Patience of the Hand

14 December 2015

The Michaelis Graduate Exhibition

Patience of the Hand documents my passage to becoming a beekeeper, where bees became interchangeable with humans through the similarities I recognized in their social make-up and practices. The parallels between the swarm and the crowd obscure the human-animal boundary and complicate the idea of individualism. I have been stung only once so far, on the soft skin below my eye. I had been careless, out of my depth, and as i became increasingly agitated, so did the bees. I could feel the venom trail through the veins of my face along with my heart beat as a second bee landed below my other eye. Surprised at the pain of the first sting, I pushed my rising panic down an began slowly to move away. Away from the swarm, humbled, I could brush of the second bee off.

The figure of the beekeeper embodies the archetypal observer, at once in a position of power and of dependence; it assumes a relationship with another, the ‘other’. In this case, the swarm, a being or entity whose nature seems wholly opposite to the beekeeper herself. Between the beekeeper and the swarm, between the binaries of reason and the irrational, there exists a space of interaction. It is a realm of creative tension and communication that precedes or transcends the linearity of reason. The figure of the beekeeper became a way to create distance from our way reason by using her as the observe, located outside of our collectivity, the bee’s collectivity, and thus bringing our rationality into question as we are forced to recognize the extent to which we are defined by the crowds we find ourselves a part of. The tension inherent in the relationship between beekeeper and swarm, between observer and crowd, between us and them, seemed to offer insight into what abandoning the linear logic of reason might look like.

As this figure at a distance, the beekeeper embodies a position from where human actions can be seen as clearly as we think we see those of animal. Dislocated from the power and apparent circumspection our capacity for reason and abstraction seems to afford, we find that we are simultaneously beekeeper and swarm, a Self and an Other, an individual and one piece of a shifting, searching mass.

We heard them, their heavy thrum, before we saw them. The bees arrived at once, quickly, a dark mass that clustered around the entrance of the beehive. Within fifteen minutes they had all moved inside, with only a few left flying around to orientate themselves in  relation to the nearest sources of nectar and pollen. Henry David Thoreau wrote that “the keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams”. I could accommodated them, invite them, but they would not have come had they not wanted to. If I disturbed them, as I had that hot afternoon where a single sting acted like an admonishment designed to humble me to the sensitivity our proximity demanded, then their collective power could easily overwhelm my own. To work with bees, I have had to lose the sense of myself as a being distinct from them and yet keep enough distance that the tension of our proximity becomes constructive, communicative, allowing me to read them and respond to them without imposing myself on them.

Observer, I am observed.