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The Sphinx Moth

Paul Newman

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When my mother died, my brother preferred not to stay much in the family home which I had come to nickname Gorilla Villa. He would rush out in the mornings to catch the bus to Bristol, where he might watch a horror film or set out on a pub crawl. I would stay alone in solemn Victorian rooms, by now untenanted and in an even more advanced state of decay. Neither of us had done any house-cleaning: hence nearly all the ceilings were decorated with the delicate hammocks of spider’s traceries. I tried to interfere with them as little as possible. There is something ruthless about breaking up cobwebs with brushes on poles, all that patient silk-spinning torn and effaced: the equivalent, I suppose, of a huge metal fist smashing through one’s own bungalow or apartment.

What heightened my brooding on such matters was an unusual manifestation. One afternoon there flew into the house a strange-looking moth that attached itself to the central drawing room curtain like a logo or motif. I tiptoed up and studied it. A skull’s head was imprinted in glowing white on its dark body. How amazing, I thought, a Sphinx Moth has flown into my life!

I sat in the chair feeling slightly breathless, and I started to smoke, as I always do, when something exciting happens, praying the fumes would not upset or drive away my guest. I was almost quivering with importance. A moth with legendary associations was gracing the curtains of the filthiest, most derelict mansion in Jesmond. Now it could have flown through the window of the mayor or a rich town councillors or one of the numerous prosperous lawyers and dentists who practised up the road, but instead it had chosen the dirt and desolation of Gorilla Villa. I felt humbled and ennobled. I also felt I wanted to communicate the importance of the event, to bolt out into the road, grap a passerby by the collar and say. “You’ll never guesss who’s dropped in on us – a death’s head moth!”

The creature has a fascinating genealogy. Van Gogh had produced a dramatic painting of it swooping towards a wild arum and, during the cholera epidemic of the 1840s, Edgar Allen Poe had retired to a house on the banks of the Hudson. Towards the end of the day, he was sitting by the window when he saw a darkly glowing skull-branded monster moving over the glass. He was even more appalled when from its jaws there 'proceeded a sound so loud and so expressive of woe that it struck upon my nerves like a bell…'

A screaming moth? Thankfully my guest did not let out an eerie cry – I do not think I could have endured that - but Poe was not imagining the noise. I read in an old book of natural history that the Sphinx “can easily provoke a feeling of terror because of the mournful cry it emits and the funereal symbol decorating its chest.” Cry – did the noise issue from the mouth? It seems that the presence of the moth is liable to stir up the tragic ash of the soul?  Like the Coachman Rat in ‘Cinderella’, it is a half-creature, poised between human and non-human, trying to shrill its woe to a world that grinds on like a milling machine. It taught itself to cry out because pain and terror are the root of language. Happiness is often smooth, compacent, inwardly admiring - a smile trapped in a selfish bubble. But anguish and misery well up from volcanian depths like hot springs, pouring out thoughts, words and protests! All the great articulations of the world are disguised cries - albeit robed in the verdure of metaphor. They seek to redress the great unfairness of things. And the Sphinx knows that all too well, for it carries the thought on its body, in the image of the skull that binds and reminds us all that we share the same immaculate sky, sleep under the same ever-turning night and are eventually consigned to the fructifying patience of the soil - hence every value we evolve must bear the brand of that inevitability. 

August Strindberg believed the Sphinx was drawn to plague spots, battlegrounds, cemeteries, places of skeletons and decomposition, hinting that the long-imbued association had left the signature of death on its anatomy as on a photographic plate, and its near-human cry was also a mimicry of the desolation it knew so well.

All this lore made me warm to my exotic visitor. But the Sphinx did not linger in the drawing room. By the afternoon it had flown away, probably through the break in the lower widow. I glanced at the curtain with a mild feeling of desertion. My life had been briefly privileged by a chthonic symbol. But I did not see why Poe had reacted so nervously - unless he thought the moth intimated he would be stricken by cholera. Quiet, modest, neat as a postage stamp, the Sphinx caused less heartache and uproar than any girlfriend I had so far acquired. It left me with a placid, self-effacing impression considering the ireful symbolism it bore - although, come to think of it, that’s what Death is, literally self-effacing.