[Newspoetry] Canister: A Small Can of Worms

[Donald L Emerick]

5/7/03 The New York Times: Indestructible Worm -- When last we checked in on the tiny soil worm known as C. elegans, it had reached a pinnacle of scientific success.  Not only was it the first animal to have its genome deciphered, but it had also become the favored laboratory specimen for studying how cells divide, differentiate and develop into organs, a role that contributed heavily to last year's Nobel Prize in medicine.   Now C. elegans has achieved another spectacular feat. Hundreds of the worms were on the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated.  They survived the breakup, the fiery descent through the atmosphere and the jarring collision with the ground and kept on reproducing until they were found three months later.  Whether this was mostly luck, or because their canisters rode in a sheltered spot on the shuttle, or because of the worms' hardiness, is not clear.  Their survival lends plausibility to the notion that life might have descended on Earth from other worlds in ancient times.  If a tiny soil worm could do it, why not a hardy bacterium from a distant world, hitching a ride on a space rock or, dare we think it, sent by an advanced civilization?

What difference does it make whether we evolved on this planet, or came from another world, in the form of microbes?  We all had to start somewhere, from something, regardless of what the actual origin of life was.  And, we all seem to be pretty much related to everything that is now living on the planet, although few people put together a family tree that goes back far enough to include actual trees and bushes, let alone other animals than our own "kind".  Except, of course, the Bush family puts a lot of bushes in their family bush -- which could not be, by definition, tall enough to be a family tree -- for they descended from bushes and not from the trees, like proper primates did.

The idea of mankind is itself absurd, because it suggests, in the alternative seductive meaning of terms that hovers around most words, like a shadow or a ghost or a spectral thing that does not quite have an image that could come into focus or even be brought into focus, for it seems to lie beyond the focal length of our most powerful ideas of clarity in resolution, that man could be, by genus, kind.  And, note how we do not say, generally, oh, that is true for lionkind, or mammalkind, birdkind, or fishkind.  We do not even speak of wormkind or bushkind.  We preferentially reserve the suffix "kind" to attach to ourselves, when we designate ourselves as a species, when we privilege ourselves over all other kinds of beings.

What would be the focal length of the lens, that its optics could not convey to sight and sense the truth of an image?  Would the object be forever at the wrong distance: lie too close or too far to be seen by the naked eye, however aided?  And, if eyes can be naked, why can ears or nose be naked, as well?  Yet, is nakedness silent and odorless?  Surely, I could feel your nakedness, if it were here beside me, regardless of whether I could see or smell or hear it.  Naked is how mankind comes into the world, a bare fact of life itself, barely able to survive on its own.  Bare minima define our relationship to the soil of our birth, to the worms that gave us birth, and that shall consume our flesh.

Hail to thee, Great Ourobourus!
Thou art the Worm of the World,
Who crawls on segmented belly,
Swallows his trailing tail in cycle.

There is none great beside thee,
For thy windings around the world
Make up its comings and goings,
To put down pretentious mankind.

Make his spark vanish in the dark,
Leaving the darkness in its peace,
Untroubled, unscarred, unmarked,
Unfolded against Hegelian slimes.

Let treble troubles spin in doubles
To give us in our darkness times.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

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