The discriminating aesthete understands the importance of entertainment and engagement for peoples of all ages and in particular the young. When hosting or guesting at a holiday or family affair or at a cross-generational office function, the Excelsior Place Man is always at the ready with the appropriate text for a fireside read.
Eschewing the temporary and plebian, selections are made from traditional genres including folk and fairy tales, mythology and fables. These timeless stories, rooted in pre-historic and oral traditions, link our man with the tried and true in motif and content.
Every spring, on the green at the center of town, two insect colonies arise from the depths of winter slumber on either side of the statue of our beloved and adopted public son, Oscar Wilde. On the east, warmed early by the rising sun, is the ant enterprise. On the western side, where the last glimpses of the dying orb’s splendor herald the gloaming twilight and the cricket’s call to nightfall, live their cousins the grasshoppers.
The ants are a busy lot, the majority of their kinsmen belonging to the cohort of sterile female workers, a eunuch harem. Above them in order and importance are the myriad male drones whose only purpose is to serve the whim and fancy of the breeding queen. They are dispatched in rows and columns to accomplish the work of the group. They are always at industry.
The grasshoppers are busy too, but in different fashion. Their life is organized around the gaming, drinking, and romance for their breeding habits are formed through liaisons and assignations among various couples. Nighttimes are for mead drinking, feasting, fiddling, and folk dancing. Days are spent in long naps, sunbathing, and what we will call here (in consideration of our younger audience) relationship building.
Once, under the fair spring blooms of a cherry tree, a young hatchling fell from a mother robin’s nest. Instantly a cadre of ant workers were dispatched to the dying infant and within minutes of that baby bird’s last breathe and before it’s pale, wrinkled and featherless body had lost warmth, it was being dismembered from within by the roaming and voracious predators and carried back as an offering to the queen and sustenance for her drone lieutenants.
As the tender and green grass ripened to golden yellow grains of seed fell from it. The grasshoppers savored these nougats and used them for the brewing of ales and the baking of breads. Fiddlers and other musicians also matured through that season, creating long reels. Poets set words to them, which celebrated the ever-evolving network of romance and friendship. Dancers spun circles of Dionysian frenzy, collapsed in heaps of intimacy and reformed themselves into ovals, lines, and squares, only to repeat these cycles in an endless rhythm of ecstasy and exhaustion.
As the summer waned into its last days some of the drones were used up in their capacity to service the queen. They were assigned as craftsman and designers and they made banners to be carried at the head of their columns. Some saw the hypnotic minimalism of these flags as threatening and aggressive. Scouts patrolling outer frontiers encountered a rogue red-ant colony and teams were dispatched to wage war on them. For an afternoon thousands fought and died writhing under a blazing late-September sun. In the end they attracted the attention of the village greens-keeper and poison was used to obliterate them all. Layers of dead ants dried and hardened in the heat and by the next day birds had eaten their crisp carcasses.
The grasshoppers whirled their bacchanal dervishes. Hearts were brought to the brink of their capacity both in love and in the mundane business of respiration and oxygenation. Joints grew creaky and knees failed and yet the grasshopper folk savored marrow from the summer’s bone. Poets and musicians distilled their art into the fine liquor of ballad and lament and storytellers turned to the elegiac. Stoicism emerged among the grasshoppers. They had heard of the undoing of many ants in the battlefield and they began to contemplate their own immortality. Excess began its backseat journey to refinement. Meals became affairs of orchestration and balance as someone discovered an ancient French cookbook in the back shelves of the pantry. Dances became gestural odes to the dignity and pathos of romance and lost love.
