Thousand-Legger: an ecographyby Sha LaBare 17 April 2012 I remember them well, and I wonder where they are now, hidden from the cold winds of Pittsburgh in this long and hesitant spring. Probably in the cellar somewhere, hibernation or even meditation in progress as they await the heat to come. Will it come? Yes. On this planet we have something called the seasons the warm springs, hot summers, and mild falls of a place like this and I trust that earth's current axial tilt will bring them back again, and bring in turning the thousand-legger, the Scutigera coleoptrata, the house centipede. They're centipedes of the house around here in anglophone North America, as well as in England because while happy in tropical and subtropical zones, they really have no business living in cold northern climates. Theyve tagged along for the ride with a colonizing European branch of high tech primates, Homo sapiens sapiens. They need the utilities to keep running or at least the fires to keep burning to make it through the harsh winters, with average temperatures well below freezing. Indeed, around here they are even more domesticated than we are and need what Zoe Sofia calls the container technologies of houses and buildings even more than we do1. In the winter at least, there are no homeless centipedes. Humans can huddle around fires and sleep in bags and tents, but without more advanced shelter technologies, house centipedes would have had to stay where they were before, in moderate mediterranean climates like the coastal zones of southern Europe and northern Africa. In other words, around here these critters are domestic centipedes, centipedes who have chosen to enter the domicile and feed off the populations of insects and spiders who live there; they are non-native, introduced and invasive centipedes, colonists who, with the help of humans, are establishing a habitat far beyond their former range2; and they are also diaspora centipedes,1 Drawing on Gregory Batesons insistence that the unit of survival is organism plus environment, Zoe Sofia elaborates a feminist model of containers and container technologies, one that emphasizes dynamic containment, re-sourcing, and resupply over the misogynistic metaphysics that represents space as a passive, neutral receptacle (2000: 182, 188). In other words, housing truly is an action, not some passively inhering property of a shaped space (190); as a shelter technology, the building I inhabit actively protects me from sun, wind, and rain; it also provides me with air and water, with darkness and light. If the house both in the sense of the building I live in and the household knowledge of ecology is integral to both the survival and the thrival of its inhabitants, it is hardly farfetched to say that we are a part of this house, and it a part of us. The house is not be neglected. It is a thing fully invested with what Jane Bennett calls thing-power, that curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle (2004: 351). Of course, as Bennett also makes clear, the house gains its thingpower through relations: a material body always resides within some assemblage or other, and its thing-power is a function of that grouping. A thing has power by virtue of its operating in conjunction with other things (354). In other words, as Donna Haraway puts it, relation is the smallest unit; any power, any agency, any thing only comes into being as relation. Under the influence of Manuel DeLandas view of Nonorganic Life (1992), Im inclined to consider the thing-power of container technologies an emergent property of matter, and certainly one that is vitally important for the development of this thing called life. Whether we are articulated boxes of meat (house centipede) or pliable sacks of it (human), we critters are in turn made up of even smaller bubbles of meat (eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells), not to mention all the nonliving matter that makes up every level of these containers we call bodies. Without containers and shelters, this thing called life might not have emerged at all! If nothing else, let this remind us that we humans are not the only people or processes who make containers and shelters. The shelter both humans and thousand-leggers have always lived in was pretty much built by algae and plants. 2 On the non-native, the introduced, and the invasive, see Mark A. Daviss 2009 Invasion Biology. While Davis prefers a redefinition of invasion that does not require human mediation making it any process of colonization and establishment beyond a former range (3) he does follow the standard meaning, taking nonnative, introduced, and invasive species to be those whose presence is due to the intentional or accidental introductions by humans (4). What makes these centipedes domestic as well is of course the fact that it is only by the ongoing efforts of humans and their technologies that they can survive here at all. They are

scattered far from the milder lands and epochs they once called home, dispersed, exiled, and likely never to return3. Inspired by Tim Ingolds work on lines which complement's Sofias container technologies in interesting ways I imagine the paths of the local wayfaring thousand-leggers like spilled spaghetti running all over this three-story house and the domestic zones surrounding it, the stone walkways, wooden porches, mowed grass and the like4. Ive seen them zigging and zagging as they head to and away from shelter, darkness, and light, so these lines would be crimped here and there with sharp turns, turns dictated not only by the right angles and Cartesian coordinates of local architecture but also by the scutigeromorphs search patterns, observation points, and evasion routes. I imagine these lines making a wireframe model of the building, tracing the tiny crawl spaces and plumbing pathways between rooms and apartments, lines that centipedes, silverfish and others travel but that human inhabitants only rarely see. Perhaps the thousandleggers predatory attacks would show up as messy knots, while frequent resting spots would form tighter knots of slighter movements: egglaying in loose patches of earth, sex, and other activities both personal and unknown. Filling in the surfaces of this wireframe model might yield a beautiful sculpture, a creation half-house, half-centipede, and half everything else as well. But there are even in his own house, it seems, some things that man was not meant to know. Imagining these lines is a far cry from living along them, from living alongly to use Ingold's neologism5, from haunting the small and chasing the even smaller. We primates owe our tech to a confluence that Le Guin calls handmind6. Works of the mind alone run too fast or too wild; likecompanion centipedes, sharing bread with us, and they are cyborg centipedes, sharing shelter, power, and climate control (Haraway 2003, 1991). 3 Here I am thinking of James Cliffords eponymous 1994 article on Diasporas, in which he contrasts diasporas with borderlands, writing that the former usually presuppose longer distances and a separation more like exile: a constitutive taboo on return, or its postponement to a remote future. Diasporas also connect multiple communities of a dispersed population (1994: 304). House centipedes are dispersed at a smaller scale as well; while some houses and buildings may have them, others nearby may not have been colonized yet. How exactly they spread remains a mystery, although it undoubtedly involves both wayfaring and transport. 4 In his Lines: A Brief History (2007) among other works Tim Ingold aims to show how the line, in the course of its history, has been gradually shorn of the movement that gave rise to it (2007: 75). Rejecting the idea of abstract space conceived as a Russian doll of larger and larger containers, Ingold's excellent 2009 article Against Space offers instead a vision of place as a knot formed by circumbulatory movements (2009: 32). Lives, Ingold writes, are led not inside places but through, around, to and from them, from and to places elsewhere. I shall use the term wayfaring to describe the embodied experience of this perambulatory movement (33). For humans as for centipedes, then, the house itself is lived not a set of spaces nested one inside the other but instead as a series of changing perspectives: Only a philosopher could look from his sitting room and see his whole house! For its ordinary residents, the house or apartment is disclosed processionally, as a temporal series of vistas, occlusions, and transitions unfolding along the myriad pathways they take, from room to room and in and out of doors, as they go about their daily tasks (30). Rather than consider this wayfaring worlding as a network in the accepted sense, Ingold prefers the term meshwork: what these lifelines form is not a network of point-to-point connections but a tangled mesh of interwoven and complexly knotted strands. Every strand is a way of life, and every knot a place. Indeed the mesh is something like a net in its original sense of an openwork fabric of interlaced or knotted cords. But through its metaphorical extension to the realms of modern transport and communications, and especially information technology, the meaning of 'the net' has changed. We are now more inclined to think of it as a complex of interconnected points than of interwoven lines (37-38). 5 Inhabitant knowledge, according to Ingold, is integrated alongly. Thus instead of the complementarity of a vertically integrated science of nature and a laterally integrated geography of location, wayfaring yields an alongly integrated, practical understanding of the lifeworld. Such knowledge is neither classified nor networked but meshworked (2009: 41). Similarly, in his 2010 The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton suggests that mesh is a better word for what he calls the ecological thought than either network or web: 'Mesh' can mean the holes in a network and threading between them. It suggests both hardness and delicacy.... It has antecedents in mask and mass, suggesting both density and deception. By extension, 'mesh' can mean 'a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled; a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or circumstances; a snare.' In other words, it's perfect (2010: 28). 6 I abduct handmind from Ursula K. Le Guins Always Coming Home: Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought

Ingold's philosopher, they leap from level to level, never passing through the obligatory passage points to abduct a term from Latour who abducts it from the military that works of footmind, eyemind, mouthmind, and handmind must cross. Scrawled originally in my fast semicursive handwriting, this ecography must pass through those points, take in the vistas, occlusions, and transitions that Ingold identifies with wayfaring. But most who wander are not lost, to spoof a popular Tolkien bumper sticker; this line of thinkwriting leads me to wonder what wondrous confluence of characteristics thousand-leggers owe their tech to. What enables this way of living, this technology of organism and environment? It is, perhaps, the ambulacra, the walking legs, fine like hair perhaps but able to make the house centipede float like a feather and sting like a bee. (In fact, with so much air resistance thousand-leggers take long falls in literal stride.) These chitinous legs and articulated feet tarsi suggest an act of synecdoche, an act of part-for-whole metaphor like handmind. Call it legmind. Leg: a wayfaring tool intermittently attached to the ground with a tarsus, a highly-articulated and spiny foot. Mind: an entanglement between the critters and widgets of the world that gives rise in many cases to awareness, invention, and imagination. In terms of legmind, I find myself wondering what houses and buildings would be like if they were also designed to lodge their other inhabitants, the other people who live there7? Of course, around here buildings are apparently designed for it. They provide ample lodging and crawl space for squirrels, mice, rats, sparrows and bats, but also and of course for even smaller critters: ants, spiders, cockroaches, silverfish, flies, mosquitos, fleas and house centipedes. And what if we deliberately designed this in, made our houses eminently livable for these other critters? I have no idea what this would look like, even in terms of legmind. But I do know that with such an architecture we might transform pests into not pets, exactly, but certainly companion species. Imagine doing the same for cities designing in the presence of the raccoons, bears, falcons, etc. and then for civilization at large... Hell, this might just be the way out of our ongoing ecological collapse... Speaking of legmind, in my neck of the woods Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania humans call these critters thousand-leggers, an excellent exaggeration of the already exaggerated centipede. A hundred feet or a thousand legs? In fact, adult thousand-leggers only have thirty legs and thirty feet, although the last legs would count as arms, and those feet as hands. (Actually, all the legs might count as arms, recalling the hundred-handed hecatoncheires of ancient Greek myth, although thousand-leggers don't have five hundred heads. As for ancient Greece, the thousand-legger was almost certainly living there before any humans even showed up.) The last legs are antenniform legs, reaching out to touch and not to walk, giving the thousand-legger a symmetrical look that makes it hard at first to distinguish head with antennae from butt with antenniforms8. But calling them twenty-eight-leggers is of course overly precise, based on close observation instead of on the impression of speed and numberless limbs that these critters create when they're not forced to stay still. Indeed, they strike fear into the hearts of most humans around here, fear tinged with revulsion and perhaps fascination. The other day at a coffee stand on the campus of Carnegie Mellon I caused a stir with the two baristas with my Scutigera coleoptrata hoodie. [insert image] After startled looks, the guyto the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say (175). For me, handmind further distinguishes both intelligence and intelligibility, words rooted in the action of grasping. 7 I am intentionally using people in a way that clashes with our received human exceptionalism. Having seen the look on the faces of interlocutors when I talk about people like raccoons, pigeons, and house centipedes, I have some sense of the surprise, confusion, and then wonder that my (mis)use of people can generate; this experience of wonder is, I think, a good starting point for the ecology of everyday life [FISHER here?] 8 As with the squirrel's tail, this symmetrical look must confuse possible predators as to which way the thousand-legger is likely to run. While these centipedes appear to have few predators at their own scale, they would of course be prey to household insectivores like cats, rats, and some dogs. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykNNp1VPGf0, where the cat in question has some trouble chewing up the legs.

working the register recognized the thousand-legger, and so I regaled the two with fun facts about these critters, how they can leap into the air to catch moths and sting their prey with paralytic toxins. As I walked away I heard the one who'd made my coffee say, That was cool. Produced in a limited run by Blake Brasher, the hoodie is white-on-black and zips up to bring the body together, with legs splaying out across my chest and torso. Brasher met a bunch of house centipedes at MIT, where he lived in Senior Haus, a small dorm with esprit de corps, slogans like Sport Death and Only Life Can Kill You, and a thriving population of thousand-leggers. [insert image] Indeed, this hoodie is my own version of a death metal t-shirt with skulls in pain, on fire, or drenched in the American flag.. Scary, revolting, alien, thousand-leggers are also just plain cool. As well they should be. Scutigera coleoptrata belong to the class Chilopoda, a small group of only 3,000 or so known species. (For comparison, there are almost 6,000 known species of Mammalia and over 900,000 known Insecta). Indeed, the Scutigeridae family is quite small as well, with only 130 known species. According to a recent study in molecular phylogenetics, this family probably diverged from the other Chilopoda back when land-going life was still quite rare. This divergence would have happened at some point during the Silurian that is, between 443 and 416 million years ago which also means that, given the high oxygen levels of the early and mid-Silurian, scutigeromorph ancestors might have been a lot bigger. The largest known myriapod Arthropleura grew to over eight feet in length thanks to an atmosphere rich in a plant waste, oxygen. I can't see scutigeromorphs getting quite that big, but I'm sure they were at least to scale for feeding on their also larger prey. While such speculations are hardly born out by the fossil record with their thin, waxless exoskeletons, centipedes don't fossilize well they do make me dream of alien ways of life and of other worlds. Indeed, scutigeromorphs were born into an era quite alien from our own. With no mammals, reptiles, or flowering plants, with heightened oxygen, and with the imminent emergence of the supercontinent Pangea, it's no stretch to say that they truly are from a different planet. And yet against all odds they live on this planet, with all them humans and the rest of us.