Moth Matters

dispatch from the socio-economically slipped

The nights are growing colder in London and summer’s most garish—dahlias, sunflowers, blue fortune— have stuttered open, a circus trying for lost time. 

When I took down a basket from the top of the wardrobe, I discovered my silk scarves had been destroyed. Ravaged by moths. On Saturday I saw one flutter from the open wardrobe to the dresser and onto the mirror, as if seeking itself. They are doddering, so small, their desires so filled with destruction, I didn’t think twice. I pressed my finger to the glass, dragged down. 

I’m enraged about my ruined scarves. And when I examine the murder dust on my finger, I feel dementedly glad.

I look up then, at the mirror, the smear of its death on the glass covers my forehead, like an Ash Wednesday smudge. The priest in my head is muttering "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” God’s words to Adam, before expelling him from Eden, the great fall. 

I turn away from it, then, my sin and my reflection.

There’s work to be done. The summer clothes need to be put away and I’m fearful of what I’ll find in the winter wear. But also I am hunting moths now, hoping I will find one when I open the wardrobe so I might kill it. It’s a funny thing, hope and fear all chewed together like gum. 

We moved last September across northwest London, to the outskirts where we could afford space almost enough. My oldest kids are the age I was when I got a room of my own, but they are still stacked deep and sharing. I remind myself I had one brother and they have an abundance. In finding places for things and people abundant, moth-proofing slipped my attention.

Moths feast on natural fibers, wool, silk, cotton; our synthetics, like cockroaches, will outlive us all. My finest clothes are hand-me-downs from my mother, and my favorite items are ones I remember her wearing when I was young. She wrapped them in blush pink tissue paper and kept them for decades, through two overseas moves and moves up and down the east coast. And when she took them out several years ago, they smelled like lavender. 

The exchange of goods from mother to daughter is as mutual an exchange as human exchange can be. The deep satisfaction from mother for providing daughter with something pleasing, the desire for daughter to be just a little in mother’s image (seeing your silk shirt hang so prettily on someone you love is not to be dismissed). And the daughter, receiving a gift she knows her mother wants desperately to give, a favor really, her reception. And it’s vintage, which a daughter loves. 

It’s not charity, either, even when it is.

The wool purple sweater with 80’s red and white zigzags, pop art in fashion, is gone. I remember my mother in it, explaining the French kiss I’d just witnessed between Kelly McGillis and Tom Cruise. Almost 40 years survived, I have ruined it in a season.

What will my mother think? It is double disappointment.

In recent years, moth invasions have become more common. Last week a friend told me about pulling all of her furniture out to the sidewalk, boil washing everything she could to stop the spread. It all feels like we’re going back in time.

Some scientists predict we’ll see even more infestations because of second-hand clothes, which are meant to be washed before resale, but oftentimes aren’t. Google searches for “clothes moths” have increased by 25% this season. Other studies indicate Millennials are on track to be the first generation not to exceed their parents in terms of job status or income. For Gen Z, it’s looking even worse, like the state of my closet. 

Which is all to say I’m reporting from the front lines, a bit before the curve. 

After spotting eggs or excrement, you have a narrow window to save garments from certain destruction, warn pest control technicians. After descending the socioeconomic ladder, it can take generations to repair.

When you are of the fallen, there is a certain comfort in promised equalizers. Hamlet, fallen in another way, talks about it when confronted with the skull of his beloved Yorick, once the liveliest figure of his childhood. No matter how many times we utter their names,  Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar come to nothing but mud, the logical conclusion of all those stuttering dusts:

Alexander died, Alexander was buried,

Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of

earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he

was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,

Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:

O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,

Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!

Hamlet’s speech becomes increasingly sing-song, filled with couplets like a child’s nursery rhyme—why? To point out the absurdity of our ambitions? To take the edge off the certain tragedy that is his intruding nihilism?

What do I care about these clothes being eaten? They will all be destroyed eventually.

But I do care. And from a box under the bed, I pull out a big wool dress that wears like a tartan cape. My mom wore it through both her pregnancies, and I cringe. The dress looks like it has just been to a wedding, covered in rice. But the rice is larvae’s white webby strings; it’s a part of this season’s wreckage. 

I take a break from bagging clothes to research. During the day, the moth larvae spin tunnels of silk which provide them camouflage. Only when it’s dark do the larvae emerge to feed, steadily undoing the materials they inhabit. The adult moth that I’ve killed is actually no longer destroying my clothes: moths are completely sated during larval growth, never needing to eat again in their adult lives. There’s something of the financial planner about them.

If I had made a different choice, the sweaters, dresses, scarves would still be with me.

When I tell my eldest child I’m writing of moths, I ask him to tell me what he knows. He is eleven and filled with fact. Butterfly wings are like solar panels, but moths fear the sun, they can sense its warmth and they’ve adapted to develop camouflage, unlike butterflies and their bright colors, he tells me flushed. They’re survivalists, he continues. “And,” he says, “I like that they’re so often associated with the moon. They’re drawn to it.”

“Is that why they fly into fire, hoping it’s the moon?”

“Maybe,” he says, and flits off to play cards with his brother.

When I listen to him, I feel some guilt about my recent murder spree.

In her essay “The Death of the Moth”, Virginia Woolf treats the moth on her windowsill with such tenderness. “The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various,” she wrote, “that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full, pathetic.” Her concern for him could kill a person. 

“What he could do he did.” Until the moth could do no longer, and then Woolf, her pencil poised to prop him up, chooses instead to pay vigil, put her pen to paper instead of under him, immortalizing his mortality. As the world around her remains indifferent. “Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead.”

My research takes a turn. Tineola bisselliella, the common clothes moth, is ravishing. Her fringed gold lame wings are held behind her, like a train on proud shoulders, Met Gala-worthy attire. Her eyes are large and brown, kindly, a tuft of red-gold on her head looks like Patti Smith’s self-chopped bob, which is really to say, the moth is an auburn Keith Richards. 

I am researching now what of my possessions I can save, through freezing for days or boiling for 30 minutes. And I’m avoiding my mother’s calls. Not because of her destroyed clothes, although maybe that’s part of it, but because she’s trying to nail down a family trip. “Your brother needs to know about the safari—he’s paying for all of it, you just need to get down there.” I’ve done a preliminary search of flights from London to Johannesburg. It is far beyond the reaches of our travel budget. “But it’s all taken care of once there.” 

But, but, but—

Annie Dillard rejoices in the self-immolation of a moth, seeing her creative devotion in its prolonged suicide in her essay “Transfiguration”. My second favorite line describes the color her burning moth makes visible: “Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of pine.”

Dillard’s burning moth is “like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God [...] while night pooled wetly at [her] feet.”

Now I am convinced to make something of my own moth’s death.

Delighted by a typo in the newspaper that read “manmoth” instead of  “mammoth”, Elizabeth Bishop wrote one of her weirdest poems, creating an existentialist’s Marvel character named “Man-Moth”. 

At our new neighborhood’s only restaurant, there is a dish on the plastic menu listed as “White Claims in Sauce”. This typo brings me certain joy every time I see it. 

In her poem, Bishop’s prognosis for us is a lot like Hamlet’s: “The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.” But the Man-Moth who has emerged from underground, though trembling and believing the moon to be a small hole in the sky and always sitting the wrong way on the train, is filled with illusions we humans have rejected. “He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards,” Bishop writes. But in his insistent dreams and single tear (“his only possession”), he becomes poetry.

My moths are smaller than Woolf’s, Dillard’s, Bishop’s, and I’m struggling to understand the amount of space they’re taking up in my imagination.

Restless, I face the midnight window, now my husband, now the window again. What will distract me from the holes and those webs? The money we’ll need for orthodonture this year is in there, too, and so is Woolf’s tenderness and Dillard’s transfiguration, and even Bishop’s night flight. Adam’s eviction, too. And of course Hamlet, leaning against a door jamb somewhere.

And that, too, is when they, the moths, emerge. My nighttime companions. I still, will myself to feel the breath of their wings. The night is alive with them and my regret. 

I turn again to the window. The moon is not always easily seen in London but there it is. And tonight it is waxing, the promise of a shiny penny tomorrow.