THE FERMISH RECORD

by Rick Reid

Found, quite strangely and almost entirely disintegrated, in the oil room corner of the Montauk Lighthouse by lightkeeper Silas P. Loper one August evening of heavy fog in 1850—was the anonymous travelogue of the itinerant Portuguese cargo ship the "Nau" believed to be lost to the depths of African waters off the coast of "Ilha de Mocambique"(Isle of Mozambique), bringing us the first known—yet highly incomplete—record of the until now fabled insect, Proscopiidae fermemas—more commonly known as the "fermish." It is speculated that the travelogue, though one of a kind and consisting of handwritten passages and degraded photographs of non-specific aquatic scenes, is itself an unsteady reproduction or retracing of original documents due to a salvage attempt or collaging of initial notes, sketches, photos and findings that may have been composed in secret and shadow during shipping journeys between Northern Europe and the Indies due to their aberrant observations for the typical life of a maritime trader. While the presence of these photographs dates the travelogue (or, at least its reproduction) to a minimum of the latter half of the 19th century, Portuguese trade in the Indian Ocean was steady throughout the 16th and 17th centuries transporting cargoes of spice, diamonds, jewelry, coins, precious stones (valued at 20,000-30,000 cruzados each) and Ming porcelain (often unregistered and carried as ballast) across such East African posts as Angloche, Sofala, "Ilha de Mocambique," up toward the Horn of Africa, and eastward along the Arabian peninsula and the coast of India. Arqueonatas Worldwide, founded in 1995 to preserve "submerged cultural heritage" through the "survey and excavation of historical shipwrecks," has since confirmed 79 wrecks according to a "number of magnetic anomalities" along the historical trading route, leaving the origin of the travelogue unknown and adrift across the waters from Montauk to Mozambique. However, the unparalleled value of the travelogue, what we now call the "Fermish Record," is its unusual epistemological yet lyrical evidentiary study of the memegenetic Orthoptera insect known as the "fermish," whose phono-mimetic (or memetic) singing capabilities were believed to entrance any listener in a spellbound haunt of echoing repetition. Considered to be the mythological and literary inspiration for Homer and Virgil's sirens, daughters of the storm god Achelous and the nymphs and playmates of Persephone, whose song lured mariners to their own destruction upon the rocks of their home islands of Sirenum scopuli, the "Fermish Record" indirectly recounts an analysis of the "fermish" insect from the perspective of one who is within the spiral of its spell—sometimes taking up extreme detail of the vibratory world that now engulfs the writer and other times veering adrift into dark seas of abstraction. The recurring references in the text—at least those clear enough for legibility—to 'bows,' 'harps' and 'mirrors' suggest an astounding legitimacy to the work and its influence upon the phonotaxonomic study of Orthoptera, specifically that of the Centre for Environmental Biology "Herdade da Ribeira" near Grandola, in Alentejo of Southern Portugal who recognize that "acoustic signals in Orthoptera are produced through stridulation, a process whereby vibration or sound results from the friction of one body structure against another," each species producing "different song patterns depending upon behavioural context." As is the case with the "fermish," the acoustic call is produced by a ridge of teeth, or 'bow', on the underside of the upperwing as it is dragged across a strengthened vein of the lower wing and then amplified by stretched membranes within the wings themselves—what, still today, are known as the 'harp' and 'mirror.'