Geji-geji: an ecographyby Sha LaBare

Geji-geji (ゲジゲジ) is the Japanese common name for the scutigeromorph centipede

known to technoscience as Thereuonema tuberculata. In this piece I abduct that name and use it to refer to scutigeromorphs

in general, and especially to the North American species I am coming to know and love,Scutigera coleoptrata.

The geji-geji – “house centipede” or “thousand-legger” – differs from most other centipedes by its many long, closely grouped legs and its semi-rigid, soft-carapaced trunk. These characteristics allow it to

jump, to run very fast, and to literally lasso the insects and spiders it feeds on. It is, in a word, one perfectly horrific science-fictional killing machine, utterly icky and absolutely alien to me. Hailing originally from the Mediterranean region,

the geji-geji was first noticed in Pennsylvania in 1849. Now a cosmopolitan species, geji-geji live throughout Europe, North and South America, and Asia. While earlier instars have fewer legs, adults have thirty, and they get longer and longer further back, like so:

Zoology is just misfit mythology / If you wanna learn about it do it properly.

The only good bug is a dead bug. Don't forget to suck the juice out.

I like the idea of household gods, lurking at altars, accepting sacrifices. Will you be my little god?

The world is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

Insectivore? Ever a top predator, you might become instead a deivore. Anansi, the Spider Grandmother... indeed, arachnid or not,

any of the smaller gods might make a nice snack. That Cupid's been looking mighty tasty...

Like something was wearing Edgar. Like a suit. An Edgar suit. I'm imagining for a moment wearing a suit of you, a geji-geji suit. Clumsy, obvious, grotesque, like Edgar the Bug I would trip all over all my legs and tie my antennae and antenniforms in knots.

Your thirty legs have a gazillion joints and your prickly multiply articulated tarsi give you great traction when you scramble headlong

at four-hundred and forty millimeters per second on only twenty-eight legs though because the final pair antenniform into another set

of sensors.

Reality is an active verb, and the nouns all seem to be gerunds with more appendages than a geji-geji. Through their reaching into each other, beings constitute each other and themselves. The world is a knot in motion.

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Like brown rats, humans, and a lot of other critters, you came to the New World on a boat, and now you too are living the American Dream. Mac daddy of the underworld, all you ask for is a nice

basement, warm and wet, some loose earth to lay eggs in, and all the silverfish, cockroaches, and spiders you can eat.

You are not a machine. Machines are elaborate tools designed using linear mathematics to do stuff faster or more independently, and you are not a tool, you were not designed, and you are definitely not linear. Without machines, however, you wouldn't be living here in Pittsburgh, PA, nor in Kitchener, Ontario where we first met.

I couldn't find any geji-geji plushies online, so I'm commissioning one. There's some consternation over the number of legs, but of

course simplification and size variance are practically hardwired into plushy construction. I'd like a full compliment of legs, though.

Perhaps slightly stiff, with wire.... No, I suppose that the whole point of a geji-geji plushy is to cuddle. It's a mammal thing, you wouldn't

understand.

Typing is a curious thing, a primate kind of thing. Crouched like spiders my fingers pick out letters in an alphabet to spell these words on a backlit computer screen. In the Alien Times I came across a description of a keyboard for centipedes, one you could straddle to type with all of your thirty tarsi. Of course, if you could type, we could not understand you.

Looking for a god like you the best I can do is Sleipnir, eight-legged steed of Odin. Son of Loki – like so many monsters – Sleipnir is not so much a household god as a god of the stables. With eight legs to

symbolize speed, he's nothing to shout about. You haven't had so few since you were hardly hatched, a cute pink baby wriggling out

of the dirt.

You rarely if ever see the sun, and I can relate to that. If it weren't for our shared nocturnal ways you and I might have never met. Sitting on the couch one night in Kitchener, I caught a glimpse of you as you raced across my cluttered room, zigzagging from pile to furniture to pile again. It was scary, and I itched and twitched the rest of the night, thinking you were onto me.

You and I hardly count as kin. Back in the oceans I imagine we had forebears in common. Indeed, according to recent findings in

molecular phylogenetics, you're not even too closely related to millipedes, insects, and arachnids, and you probably emerged from

the ocean separately from the rest of them. Even among centipedes you geji-geji are unique; you are the creepiest and fastest of them

all, the closest thing to a real live thing from outer space.

With this invented genre – ecography – I'm coming to grips with an ecological writing far from nature writing. I imagine it as tracing the contours of an ecological handprint, making first contact in writing with some critter or widget in the world. If human people are creatures of handmind – to use Ursula K. Le Guin's portmanteau – then what, I wonder, are the geji-geji people creatures of? To trace the ecological scuttle marks...

This ecography flows from a form of first contact I call invisitation. With visitations, the angels or aliens come down from out there

somewhere, but with invisitations, the angelic critter or alien widget has been here all along. To use sf writer China Miéville's term,

invisitations are made possible by a practiced ability to unsee other

You live with me, eating the critters who eat my waste. You are subject not only to massive biomagnification – you even eat spiders who eat bugs who eat my toxic trash – but also, and much more fun, to genetic transfections, to bouts of my symbiogenetic microbial effluent, a communication that of course goes both ways. While we

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worlds all around. The kind of unseeing that most concerns me is the agreement to unsee all the other alien people right here on earth.

I want to break that agreement, starting with that geji-geji right there.

are only distantly related on the branching tree of life, in the biochemical and microbial mesh we are no doubt woven much closer than we know.

You are my household god, my teraphim, some disgraceful feathery fetish thing carried from old worlds into new. You are my

gatekeeper, lurking under the door, protecting the lineage of this house and dining at the altar where I let fall the daily crumbs that

fatten your prey. You are my ancestor, no kin of mine but kind enough to remind me of olden times when paths were chosen, ways of becoming set in motion to bring us together at this door. You are

my household god.

Stressed out? Are they too big to eat and too little to run away from? You might consider carefully grooming your antennae and every single one of your thirty legs. Starting with one side, pay particular attention to the first six legs and especially the feet. Grab them with your poison claws, drag them along the scrubbies on your chin, and carefully anoint them with oil. Feeling better already, aren't you? Now for the rest. Hell, in times like these, even cleaning a phantom limb might be a good idea.

Size matters. Is this gonna be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug-hunt? In a world swarming with human people, it's not how vicious you are, but whether you're small enough to get away with it. The

big predators mostly got starved out or killed off by handy primates who hate cavernous maws crunching their flesh; time now for you small ones to take over. If, as urban myth claims, the cockroach is

indestructible, then you geji-geji will always have a place on this earth, and probably even in outer space and on other planets if

humans ever make it that far.

I once read a satirical anthropological study suggesting that bathrooms were the central altar of a U.S. American body cult, with houses even ranked in size and quality by their number: 1½, 2½ , 3½ bath. Littered with sacred body products – Dr. Bronners, Weleda, what-have-you – the bathroom is infrequently occupied but always at moments of heightened awareness, be it of hygiene or beauty, of excretion or ecstasy. Of course, the bathroom is also yours, oh household god. Humid and funky, full of silverfish, and networked to other wet places by a system of drains – what better place to make your temple?

Insects, arachnids, avians and mammals all have one thing in common: a center, a main body, a place to call home. But like any centipede worth its salt, this text hasn't got a body; head, legs, and vacant trunk, perhaps, but no abdomen, no torso, no main part. A

geji-geji seen from the corner of the eye, this thing looks to be made up of feet notes, fleet notes dashing too fast to follow. It's talking

backwards all the way through as each leg weirdly crosses the one before and these spineless undulations to time signatures not even

Sun Ra could sort out. Not no human

Bugs thrive on carnage. They consume, infest, destroy, live off the death and destruction of other species. The first thing I noticed when I got interested in small arthropods is that the humans who study them and write about them seem mostly interested in killing them. It's called pest control, a nice euphemism for poisoning every bug in sight. The character sheet of just about any bug ends with a coda on how to control it. I know – I can’t help but know – that over-the-counter insecticides like cyfluthrin, lambda-cyhalothrin, and tralomethrin have been shown to be effective against you. You

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geji-geji geji geji-geji. smash the entire area, you kill anything with more than two legs, you get me? Sir, yes, sir!

My focus on your squishy scuttling form right near me made me forget that this contact with you is almost entirely mediated, through language, writing, digital imagery and video, through vast machinic

networks of electricity and telecommunication, and through this entire worlding called ecology on planet earth. Without the steam engine I might never have met you, without central heating or even the HVAC, without roads, utility poles, the gas main and the water

pipeline. And without Antarctica as well, without the Mid-Atlantic Current, without the ozone layer, without this gaian meshwork to

live, breathe, drink, and shelter in as we are buffeted about by solar and cosmic radiation, you and I would have never met. This great

mediation, this worlding of human and geji-geji and every single other critter and widget in these parts, this has made our first contact

possible. For, indeed, in a way that is both fact and fiction, we are the world.

While Homo sapiens sapiens probably diverged from other humanoid primates some two hundred thousand years ago – and our general Homo line from other great apes between four and eight million years ago – you are a good sight older. You're older than wasps, older than flowers, and older than ants. One estimate puts the scutigeromorph divergence from other centipedes at over four hundred million years ago, which means your way of life is twice as old as the mammalian one. Once upon a time you lived on Pangaea, that last great supercontinent from which our minicontinents are made. You saw the dinosaurs come and go, and their little extinction event hardly fazed you. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a turn of events that could end your way of life on earth for good without taking out multicellular life entirely. The end of Homo sapiens sapiens, on ten other hands, is all too easy to imagine. But I know for a fact that you would miss them.

Brain bugs? Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive! And yes, I'm sure that this human male finds the idea of a geji-geji

that thinks offensive, too. Such are the wages of human exceptionalism, an old idea that has grown legs and is scuttling

through the attics and basements of human political rhetoric and the institutions it builds. Of course, you and I know that it is not so

much the bug that thinks or the human that thinks, but the worlds who do the thinking. Yes, worlds, plural like the futures, for how

else to describe the different sensory realms we inhabit, the knots in motion that in turn tie us together in the ecology of everyday life,

everyday thinking, everyday ideas? There are many alien worlds on earth, not so much off among the so-called extremophiles as right here in the bathroom with the geji-geji. Thinking through us, for

worlds we are agents, both owned and actors on our own who might at any moment make first contact with each other. And I think I just

We have a whole new set of names to talk about the way you and your kind work. Toxicognath. Hemocyanin. Spiracle. Tergite. Tarsus. While your exoskeletal ways far predate skeletal ones, it is still you arthropods, you jointed-feet ones who are marked in human knowledge as exo-, as in-vertebrate, spineless. Of course, the thing about an exoskeleton is that it's mostly dead, and so like any good spaceship you bristle with sensors, with setae and chemoreceptors, antennae and mysterious sense organs no human scientist is too sure about. I do know that your excellent compound eyes – unique among centipedes – can see the difference between fruit fly mutants and track moving targets as you hurtle along, and that – like any good spaceship, again – you cannot, in fact, hear, hear these words as I say them or the tapping I make to transcribe them. You are shielded from sound, if not vibration, although I admit that I find the shield – scutum – in the scutigera name to be misplaced. To me you

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have. Get it off my foot! are more of a feather. Float like a feather, sting like a bee!

Science fiction, speculative feminism, sonic futurism, or simply “sf” is what brings me to the ecology of everyday life, to this ecography,

to you. Ecology and sf share a concern for worlds in the balance, for creative diversity, and for the futures. Sf as a way of thinking

about and being in the world is one of my antenniform legs reaching out, touching, sensing, imagining other ways of life right here on

earth. I have always felt that unless humans took up the task of talking to the aliens here on earth, they would never make contact

with extraterrestrials. Hell, they don't even talk to dolphins! Of course, the sf movie references I've scattered throughout this

ecography portray first contact with you quite differently than I do. All these italicized quotations come from military sf, where the main

concern is to “fight the bug”. Bugs are the best sf enemies. I particularly like the Zerg, from the real-time strategy game

Starcraft: Brood War. Zerg are slimy, squishy, organic critters with a hive mind: they bear names like overlord, lurker, defiler, mutalisk.

Q: Who are these things? A: I think the better question is, what are they? If I do a somersault on this exchange, a reversal, I find my sf

way of being in the world called the ecology of everyday life. I think the better question is, who are these things? I may never know

who you are, geji-geji, but like a hopeful astrobiologist I trust that there is someone there, someone not at all like me but who for those

same hopeful reasons I can only ever think of as another person, waiting to make first contact.

How can we adapt to and make a difference in an increasingly science fictional globalizing situation, one in which global warming, mass extinction, and a forever war on terror inform the texture and tenor of day-to-day existence? This is the question that drives my current project, The Ecology of Everyday Life, the project that spurred me into inventing the term “ecography” in the first place. Although in recent times I've been edging away from identifying myself as human, I do still enjoy all the privileges and problems of being human in this wild mesh of a world. It seems that escaping the constraints of human exceptionalism is essential to the kind of ecological thinking I embrace, and so writing ecographies is a good place to start: small sf scholarly texts tracking first contact with the many critters and widgets who like humans engage in worlding this world that is the case. You are the first, oh geji-geji. We live here, under the same roof, made of the same stuff and on the same planet, and yet still for me you are a very scary alien critter. I promise to try, but I may never cuddle you for real. I just have the feeling that you would end up losing a lot legs. Besides, I think cuddling is something you will never understand, not to mention the fact that I really don't want to touch you. As Socrates put it, philosophy begins in wonder. What I do want, oh geji-geji, is to deepen this contact with you, to share my worlding with you, and to hold onto this sense of wonder that is, I think, where the global household-knowledge I want to inhabit begins.

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