har-ish

I first encountered this level of anatomical intricacy when I was sixteen, in Plus One, studying zoology and the arthropods. One of our practical assignments was to examine the compound eye and dissect and lay out the mouthparts of a cockroach.

I was hopelessly clumsy at it. My dissection needle seemed almost comically large for the job of teasing apart and arranging all those tiny structures. The mandibles, maxillae and other mouthparts demanded a degree of precision I simply didn’t possess at sixteen.

I remember thinking that this was less like a school dissection and more like the work of a horologist tuning the spring of an automatic watch. In fact, at the time, I was convinced that laying out a cockroach’s mouthparts was even more intricate than working on a watch.

Looking at this drawing now, I think I was probably trying to recreate that feeling rather than the anatomy itself: The extraordinary complexity hidden inside something we normally don’t bother to look at twice.