It all began in a little tub of jam that was sitting on the table in the open-air restaurant in Boyle Forest Park on a warm day in late August. I was meeting a dear friend, a supporter of the Green Party. We shared coffee and croissants, admired boats on the lake and children playing on the lawns and families at other tables enjoying Sunday morning as families have done from the dawn of history.
A wasp was licking the jam in the tiny paper tub. He may have overdosed on jam, or got high on the sugar because he fell into the tub. Then he recovered, climbed back on to the rim and began cleaning his sticky arse with his hind legs.
Neither of us wanted to kill a wasp. I’m a Buddhist and she’s a member of the Green Party so we just watched as he flustered about on the table. He climbed on to her cup, then fell off the saucer like he was still drunk, continuing to rub his wings and his rear end as furiously as he could. Then he circled her head rather aggressively before flying away.
That evening she phoned in distress, saying she had been mauled by a wasp in her garden, so I dashed down the hills of Arigna to a pharmacy in Carrick-on-Shannon and thence to the lush laneways of Roscommon, outside Boyle, with tablets and a tube of ointment.
I had read somewhere that wasps can recognise human faces and sometimes they will take revenge if they have been attacked, and I wondered if the wasp in the jam had followed her home.
She was mildly irritated by that notion.
“Don’t believe all you read on Google,” she hissed.
I made coffee and she directed me to the compost tub at the bottom of her garden with the wasted coffee dust. A black plastic container as large as a wheelie bin sat outside the garden shed with a lid at the top, which I was about to lift, when I saw more than a hundred wasps moving like a single organism just inside the lid.
Needless to say she too began wondering if the wasps were angry with her when I told her why I couldn’t get the coffee dust into the compost bin.
I stood beneath the glass, thinking only about how wonderful I was to have got the camera in focus and pressed the video button in time to witness the killing
But the drama was over, and I forgot about the incident until a few days later, when a wasp arrived at my open door and flew into the room and around my head. Instantly I lost the run of myself.
“You little f**ker,” I screamed, because my heart was turned against all wasps, and I dashed around the room with The Irish Times rolled up into a weapon of death.
I haven’t intentionally killed an insect in many years, yet despite decades of Buddhist practice, a black rage was rising to the surface like karma ripening from some long-ago lifetime.
And worse was to come. In order to avoid the newspaper, the wasp flew towards the skylight, a window in the apex roof, and bounced and buzzed for some moments trying to get out.
He didn’t. Instead he got tangled in a dusty web. And since I have recently developed an interest in photography I extended the zoom of my Lumix camera and began shooting.
The wasp struggled and flailed for a while until a long gangly spider approached from the corner with a belly on it bulging with the blood of other creatures.
The spider towered over the wasp. I was below, shooting upwards as the poor wasp lay entangled in the web and the gigantic spider hovered over his helpless victim.
The spider didn’t do anything. He just watched as the wasp flailed about, and then delivered him two sudden stabs with his forepaws and dragged him into the darkness of a crevice below the window frame.
I stood beneath the glass, gazing up through the viewfinder of a camera, thinking only about how wonderful I was to have got the camera in focus and pressed the video button in time to witness the killing. And all this from someone who purports to follow the gentle ways of the Buddha.
What shocked me was how one tiny act of violence, such as a wasp stinging my friend, could have left me so enraged, as if I carried her wound and wanted revenge on her behalf.