It’s one of those circle of life kind of things, the antagonist Hopper says in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, explaining how his gang of marauding grasshoppers exploit the ants with a dry cynicism that Luke Carman might appreciate. It wasn’t until I reached the final story in Carman’s collection An Ordinary Ecstasy that this phrase came to mind, as the structure of the book resolved itself into an Ouroboros: the snake biting its own tail that represents, well, the cycle of destruction and birth.
