Words&Dirt

“Vernadsky, a chemist who studied crystallography, was always interested in the structure of minerals.  He was a scientific monist with novel insights.  Unlike the vitalists, who held that there must be a special, unique property of life that gives it the ability to think and act on its own, Vernadsky saw life as a natural outgrowth of a chemically active universe.  The early vitalists argued that life must be made of special stuff that distinguishes it from nonliving matter.  But after Wohler synthesized urea, chemically related to the uric acid of urine––a chemical containing nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon––in his laboratory in 1828, the argument that life is made of special matter would not hold.  Vernadsky took the notion a step further: He looked at life as an entirely natural global phenomenon.  Indeed the very word ‘life’ contains a vitalistic connotation, that of a special entity that cannot be reduced to physics or chemistry.  To avoid this connotation, Vernadsky resolutely used the term ‘living matter’ instead of ‘life.’

Influenced by the movement of arms, men, tanks, and planes on a global scale in World War I, Vernadsky saw life (including human life) as a complex mineral.  Living material was a kind of ‘animated water.’  A multicomponent fluid, a kind of solid, life was a highly charged, energy-rich, and reactive form of matter.  With chemical impurities and in a special phase, to be sure, life is still mostly salty water.  Over evolutionary time, Vernadsky argued, more and more chemical elements became involved in the global circulation of living matter, and the rates of elemental circulation––of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorous––tended to increase.  The complex mineral that is life is also horizontally transportable (for example, by wind or water) or self-transporting.  Locusts, for instance, descend upon and devour fields of grain, then swarm again to the skies to transport organic-rich salty water horizontally over the Earth.  Such massive, moving populations of insects were, for Vernadsky, ‘flying mountains.’

Living matter, according to Vernadsky and his modern spokesman Andre Lapo (1987), is the strongest geological force.  The active part of the biosphere, a thin layer of life twenty to thirty kilometers deep, ranges from microbial spores in the atmosphere to ecosystems at the ocean abyss.  The active part of Earth’s surface resembles the bark of a growing tree.  The wood of the tree is not so much dead as composed of formerly living tissue integrated into the still-functioning water-sugar transport system of the heartwood.  Thus much of the landscape we see as mineral––sand, rubble, limestone, iron ore––was shaped by activities of life or went through a phase of production inside cells.  They trace ‘bygone biospheres.’  The white cliffs of Dover are fossilized skeleton-forming microbes, as is most limestone worldwide.  Soil, one of Vernadsky’s earliest objects of interest, would not exist without intense biological activity.  Soil also interested Darwin, who wrote a monograph on how earthworms help produce soil.

Soil does not exist on Mars or Venus; rubble called ‘regolith’ does.  Moist, fertile, and replete with protist cells and other organisms, soils are a kind of tissue of a living Earth.  Their composition is determined by the worldwide circulation of key elements.  Because no individual organism is immortal and the materials of which all are composed are limited, crucial chemical elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, phosphorous, and nitrogen) recycle in all ecosystems and on a global scale.  The computer models of geochemists show how carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water, and other molecules circulate at the planet’s surface.  Accurate model-making has become a scientific goal among geochemists and biochemists in recent years after Vernadsky and Lapo focused interest on Earth’s life as deeply intertwined with geology.”

––Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, pg. 127-9

“‘I did not go to join Kurtz there and then.  I did not.  I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more.  Destiny.  My destiny!  Droll thing life is––that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.  The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself––that comes too late––a crop of unextinguishable regrets.  I have wrestled with death.  It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.  It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.  If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.  I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.  This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man.  He had something to say.  He said it.  Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.  He had summed up––he had judged.  ‘The horror!’  He was a remarkable man.  After all this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth––the strange commingling of desire and hate.  And it is not my own extremity I remember best––a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things––even of this pain itself.  No!  It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through.  True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot.  And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.  Perhaps!  I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt.  Better his cry––much better.  It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions.  But it was a victory!  That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.'”

––Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, pg. 119-20