The word I need is not "to follow after." I need another etymology: parasitism, helotism, commensalism, mutualism, dulosis, symbiosis. Local labels for the ways one solution requires another, from the bribes of fruit trees to the bacteria in my gut. Joint solutions everywhere, from ants and their domestic aphid farms to lichen, a single plant formed of two organisms that feed and water each other, breed and reproduce together.
One remarkable night, snowed solidly into a New Hampshire cottage, Dr. Ressler laid it out. "Mimicry is also an interlock. A snapping turtle's tongue depends on the shape of a fly. The beetle that borrows the look of a thorn lives off the rose's solution. Half a dozen harmless snakes ape the bands of a coral without paying to produce the poison. Jammed frequencies of passed semaphores, real, faked, intercepted, abused: everybody trafficking on the river dabbles in this pidgin." His speech was soft because the night was late, the kerosene flame revealed the blanketed world outside, and we knew we were going nowhere the next day.
"Every animal cell is itself a contract. A primitive cell may have co-opted a bacterium, enslaved it as the first mitochondrion, a genetically independent cell enclave. Believe me, we're all in this together. No cheating this economy. The books must balance. No," he said, breathing, his face obscured by the lamp, on the far side of the room where Frank and I lay touching. "The world is a single, self-buffering, interdependent organism. Or has been until this moment. Individual persistence is not the issue. Neither is species stability. If permanence were the criterion, nothing in the animate world could come close to the runaway success of rocks."
I would trade what's left of my savings to hear his monologue again, to jot down even a draft of a rough transcript of what he said. But he and his words have gone the way of probabilities, back into the loop. Death has returned him to school. I mimic him now, live off his solution.
"Why can't we speak that pidgin more fluidly than we do? Speak it the way everything else lives it? The definition of life we've lived with for too long is flawed. We presuppose the ability to tell haphazard from designed. The whole community is about to go under, pulled in by our error. Why do we want to revoke the contract, scatter it like a nuisance cobweb, simplify it with asphalt? Because we still believe, despite all the evidence, that the place was made. And what's made, by definition, can be improved. But suppose the whole, tentative, respiring, symbiotic message is no more improvable than chance. The superorganism takes its local shape — each part at the mercy of all others — because that is the configuration that chance conditions permit. Design might benefit from human ingenuity. Conditional fit cannot.
"Oh, it's worse than you think. Worse for us. Worse for you two." He looked at us as if at two crosses in a French cemetery dated a day after V-E. "Your generation, everyone from now on, faces the most serious shake-up in history. Because my generation," oblique mention of his departure from science, "has already killed life for you. I mean the old definition, the vitalist idea. We did something twenty years ago that people haven't gathered yet. It's all mechanism now. Self-creation. The game has changed. Only we haven't responded."
The night was silver and deepest blue. Outside, in the drifted conifers, owls sat dusted in branches, their eyes night-wise to the least run of rodents beneath them. Foxes scoured the surrounding hills. Tufts of grass poked above the snow like dangerous shoals, while rock outcrops were slowly digested by a two-celled limited partnership. All the while, underground, below the frost line, life waited its rechance. That night Dr. Ressler telegraphed me a part of the genetic code I just now unfold. All of this soft, conjoined precision — mutable, always slightly mistaken — was self-assembling, self-adjusting, self-nurturing information.
I thought I had the gist, on that oil-lamp evening, snowbound. I thought he was faulting science for letting the gene out of the bottle, disenchanting the natural kingdom, turning the impenetrable magnificence of the ecosystem into spent anagram. Two years later, alone, with time to think, I see he was saying the opposite. We've dismantled the biosphere out of fear. We suffer not from too much science but from terrified rejection of observation. Pattern can produce purpose, but it does so without final causes. Destination, design, is a lie stripped off twenty years ago. The only ethic left is random play, trial and error. We go on in shock, not yet disabused of success, not yet ready to save ourselves by looking.
Hopeless, he hoped that we might reconvene on higher ground, in an ecology of knowledge. Learning to hear the underwriting îune might at last affirm our own derivation from the theme. Adenine, thymine, a hundred thousand commensal genes, owls, foxes, the silver and blue forest of pines. His hope was simply that learning the layout of the place, the links — identifying how matter made its escape from matter and passed irretrievably through this spreading gene — might rejoin us to the superorganism at the source. Life, ordered irregularity, aperiodic crystal, signal in a field of noise, required that wonder and reverence, both coded for, beat out success if anything is to survive.
He hinted at a new discourse, a new definition. But tonight it feels like a recovery. The only, truly unequivocal success is the aperiodic crystal itself. Accustomed from long training to viewing life from the molecular level, my friend based his hope on our acquiring an awareness of the explosive potential of the genome, its implausible beauty. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear would know that the string is big, an ample world for expression. And anyone who once adds up the living number must act ecologically, commensally forever.
I read a throwaway bit that, like the last tumbler waiting to turn over, brings home the idea for good. Huge stretches of code called introns — in fox, owl, grasses, lichen, cabin captives — have no identifiable function. They've been carried along inside, a free rider, for a billion years. I suddenly see DNA as an ingenious parasite, a creature that has struck up symbiosis with every scaffolding it has ever invented; organisms are only the necessary evil, the way DNA has hit upon to make more DNA. To get out and see the world. Which is the most successful strain of life? A defective question, one I now relegate to the bin of exhausted fits. Life is the sole strain, perpetually becoming, a single, diversified proposition that succeeds altogether or not at all.
I check the etymology for his "pidgin." Thought to be an English derangement of the Chinese pronunciation of the English word "business." But if this business is a business at all, it must be a lending library — huge, conglomerate, multinational, underfunded, overinvested. Ecology consists of identifying, checking out, poring over, marking up, and returning all existing solutions. Passing them around. Running down another reference, another key, another published breakthrough. No competition, no success, no survival of the fittest. The word I am looking for, the language of life, is circulation.
C. Evolution
The envelope is as wide as the space granted by the surplus of generations, sculpted by scarcity. If anything is behind the accumulation of variations, it's reprimand. Constraint and condemning somehow rebound into bounty. Weeding out increases complexity, like gravity driving a river uphill. I can't see it; how can the shake-out sieve of death create more, when its most generous judgment is "Not quite"?
My enlightenment arrives in stages, unfolding historically, inaccurately, like the thing it researches. The best classification for gene anthologies must be laid out on the axis of time. Darwin induced the whole before he had adequate foundation. Evolutionary thought evolved only fitfully, by pangenesis. The earliest recorded text I can find already suspects the mutability of living shape. Anaximander, in translation, reads like the Origin, 2,400 years ahead of time. Aristotle blunders up against the notion, then walks bravely away. Linnaeus — worlds later — knew; he could have proclaimed it, incomplete, in rough outline. But he was unwilling to crawl out onto that geneological limb until humanity was ready.