Meiosis, necrosis: the arcs of the ancient cycle of recirculation I'm caught in for good. Both carry on, mesmerized, churning out tireless rearrangements on the first little nitrogen, methane, lightning spark. Carry on, despite long since filling the entire surface of the earth with velvet and scum, as if some fabulous combination were just around the next chromosomal bend, waiting to be revealed. But there is no revelation. Only endless surplus versus harm.
To the population, the gene, birth and death carry no last word. Only in the chest of the next of kin does that partnership make any inroads. Slow, conservative, migratory. Once, a colt, I spoke that language. I've forgotten it all, the years I spent hungry and astonished, nights by flashlight over the illustrated encyclopedia describing mysterious, interlocked systems — water cycle, nitrogen fixation, circulation of blood, food chain. Winter weekends, whole summers out in the woods, in empty lots, in our immense, dark backyard, examining the scat of rabbits, catching bizarre electrical arthropoda in jars, convinced, sensing firsthand the terrible expanse of the place.
I remembered it this morning, to ruinous expense, so long after first elaborating the thought. It suddenly was not enough to rehash natural selection. I had to go put my hands on the gene, on evolving population, invariant heredity. I knew it would cost, that my carefully guarded nest egg would suffer. I boarded the inbound, not knowing what part of the unclassífiable, branching catalog I was after, but knowing that the biome was midtown. I found myself on the stairs to the Met, but could not bring myself to go in. Not without the one I once arranged to meet there, should we ever be separated.
Instead, I walked back through the living park and on to 53rd, the Museum of Modern Art. Time to see how Brueghel had evolved, survived, passed down to my own generation. All morning I discovered again that every observer's notebook, every act of seeing even the harshest, most politically indicting, alienated, abstract, cynical acrylic, is a frightened, desperate, amazed recapitulation of the natural kingdom. More: an effort to mimic it. Always inexhaustibly to recombine, to classify.
I stood in front of Paul Klee's Twittering Machine, a created thing at once both mechanism and inexplicable bird. It had been so long since I'd looked at anything but genetics that the sleight of hand seemed crammed with associations. I thought of Emily Dickinson's secret reaction to Darwin, five years after the publication of the Origin. Split the Lark — and you'll find the Music. Loose the Flood — you shall find it patent. Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?
On the train back, I knew it would have to be poetry for me, as well. I scribbled my fllle de Klee on the back of a MOMA flyer:
star start itself seeds blueprint climb: egg alone and only gear for eatrock lichen or unlacing umbel veil, chance, the sole mode assay-able: tumult of twittering ovation is all word forward can enlist to move embryo to ember, or drive cold scale from first bird.
It smacks of effusion and will embarrass me by next week. It contributes less than nothing to my understanding of Ressler's aborted bid for love, discovery, the Swedish Sweepstakes. But as poetry, it doesn't have to be good. It only has to contain a testable guess about being alive, the incomprehensible ability.
Back in my apartment I remember two things I long ago lost words for. The paradoxical breakout of life from mere preservation to runaway self-threat depends on two subtle phenomena. First, information represented in a certain way emerges as instruction. As in the gene, all observation is a command to observe. Dr. Ressler once showed me how an ordinary drinking glass is a data structure informing liquid where to go. The information in the life molecule is a similar vessel, informing itself how to describe the condition it finds itself in.
Second, small initial changes ripple into large differences. The constricted initial alphabet of four letters produces a journey many million species long. The only astonishment great enough to replace that ectomized maker: all this proliferation results from one universal and apostolic genetic code. The fantastic diversity of outward form doesn't begin to anticipate the leaping, snaking, wild logic that develops in response to the far more complex internal, intracellular environment. Once DNA began to speak, not only the carrying medium but the message itself was susceptible to evolution. Even to approximate that polyphonic, perpetual baying, I'll have to go back down, square off against the living, purposive program incorporated in the enzyme.
Tonight in History—12/9/38: A coelacanth caught off Africa, a third of a billion years after it was supposed to have vanished from the earth. Not the first extinct animal to return from living fossil-hood, nor the last. Far stranger things are afoot. Quaggas rebuilt from the residual ghost in their zebra cousins. Frogs cloned. Talk of reviving mastodons from single frozen cells. I sit at my desk, overwhelmed but still among those throwing their insufficient efforts against the unlistable world.
I know nothing about the place. But the nothing I've ascertained has already changed everything. I learn that I live in an evening when all ethics has been shocked by the sudden realization of accident. I must ask not how many kinds of life there can be, nor even how there can be so many kinds of life. I must learn how, out of all the capricious kinds of cosmos there might have been, ours could have lucked, against all odds, into that one arrangement capable of supporting life, let alone life that grew to pose the hypothetical in the first place. How quantum physics allowed room for a rearrangement capable of learning the outside chance hidden in quantum physics. How this tone-deaf conservatory could produce the Goldbergs.
I review the record of care we've given a spark we once thought was lit for our express warming. I feel sick beyond debilitation to think what will come, how much more desperate the ethic of tending is, now that we know that the whole exploding catalog rests on inanimate, chance self-ignition. The three-billion-year project of the purposeful molecule has just now succeeded in confirming its own worst fear: this outside event need not have happened, and perhaps never should have. We've all but destroyed what once seemed carefully designed for our dominion. Left with a diminished, far more miraculous place — banyans, bivalves, blue whales, all from base pairs — what hope is there that heart can evolve, beat to it, keep it beating?
XVI
12/6/85
Our Dearest O'Deigh, Out of some terrifying collective unconscious, the phrase "Greetings from the Old Country" nags at me, although this place is one continuous novelty from Cisalpina to the Afsluitdijk. Do you remember that game show where contestants were sent into a supermarket for three minutes (our nation's chief contribution to world culture — shopping as a competitive sport)? Europe is exactly that; I've got this checklist of three-star Schatz chambres and a rail pass, and I can't come home until the art treasures have all been looted. Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum. Speyer Cathedral. Brueghels in Brussels. Haven't enjoyed myself so much since butterfly-collecting days.
I can haul body around faster than mind can follow — the goal all civilization has striven for since the Golden Age. I haven't words enough yet to tell you what I've seen. My teacher says (at least I think she says; all transactions are in Dutch, with scattered cloudy regionalisms) that words make up for lack of grammar better than grammar makes up for lack of words. The language methods here do no conjugations, declensions, paradigms. Only reading, speaking, and restoring sense to texts by supplying missing words. ("Vocabulary," beautifully enough, is woordenschat: word treasure. OE's word-hoard?) Only a little touring and I've discovered how beautiful Dutch is. On those city maps set up at strategic places for out-of-towners, the highlighted red arrow reads: U bevindt zich hier. You find yourself here.