Notes on Genetic and Poetic Languages

I read the recent news from University of Washington about the discovery that genetic structures use two languages. The previously known language involved "codons." The new one involves "duons," which are dual-use codons.

My first thought? That the corporate drones who have committed genetic manipulation will not bat an eyelash. So they fiddled like children with their building blocks, and never realized those blocks had an alphabet printed on them? What does it matter? They made money and will make yet more. Having done their bit for the dehumanization of agriculture they will sleep like babies.

Ortega y Gasset may have been correct that our scientists are "barbarians"——specialists who know a great deal about one thing. The scientists I have known have tended to be actual scientists in the older sense of being natural philosophers. If not directly engaged in a process of discovery, they at least felt innately drawn to that process, as part of their participation in a tradition of humanism; and they stood apart from the funnel-eyed engineers and technicians required by corporate industry.

Yet funnel-eyed uni-directionalist drones must be in good supply; and our education system seems set on producing even more, to judge from statements I read earlier this year, somewhere, about the end result of the "No Child Left Behind" directive ... disastrous results, to my mind: for this system teaches students that to succeed they must make points, rather than make sense.

Schools now are turning children into the equivalents of those websites that have keywords but no content, except advertisements.

I possess no deep understanding of codons and duons——nor even a shallow understanding, from the point of view of the biologist. Yet the literary ordering of words we call poetry offers me a way of thinking about these notions. For a gene is a thing as well as a type of a thing——and also an expression: for surely even a corporate drone cannot sever a gene from its expression ... not even with that Orwellian-sounding technique that I came across in during random reading recently: that of "silencing" genes. (Next they will be "disappearing" genes.)

Similarly poetry is a thing, and a type of thing——and an expression.

Northrop Frye aptly observes that poetry has two languages: so you might think in terms of two languages being spoken simultaneously by a poem that is "viable"——if you will allow me the botanical word. Frye noted that one reads, hears or understands not only the language of the poet's writing but also the language of poetry itself. You might say the poem gives voice to the poet's creative individuality while also giving voice to poetic tradition. We might take away a particular sense from the first expression, and a universal sense from the second——even though the poet is as much a participant in universal creative process as s/he is a separate individual——and even though our poetic tradition is not at all universal but rather a particular playing ground of interactions between writers and readers ... simply the current moment of ongoing process.

A Second Second, and Product vs. Process

The thought occurs to me that this second "language" of the duons may well itself prove to be a composite of two languages. I think of the language within ourselves that we use in setting our actions or behavior: for I do think we are all like William Dean Howells's character who discovered "that two strains of blood were striving in (him) for mastery ... paternal and maternal." (Brooks has a similar point to make about American character, in terms of conflicting maternal and paternal influences.) Blake knew as well as did Hegel that without conflict there is no growth; and this language of our actions and behaviors seems inextricably tied to our growth.

How can I help but think that this newly identified second genetic language is inextricably tied not to stasis and unchanging form but to action and behavior——and growth?

Of course, that this second duality would be literally maternal and paternal seems reasonably possible.

Yet another way to think of the situation comes also from Frye. He draws a distinction between attitudes: the Aristotelian, which regards literature as product, versus the Longinian, which views literature as process. A product has static and fixed qualities among its attributes. We might think, metaphorically, of codons being related to product. A process, in contrast, must have unstable, changing aspects among its attributes. So we might think of the dual-language codons now called duons as being related to process.

The genetic modifiers (I mean those who modify genes ... although I can think of endless modifiers for these corporate drones——such as "rash," "dangerous," "unthinking," "human-culture-threatening," etc.) would fix the world into a particular set of regulated patterns, so that agriculture could be reduced even further from being a process and toward being production line.

Wilder Thoughts ...

In the absence of those "two strains of blood," expression would seem a one-way street; and in nature how many one-way streets are there?

Think about this carefully. (I insert here a small tribute to late professor of philosophy Scott Crom, who urged on me caution when nearing the specter of determinism.) For what is "expression"? The production of oils from seeds, I suppose is one answer——useful, but not part of the ongoing give-and-take dialog of a conscious being with its universe.

A microcosmic theory will arise eventually that will ascribe consciousness to the gene——and why not? At its scale the gene must exhibit something akin to the complexities of piscine, reptilian, avian or mammalian nervous centers.

And if such a theory should arise then the purveyors of genetically modified organisms, and their hired guns and ill-inspired drones, may well find themselves suddenly ranking alongside slave-dealers of a previous century.

A thought to consider...

Gene expression should be free. If gene expression cannot remain free then human expression cannot remain free.

I pose this without too many hesitations, except for my use of "expression." You may know why: that sense of the non-communicativeness of "expression." So how about this.

Gene communication must remain free. If gene communication cannot remain free, then human communication cannot remain free.

Cheers ...

Farewell to Jack Vance

I never knew him —— although after our one or two phone conversations I began to feel as though I did, at least a little: and at this moment I can hear his voice in my ear, genial and gentle and unassuming. As has happened for me with other souls who identify themselves as political conservatives we made our links to one another via the arts —— plural —— one being science fiction, another being music. Or maybe I should say we made a link to one another through memory: his memory, personal and direct; mine, impersonal and research-based and indirect. We cared enough about the same things that our exchanges came easily.

On January 6, 2009, Jack told me, "I'm blind. My eyes went out fifteen years ago. I've acclimated myself to the situation. It seems almost normal." His contact with literary culture continued —— for he had a "reader" —— I assume an automatic device: "I've got a reader that reads cassettes to me from the Library of Congress." At the time, poetry occupied a fair share of his time, for in his queue he had the Oxford Book of English Verse and Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Should my eyes dim while my ears remain a-quiver, I could ask for no better companions for quiet afternoon or evening hours.

I doubt he could have done in prose what he did, without the influence of traditional poetry.

At the time of our conversation I jotted down those titles without too much thought.

Where does Vance stand in science fiction? I wish I knew better. He was doing a great deal of writing and publishing in years when I read relatively little in the genre. His earlier books, insofar as I know them, include distinctive, idiosyncratic and complex works that I have enjoyed and respected and look forward to revisiting. What emerges most powerfully from them, in memory, is the Vanceian color —- the strangeness, the posed artificiality that inhabits and infects his characters and situations, tingeing them with an impalpable edginess that threatens to blur into discomfort but often leaves an aftertaste of pleasure.

Cheers ...

Notes, Ravenna Press

I have read a handful of books from Ravenna Press, lately——a good-sized handful, even though they are small books, physically ... perhaps even a great handful: for individually they seem large enough: each seems a full entity. A book of a size or a set of dimensions that makes it loom before you ... like a weighty hardwood chair, inviting your sitting, successfully, so that you end up occupying it for a time, even as its presence occupies you: books of this sort ... real entities. I have walked into stores and have seen the new books being pushed over and falling off their stands from the pressure of the eye's touch on their covers and spines, however fat those spines. These books of Ravenna's might seem to turn and lean before the gaze, at first. I suspect that even in a store mall-squared and plasticoated these volumes would stand firm, being slenderly empty of the synthetic mental gas-globules that make all those fat cartons of literary styrofoam shift so easily on and off their shelves. I say this but perhaps should not say it of all of them: for I have read fat books that are much more full of sense than they are empty. Yet I still can feel glad to hold in hand small books that breezes will not bear away.

Are these little volumes detached from our Mass Age, then? I think they are well attached. Pertinent, maybe I should say. Poet and editor and publisher Kathryn Rantala in her own writing makes it clear she moves in a world that has been commercialized, that has been striped with black roads and boxed in with buyable goods. Yet the reader finds it hard to say whether the gaze actually sits on material manifestations of our nearly ruined social spirit, or on the spaces between the objects held up for examination by her words. She displays deep concern with the beauty to be found through arrangement: and in any arrangement the whole takes on some quality missing from whatever small items within it first catch the eye. She also follows an instinct——exploratory, historical, knowledge-dowsed: I can use such words, to point toward where the instinct hides and abides. She follows this instinct, or inoculates the reader with it so that its movement then guides the reader around or underneath whatever meanings the words offer.

Even through the pages most dense with words I feel a movement of air——even as the words themselves stand firm.

Cheers ...

Writing Without Payment

As a human being you house within you the potential to do an infinite amount of work for no payment. As a writer, you tend to realize the potential.

The poetry I mentioned, last posting, provides a nice example. The strange aspect of the matter is that we who felt the urge toward poetry, in earlier Age of Masses decades, put out cash in order to even have the whisper of a chance of publication. Back in that strange time, absolute requisites for the poet included the purchase of paper, envelopes, and, above all, a great many stamps.

Stamps! I feel the great philatelic treasure trove of the Modern Century well might be all the self-addressed, stamped envelopes of the greats, the not-so-greats, and the not-great-at-alls, among the poets and other writers of the generations before mine. Those envelopes would have been postmarked in towns and cities where all the presses, small and large, pursued their own struggling lives; and they would have borne the writers' own names and addresses, typed there by their own fingers. As I did in the 1980s, those writers must have thrown all such ephemera away. The latent philatelist in me would love to hold the envelopes that returned rejections to the late greats. What immense histories would be contained within those slender, emptied confines.

Who knew to what a degree matters would change? The stamped, self-addressed envelope still exists -- but in a time when so many small presses and even professional presses accept electronic submissions, their existence must be under threat.

In recent years I have been in the situation of still writing poetry but not, by and large, sending it out. One element playing into this is the rise of electronic submission. I find it hard to bring myself to commit that act. A part of my soul cries out, "What, no postage costs? Where is the expression of commitment? Where is the demonstration of determination? No wonder the world has gone to the wolves!"

Cheers ...