Reading Eli’s post about the Post’s essay on New Orleans reminded me of this article in last month’s Harper’s, about swarms of termites that are (or, rather, were) overtaking the French Quarter. I loved this section, in which the author stands on the levee and watches a swarm of termites that are forming a cloud in front of him:

My body is a mystery to me. It contains too many moving and multiplying parts working through processes I barely understand and cannot see. I fear this part of life, the unknown body, the old bone sack. The cells of the body are cryptic, until they fail or they multiply so rapidly that organs begin to shut down. I am afraid because they are cryptic, which is also the word often used in the scientific literature to describe the most basic problem in the study of subterranean termites: they spend their lives underground, out of sight, until once a year (in the case of C. Formosanus) some of them burst free and, no longer controlled by their ancient queen, set off in flight seeking their own mate and new foraging grounds. Unbearably fecund, nature’s center breaks and cannot be contained. It flutters toward the circumference, toward the opposite sex and some available wood, preferably soft.

Finally I rouse myself to go whooping it up around the oak tree, chasing alates from lamppost to lamppost with the others. They are just insects. These particular insects are evident in extremis, they’re invertebrates that annoy and threaten and disrupt our illusion of equilibrium, which is enough to classify them as a pestilence, purveyors of rot. The effort to kill off C. formosanus in New Orleans, or at least to control the overwhelming invasion, is an effort to settle the question of who owns the place, a deltaic crescent of mud and sand and dirt at a bend near the end of the Mississippi River. This is a real struggle, not a figurative one.

And yet the alates part at St. Louis’s like water around a boulder, and I think they are beautiful.

THERE IS ALLURE in the city’s rot, and not a few native authors have bridged the short etymological gap between decay and decadence, as if the city’s louche human history was written in the twisted, rotten, vinewrapped beams of the old Creole cottages of the French Quarter, the Victorian shotguns in Fauborg Marigny, and the rambling Queen Anne piles in the Garden District and Uptown. The city is wet, sunken, overgrown, and tropical, and marks-in our imaginations as well as on our maps-the dead center of our country’s underbelly. Of course the city is the preferred home of termites and wood mold and strippers and drunks and obese hot-dog vendors and moviegoers at odds with the universe. Look in the eyes of the New York television reporter making his report from the Quarter-The bug that ate New Orleans!-and you can see the city as a frontier land of plagues, oddities, and ghosts ruling over chaos.