Words&Dirt

“Under stress, different kinds of individuals, of very different origins and abilities, physically associate.  With continued and predictable stress, cyclical and seasonal, these acquaintances become intimate and extend beyond a single encounter.  To become significant to the evolutionary process, the former strangers must interact frequently enough to form a stable, unique relationship––and ultimately a permanent or at least deeply seasonal affair.  Put succinctly, in cases of importance in evolution, associations lead to partnerships that lead to symbioses that lead to new kinds of individuals formed by symbiogenesis.  At any time the association may dissolve, the partners may change or even destroy one another, or the symbionts may be lost.  Outcomes that involve very different live organisms are not fully predictable, and terms like ‘cost’ and ‘benefit’ are not very useful.  Associations may tighten so much that literal incorporation occurs.  From casual association and unavoidable metabolic exchange (where the waste products of one being, in an open thermodynamic system, become food or protection or lubrication to another) grow new mutually incorporated bodies.  Former independents can be recognized as components of corporate mergers who have not lost all vestiges of their earlier independent state.  The green chloroplasts of leaves still divide.  The beating fringe of spirochetes on Mixotricha still swim––but they don’t swim away.  After long periods of complementary living, intimate association or metabolic dependency, the strange bedfellows often fuse their genetic systems.  This is the last step in genome acquisition, the key to the ‘inheritance of acquired genomes.’  The once separable and differently named partners now become a new entity, a new individual at a larger level of size and complexity.  Many such fusions have been documented in all five kingdoms of life.

The most interesting to us are those partnerships that spurred discontinuous and conspicuous evolutionary innovations so immense that they left clear evidence of their histories in the fossil record.  Such outstanding examples include coral reef animals and their algae; photosynthetic clams; sulfide-oxidizing, two-meter-long tube worms in the abyss; urbanized termites; and grass-munching cows.”

––Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, pg. 90-1

“‘You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him.  ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my––’ everything belonged to him.  It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.  Everything belonged to him––but that was a trifle.  The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.  That was the reflection that made you creepy all over.  It was impossible––it was not good for one either––trying to imagine.  He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land––I mean literally.  You can’t understand.  How could you?––with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums––how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude––utter solitude without a policeman––by the way of silence––utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?  These little things make all the great difference.  Where they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness.  Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong––too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness.  I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil––I don’t know which.  Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds.  Then the earth for you is only a standing place––and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say.  But most of us are neither one nor the other.  The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, and smells, too, by Jove!––breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.  And there, don’t you see?  Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in––your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.  And that’s difficult enough.  Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain––I am trying to account to myself for––for––Mr. Kurtz––for the shade of Mr. Kurtz.  This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether.  This was because it could speak English to me.  The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and––as he was good enough to say himself––his sympathies were in the right place.  His mother was half-English, his father was half-French.  All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance.  And he had written it, too.  I’ve seen it.  I’ve read it.  It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think.  Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for!  But this must have been before his––let us say––nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which––as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times––were offered up to him––do you understand?––to Mr. Kurtz himself.  But it was a beautiful piece of writing.  The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous.  He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings––we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on.  ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc.  The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know.  It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence.  It made me tingle with enthusiasm.  This was the unbounded power of eloquence––of words––of burning noble words.  There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method.  It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’  The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career.  I had full information about all these things, and, besides, as it turned out, I was to have the care of his memory.  I’ve done enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it, if I choose, for an everlasting rest in the dust-bin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilization.'”

––Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, pg. 82-5