Meaning and the firefly

when the medium really IS the message

Lately I’ve been leafing through Born to Sing by Charles Hartshorne, the process philosopher who was also something of an expert on birds. The basic argument of the book is that songbirds can and do derive aesthetic pleasure from singing and listening to each other, and their behavior can’t be accounted for otherwise.

A couple of passages in one of its first chapters got me thinking, and I’ve bolded the parts that raised my eyebrows and turned my wheels.

Far more than the visual appearances of nature, the auditory aspects depend upon the actions of animals. Trees and grass, with blue sky or clouds above, and the background of plains or hills, rivers, lakes, or mountains make up the main features of visible natural landscapes. Moreover, the colors and shapes of the animals themselves are largely fixed and unalterable. By their movements they may change the locations of their bodies; but their colors and their approximate shapes are, with minor exceptions, generally outside their control.

Sounds are quite different. The voluntary production of a single sound may change the entire audible situation. Turning the head does not cut off the effect, as it does the sight of whatever one had been looking at. A few singing birds, or even insects, frogs, or toads, thus suffice to transform an auditory emptiness into a world of meaningful sounds. Above all, sound waves can be directly controlled by organs at the disposal of voluntary muscles, whereas light waves cannot be produced or altered directly and instantly through bodily movements.

Because I was reading this in late June, I thought pretty quickly of a significant “minor exception” with regard to the restrictions Hartshorne mentions.

The bioluminescent beetles of the family Lampyridae. Firelies. Lightning bugs.

Before we talk about them, let’s linger a moment on the idea of “meaningful sounds.”

Though Hartshorne repudiates behaviorism, BF Skinner’s functional definition of meaning is implicit in his use of term where animal “music” is concerned. Meaning is not a property of sound per se, but inheres in the listener’s response to it. For a sound to be meaningful, the entity that hears it must be able to act on it. For verbal critters like ourselves, the response may be almost imperceptibly subtle: thinking motorcycle and grimacing when we hear a piercing, high-decibel roar over on the avenue, or envisioning a modest grey bird with a long tail (or even just a generic bird shape) when we hear a mockingbird doing its car alarm routine across the street at two in the morning. (To be a verbal animal is to relate stimuli to other stimuli, often spontaneously; probably the only truly meaningless sounds for us are those we hear but don’t discern.)

We know for sure that another dog barking from behind a slatted fence is meaningful to our poodle Fifi because she answers straightaway by barking back in its direction. We know that various types of calls have various sorts of meaning to chickadees because the flock’s typical reaction to a dee-dee-dee call differs from its response to a see call. We know that the sound of an electric can opener is meaningful to our stupid selfish cat because after ignoring and avoiding us all afternoon he comes happily mewing to us when he hears us using it to open a can of chickpeas.

Even though insects’ emotional lives are richer than the popular understanding of them (many of us are accustomed to thinking of bugs as insensate self-replicating robots), their communications are magnificently uncomplicated. Hartshorne repeatedly uses “primitive” as a descriptor of insect calls, but grants that the musical bug, like the songbird, “lives primarily in a world of patterned sounds to which its own deliberate and delicately controlled contributions are substantial.”

Insects like crickets and katydids announce themselves to each other with sound. It’s a solid and balanced survival strategy: being bite-sized, it’s in their interest to be visually inconspicuous, but they still need to be able to find each other for purposes of propagation. A male dogday cicada rapidly contracts and relaxes the ridged membranes in his upper abdomen to produce a resonant buzzing noise to which females of his kind are attracted. When a female hones in on the male, she produces a sharp click to which he is drawn. Then they mate and go their separate ways. (He dies, she lays eggs.)

At this level of animal communication there is no code to be deciphered, no words into which the characteristic sounds of a cicada, katydid, or cricket can be translated. To even say that one of their calls means I’m here is to anthropomorphize and intellectualize what’s actually happening. We might as well ask what a day-old human infant “means” by suckling, or what the nipple pressed to its lips “means” to it. There is nothing of the abstract at play, nothing enacted that depends on an association that must be learned out in the world.

One could say that sounds meeting certain criteria in terms of timbre, tempo, pitch, cadence, etc. are like sonic keys that “activate” specific insect species, but it makes just as much sense to say that sounds meeting those criteria are particularly meaningful to that insect—as are other sorts of noises, such the stomping and rustling of a large and curious mammal moving through the bushes, which typically prompts an intermission in the concert.

Insect sounds are meaningful to other insects, but they lack content. Marshall McLuhan maintains the content of any medium consists of another medium, and at its bottom, meaning is always and essentially nonverbal. The self-referential circuitousness and indirectness of our communication is precisely what makes it so sophisticated, while the concreteness and clarity of insect communication corresponds to its simplicity. There’s no ambivalence, no acquired vocabulary, no social manners. To a female katydid, the stridulations of a nearby male katydid must be possessed of a directness, clarity, and persuasion outstripping most any mode of communication employed by humans.

While talking about the nesting-doll schematic of human communications, McLuhan brings up the lightbulb:

The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were…

The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no “content.” And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the “content” (or what is really another medium) that is noticed.

It’s different for lightning bugs. All we’ve said about “singing” insects applies to lightning bugs, though for them the patterns to which they’re attuned occur in the visual instead of the auditory field.

If singing and chirping insects live in a world of meaningful sounds, fireflies move about a world of meaningful light, where illumination is communication.¹ Airborne males flicker their biochemical lanterns; an earthbound female, spotting her species’ characteristic flashing pattern with her proportionally gigantic eyes, responds by lighting up in the same pattern; the male, perceiving her signal, follows it to the ground, and perhaps gets lucky.² Some species’ males coordinate and synchronize their signals when they fly in large groups; it’s hard to remain skeptical of Hartshorne’s insistence that the “lower” animals understand something of beauty after witnessing a cloud of Photinus carolinus staging an extemporaneous and magnificently harmonized light show.

We’re a visually-oriented creature, true, but “the eye world is relatively a cool, neutral world,” says McLuhan. Compare the emotional effect of reading the lyrics of “Ode to Joy” against hearing them sung, or of looking at an old photograph of the house you grew up in against getting a whiff of its potpourri of familiar scents. If what we see speaks to us, it usually does so mediately and associatively. This can’t be true of the lightning bug’s “eye world.”

Let’s emphasize that firefly signaling isn’t anything like turning a flashlight on and off to spell out words in Morse code. In the latter case, we have another nesting doll of subsidiary media: the flashlight’s content is the dots and dashes, the dots and dashes’ content is the letters they signify, the letters’ content is language, the language’s content is the intercourse between the human organism and its environment. In the case of the firefly, its medium truly is its message. My blinking a flashlight in your direction on a dark night would be analogous to what fireflies do if you immediately knew my thoughts upon seeing it—and without any prior arrangement or acquaintance with me, without any instruction from another human being, and without any act of interpretation or inference on your part.

Like too, too many of the fragile and beautiful things of this world, fireflies are being wiped out for our sake. Habitat loss, pesticides, motor traffic—you know how it goes. Undoubtedly you’re also aware that fireflies are particularly imperiled by light pollution. Adult fireflies seem to find LED lights tremendously attractive, and are susceptible to following them and living out their season in places where they’re less likely to discriminate each other’s signals, and where the shorter duration of natural twilight reduces the duration of courtship activity. A 2019 study found that the frequency with which females responded to male signals sharply dropped off in an artificially lit tract. A report from 2022 observed that firefly larvae avoid artificial lights, and are evidently immobilized when caught beneath a street lamp.

We can imagine scenarios in which sound is deprived of its meaning. In the Tower of Babel myth, the peoples of the Shinarian plain suddenly can’t understand any of the noises coming from each other’s mouths; unable to coordinate their activities, they cease building their city and tower, and are “scattered…abroad thence upon the face of all the earth.” Here in reality, people who have suffered a traumatic brain injury sometimes lose some of their aptitude for parsing and processing sounds, including the spoken words of a familiar language. We also have some idea of the effects of sustained exposure to loud, discordant noise: living in a persistently loud urban environment wreaks havoc one’s circulatory and respiratory equipment, not to mention one’s nerves.

This is all to say—while there’s no difficulty for us in understanding what Hartshorne means by “a world of meaningful sounds,” I wonder how many of us have the synesthetic imagination to conceptualize the stress and perhaps the terror of a world of meaningless lights, where gibberish and noise assail us not through our ears, but our eyes. To an animal for which meaning resides in evanescent yellow beads in the summer night, a row of garden lights, a grid of lambent windows, a flickering sodium vapor lamp, and the scroll of head- and taillights on the street must be like unto the sense-obliterating cacophony of Babel.

I also can’t help wondering, in spite of all reason, if perhaps urbanized and beleaguered lightning bugs some faint, rudimentary experience of hyperreality—that condition of confused and ultimately deleterious behavior that certain visually-oriented, higher-order mammals inflict on themselves, largely through the vector of illumination.

1. Interestingly, it seems that fireflies produce sounds that they themselves cannot hear.

2. The females of some firefly species imitate the flash patterns of other species in order to lure males to the ground and eat them—a tremendously unlucky outcome for the hopeful suitor.