Be he moth or be he bird

Last November, I thought of some lines from Walt Kelly's old malapropism-driven comic strip Pogo and tried to track them down online. In the strip I was thinking of, one of the characters says, "A frog's not a bird. It's a behemoth!" and another character responds with,

Oh, be he moth or be he bird,
He's the prettiest frog I've ever heard.

I couldn't remember anything about the context, not even which two characters had this little exchange (Churchy and Howland maybe?), so I thought I'd try to find the strip.

Unfortunately, Calvin and Hobbes is the only comic cool enough to get its own search engine, so I had to use regular Google. When I put be he moth or be he bird into the search box, all that came up was the They Might Be Giants Song "Bee of the Bird of the Moth." As a long-time TMBG listener, I knew that song well, but I had never made the connection to the Pogo line. It's quite a striking one, though; how often do you find be(e), moth, and bird juxtaposed like that?

The TMBG song was almost certainly not inspired by some obscure Pogo strip from who knows how long ago. (My mother has scads of old Pogo books from the forties and fifties, and I read them all many times as a child.) They credit Jonathan Lethem as their source, one of his "promiscuous songs" (free lyrics for bands to use or adapt) called "The Moth of the Bee of the Birds," which is about a sort of sexual Bartleby who "would prefer not to" have anything to do with the birds and the bees.

Pollinate? I’d prefer not to
I’d prefer anything
to being
the moth of the bee of the birds

Find a mate? I’d prefer not to
I’d prefer anything
to bee-ing, to bird-ing
the moth of the bee of the birds . . .

They Might Be Giants pinch the bee/bird/moth combo but otherwise completely rewrite the song. "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" is about the hummingbird moth -- a sort of moth which resembles a sort of bird which resembles a bee. This chimerical creature becomes a symbol of the breaking down of boundaries, of things that should be utterly distinct blurring together, and of Goya's "sleep of reason" that produces monsters.

I made a note of this Pogo/TMBG connection back in November but didn't post about it because it didn't seem connected to anything else. Now, though, the word behemoth has appeared in the sync-stream, and things are different. I posted about behemoth, and its connections to Enoch and to killer whales, in a post titled "Call me Ishmael" -- the famous opening sentence of Herman Melville's greatest novel, Moby-Dick. Melville's greatest short story is without question Bartleby, The Scrivener, and its defining line is, "I would prefer not to."

There's also the fact that the Pogo cartoonist's name is Walt Kelly.

In my recent post "April 27 and the whale," I mentioned encountering that date -- the date of Dee and Kelley's whale vision and my post about my own whale dream -- as the date of a Dutch holiday on which people wear orange to honor their king. As detailed in that post, this was a synchronicity because I had twice recently encountered the book title The King in Orange. The King in Yellow is of course a much better known title, and at first I thought the "orange" version was simply a mistake, but then I happened to hear an interview with the author of a book actually called The King in Orange -- and he spent much of the interview talking about Pepe the Frog!

I mention this because of the Pogo reference to "the prettiest frog I ever heard" and because "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" includes a similar reference to something orange-not-yellow.

Got a brand new shipment of electrical equipment

It's addressed to the bottom of the sea

Send a tangerine-colored nuclear submarine

With a sticker that says STP

Windshield wiper washer fluid spraying in the air

Head lice under hats lie in the headlights everywhere

Subatomic waves to the underwater caves

Of the bee of the bird of the moth

The Beatles made a yellow submarine famous, but here we have an orange one.

"The underwater caves of the bee" is also significant, because just last November I was writing about underwater bees: "What a weird and evocative image -- swarms of honeybees crossing the ocean as if in 'a whale in the midst of the sea'! (Bees in the belly of the beast is also a link to Samson.)" Note that I linked the Book of Mormon image of bees in a "whale" (actually a submarine) to Samson's finding bees in the carcass of a lion. "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" associates a submarine with a bee in an underwater cave. Dee's whale roared "like a cave of lions." Whales, bees, caves, lions. I have even associated John Dee with the bee via "Sloop John B," making Dee and Bee interchangeable.

One final note: I first became aware of The King in Yellow back in 2000, because someone had used a Markov chain program to created a computer-generated mashup of The King in Yellow and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as well as similar hybrid works like Alice in Elsinore. Such chimerical texts are very much in the spirit of "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth."