Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ fish on Californian beaches for a few nights after a high tide. Even so, everyone here knows one. It doesn’t happen on the same day everywhere, but wherever you live, there’ll be one still, humid, bright day that triggers it, and today it’s happening right here.

      Above me is a towering column of flying ants. I only know they are there because there’s also a column of about a hundred herring gulls borne on lean grey black-tipped wings, some cruising at rooftop height, others circling hundreds of feet above. They aren’t flying in the usual laconic manner, a lazy flap and glide from one place to another. They’re feeding. I can’t see the ants that they’re eating. But I know exactly where individual ants are, because every few seconds a gull twitches itself to one side, beats its wings once, twice, and snaps at the air. And another, and another. Above me is as much a feeding frenzy as any bait ball in a tropical ocean, but featuring gulls and ants rather than anchovies and sharks.

      What I’m witnessing is the nuptial flight of a species of ant called Lasius niger, the common black ant of our town streets and suburban gardens. For the last twenty-four hours worker ants all across town and county have been enlarging the entrance holes to their underground colonies to make them big enough for winged virgin queens to emerge. The male drones, also winged, are already massing on the ground, and as the queens take flight, trailing pheromones, the drones chase them aloft. The queens take their pursuers higher and higher, waiting for males strong enough to reach them. They’ll mate, sometimes with a few different males from different colonies, in brief coincidences that herald the birth of tiny empires. On their return to earth, the drones die, while the queens rub off their wings and search for a place to start a new nest. Though these queens may live another thirty years, they will never mate again. Every fertilised egg they lay for the rest of their life will use sperm they store in their bodies from that one ascent on a summer afternoon.

      I watch gulls from all points on the compass flying in to join the bonanza. The ants are caught up in a thermal of rising warm air, and as the incoming gulls meet its outside edge, the tip of one wing is tugged by the updraught; they straighten their wings, circle into it, and rise effortlessly. This tower of birds is an attraction visible for miles, an ephemeral landmark above a roadside church in a small country town. And these flocks of predators are one of the reasons why ants from a whole district all emerge at the same time; the more ants in the air, the more likely it is that some survive the onslaught of beaks. A red kite joins the flock, drifting and tilting through it on paper-cut wings stamped black against the sky.

      We so often think of science as somehow subtracting mystery and beauty from the world. But it’s things I’ve learned from scientific books and papers that are making what I’m watching almost unbearably moving. The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightlines, warm airspace tense with predatory intent and the tiny hopes of each rising ant. It isn’t merely the wheeling flock of birds that transfixes me, or the magic of how the ants have carved out a discrete piece of unremarkable air and given it drama and meaning. It is that the motive power behind this grand spectacle is entirely invisible. This vast stretch of sky, the gulls, the imperceptible ants, is a working revelation of the interrelation of different scales of existence, and it is at once exhilarating and humbling. Humbling because this contemplation on scale and purpose can’t help but remind me that I’m little more than an ant in the wider workings of the world, no more or less important than any of the creatures here. Mesmerised, I watch a party of swifts pile in to take their turn at the harvest, wings scything, pink gullets open wide to scoop ants from the air. Craning my neck, I follow them up until the flock banks between me and the sun, and the fierceness of the light erases them from sight. My eyes water, and I look down to the ground I’d forgotten, to tarmac covered with the glittering wings of drones and queens all readying themselves for their first, and final, flight.

Symptomatic

      Migraines: something like rain, something like a bullet that’s only chambered one morning days after the threat of violence. A slug that ratchets through and slots into your spine before the slow shot begins with an umbrella-towering nimbus of empty pressure that makes you as dizzy as if there really were a storm-cloud of rising air growing, billowing up and outwards until its edges feather and coincide with your skull. Then come two thumbs pressing on your sinus and moving over your jaw, and strange strips of fast pain like summer lightning when you lift a cup, pick up a pen, burying themselves in your shoulder, deep into places which don’t exist until they hurt. And when the pain comes it is one-sided, sometimes on the left of your skull and sometimes on the right, although it is so intense it can’t be kept in either place, and it ripples like a flag cracking in strong wind, or thrums deep like a heartbeat, and sometimes one of your eyes waters, the one on the same side as the pain, and there’s what doctors call a post-nasal drip, which makes the world taste of scalding metal and brine. A few times, in the midst of my own migraines, I’ve had a strong and sudden intuition I’m made out of cobalt: partly it’s that taste in my mouth, partly how heavy I feel, but mostly because the interference in my brain runs sometimes along the lines of those delicate scrawls of blue-flowered decorations on ancient Chinese porcelain. Shipwrecks, bones, pearls. So yes, migraines put me in mind of metaphors, and then more metaphors, and more, for they are always too much in a way that makes them unbearable, all filters gone.

      Thirty per cent of migraineurs experience visual disturbances with their headaches. I’ve had them only once, on a stormy night at a literary festival. I was busily signing books when a spray of sparks, an array of livid and prickling phosphenes like shorting fairy lights, spread downwards from the upper right-hand corner of my vision until I could barely see through them. In textbooks the phenomenon is called scintillating scotoma. It scintillated. I freaked out. I kept signing, kept smiling, gripped the inside of my shoes tight with all ten toes, and worried that I was going to die until the pain came.

      Although they hurt, make bright light a brutal intruder and force me to take to bed and swallow as many painkillers as I am allowed to without harming myself, my migraines seem useful. Their utility isn’t in the pain. The pain is terrible. I hate it. I hate the time it takes from my life, my helplessness in the face of it, the tears soaking the pillows I’m curled around. But migraines remind me we’re not built with the solidity so many of us blithely assume. That the World Health Organization’s 1948 definition of health – a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity – refers to precisely no one, is a sweetly turned phrase more ableist than utopian. That perfection cannot be intrinsic to us, built as we are of chemicals and networks and causal molecular pathways and shifting storms of electricity; none of us are ever in perfect health.

      Migraines are an incredibly common – more than a billion people suffer from them – but highly mysterious neurological condition. We’re not exactly sure what they are, though it’s likely they’re a tendency for the brain to lose control of its inputs, a sensory processing disorder that is partly inherited. We know that meningeal blood vessels around the brain dilate during the headache, and that migraines are associated with activity in the trigeminal ganglion, the base of the nerve network that governs the face and the muscles used in chewing. We know that migraines with auras involve waves of electrical activity across the brain called spreading cortical depression. In the midst of a migraine, not knowing is very much to the point. Pain wipes you free of knowledge, makes understanding utterly redundant. There’s nothing to know or understand. Subjects, objects, fail. All you are is all that is and all of it hurts.

      Some people get migraines most often around the time of their period (three times as many women as men are migraineurs; sex hormones appear to play a role) and the correlation is pertinent to me not only because I am one of those women, but because menstruation is migraine’s closest cousin in my life. There’s no mistaking their occurrence – I bleed, or I curl up in pain and weep – and both involve a suite of premonitory symptoms.

      It took me nearly thirty years to understand the robustness of my premenstrual pattern, СКАЧАТЬ