be like ducking a kiss from someone we love — a preposterous gesture.

But butterflies, and especially swallowtail butterflies, have been conspicuously absent in my front yard this spring. I miss them terribly. And I wonder where they have flown off to. Their absence is a sort of palpable presence, highlighting their profound importance to me. There is a longing associated with this presence and absence. A longing not to be the sort of guy who would duck a butterfly on a mountain trail. And a longing to live, again, in a world filled with butterflies in spring.

A curious set of unfolding experiences and events have led me to decide to write and publish my first book, and my working title is The Mystery of Butterfly Flight: How Physics Illuminates Ordinary, Everyday Phenomena. The book will only lightly touch upon butterfly flight, in telling what is known about why butterflies are mysteriously able to fly in a directional, intentional way even in wind. This is, indeed, a bit of a mystery to any child observing who has flown a kite. Any child can see that a butterfly resembles a tiny creature bound to two enormous kite-like wings which one would reason would render the creature both hapless and helpless in a wind. And yet we can observe butterflies miraculously flying quite effectively even with a wind blowing, if the wind is not too strong.

I want to write this book mainly because it wants me to write it. The book has a real, palpable presence in my life, and a bit of a will of its own. It is both here and not here already! It whispers to me about how it wants to take shape, but will not spill all of the beans, and asks that I take it as an adventure in discovery and learning, so I’ll do as it gently and encouragingly asks. It seems like a fine way to learn, explore and create, all at once! What could possibly be more fun than learning, exploring and creating?!

Weirdly, lately, I have fallen in love with light — sunlight in particular — as it expresses itself in that branch of physics called optics. I’ll probably be telling some of that story here in The Swallowtail. Being madly in love with light, as I am, I am also wanting to learn more about the branch of physics which studies light, especially sunlight. That, and I want to help a whole new epoch in solar energy to emerge in our time, as it must, if we’re to avert the worst of worst case climate scenarios. So I’ll also be writing about those topics in The Swallowtail.

It’s not only optical physics which excites me, however. It’s all of physics, and especially physics as it pertains to our ordinary, everyday, embodied and sensory experience of this world. I want to make physics come alive in a deeply embodied way — or rather, the butterfly book asks that I do. I will oblige, as best I can.

The Mystery of Butterfly Flight will interweave several themes which initially seem largely unrelated, but which eventually settle into a comfortable whole. These themes are learning and physics. But it only seems strange, initially, because the book will equally address topics and themes in learning which pertain to so-called “learning disabilities,” which at the moment I prefer to call “learning differences”. So the title of the book rather shimmers with multiple interpretive matrices. It’s both about literal and figurative, or metaphorical, butterflies. Some people with dyscalculia (a “learning disorder” which makes learning math difficult), such as myself, have always been scientists in their hearts, though a key to scientific learning and discovery is challenging for us: math that is.

• [Since publishing this article, I discovered that my self-diagnosis of dyscalculia is probably false, or my case of it is very mild, at most. There is no doubt that I fell behind my grade school class in learning arithmetic tables, and was deeply ashamed, thinking myself incapable of memorizing this stuff. My shame was severe, and so I took to avoiding math like the plague. I almost certainly had a relatively mild form of dyslexia in those days, but doubt that I have it now. I think I can learn the math I need, but with some effort at overcoming my challenges with it — and the associated math anxiety. I may become a “real scientist” after all! Algebra, calculus and all that crap may be in my future after all, maybe even trigonometry and other “squiggly line math”.]

So I think perhaps I should learn of scientists and engineers who have struggled with dyscalculia or other learning difficulties. I can’t be the only one! But the thing about my emerging book is that it will guide me along the way, and I need only follow it where it goes. I can’t plan such a book ahead of time. It has its own agenda and itinerary. I must not duck this fact. It’s my teacher. It’s the butterfly which wants to land on my forehead. It is a gift which wants to pass through me to be given. It may be absent, but it is right here in my heart.

So the ideas and themes in my butterfly book will undoubtedly populate The Swallowtail, along with many other topics and themes.

Welcome, and enjoy!