'We Caught the Christmas Beetle'

I understand why people might be repelled by a poem titled “When We Were Kids.” A wallow in nostalgia can prove deadly. But the language in Clive James’ twelve stanzas cataloging an Australian childhood is exotic enough to interest this American reader, apart from their poetic worth (some of the rhymes are amusing). The occasional footnote would be helpful: 

“When we were kids we played at cock-a-lorum.

Gutter to gutter the boys ran harum-scarum.

The girls ran slower and their arms and legs looked funny.

You weren’t supposed to drink your school milk in the dunny."

 

The OED tells us cock-a-lorum is “a children’s game in which one set of players jumps on to the backs of another set of players, calling out ‘hi cockalorum, jig, jig, jig’.” And dunny is Australian slang for “a toilet; esp. an outside toilet, usually without plumbing; a privy, an outhouse.” In other words, a jakes.

 

I happened on the poem because a reader told me of the Christmas beetle, an insect indigenous to Australia that I had never heard of. After consulting some etymological sites I happened on James’ poem. Some of the thirty-five species, part of a larger group called “metallic beetles,” are peculiarly beautiful. Their wings reflect light and can render a mirror image. James writes:

 

“When we were kids we caught the Christmas beetle.

Its brittle wings were gold-green like the wattle.

Our mothers made bouquets from frangipani.

Hard to pronounce, a pink musk-stick cost a penny.”

 

Beauty of this sort, so beguiling and unexpected, inevitably raises the question: why? Our Darwinian assumptions suggest we look for the evolutionary advantages, though I’m convinced much of the beauty found in the natural world and elsewhere is purely gratuitous. Beauty is its own nonutilitarian reward. It’s there for us to enjoy. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson’s dinner on March 31, 1772 with General Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot exiled in London. The wide-ranging conversation settled on aesthetics:

 

“We then fell into a disquisition whether there is any beauty independent of utility. The General maintained there was not. Dr. Johnson maintained that there was; and he instanced a coffee cup which he held in his hand, the painting of which was of no real use, as the cup could hold the coffee equally well if plain; yet the painting was beautiful.”

 

To risk a rather silly rhyme, beauty is a gratuity, perhaps chief among life’s consolations. To be without an aesthetic sense is to be impoverished. The absence of such a sense and its impact on the moral life would make an interesting study and might help explain much human behavior.