Saṃsāra

 

​

“The greatest hazard of all loosing oneself,

can occur very suddenly in the world,

      almost as if it were nothing at all.”

 

Soren Kirkagerad

The sickness unto Death.

 

     In mid-June, the Tisza River transforms into one of the most powerful displays of life that can be seen in Europe; as the ancient species of long-tailed mayflies, Palingenia longicauda, erupt into adulthood dancing across its surface. Within their five inch body, resides the DNA of a taxon that stretches back more than three hundred and fifty million years, longing for the Carboniferous period. Despite this venerable lineage, the Tisza River now remains their only habitat on earth.

     This does not deter the mayfly; they are well acquainted with the struggle of life. After their mothers lay their eggs on the water's surface, they drift pollen-like to the river bed where, after forty five days, they will hatch into larvae. They will then burrow even further until they have made a dense lattice of colonies. In these four hundred tunnels per square meter, they will begin their glacial three year metamorphosis, moulting their exoskeleton up to thirty times. Finally their June arrives and the mayflies erupt once more in an astounding feat of biological timing, perfected from generation to generation. After spending twenty-six thousand two hundred and ninety-seven hours in an aphotic underworld, they emerge into the sunlight, having no more than three hours in which to live. However, before they can skim the water's surface in search of a mate, there is still work to be done; the female must metamorphose once more and the male twice. In a matter of minutes, the male will pass from a sub-adult stage into a fully-fledged adult. The stage is then set upon the river: a ballet of reproduction.

     Wings beat like a thousand drummers, creating a soft hum that passes across the water and rolls over the river bank. With procreation their sole drive, several males will join around a single female, their wings connecting like the petals of a flower around the ovule, thus giving rise to the name The Blooming of Tisza. Once the flower has been pollinated, the male dies and the female mayfly must travel between three to two kilometres up stream. There, she will lay her eggs moments before she too joins the cosmic exchange of carbon. What strikes me in this incredible affirmation of life is not just the mighty will of the mayfly but the sight of those human figures lining the river banks for those two weeks in June. It is hard to say what goes through each and every mind, what transformation may take place within their being and why they are even there. But as they watch in quiet contemplation, I am overwhelmed by a sense of union with the mayfly; I too was born, I too am alive and I too will inevitably die. At this juncture though, I depart from the mayfly because to merely reproduce is not enough to affirm my existence, not with the weight of everything that has constituted my being.

     It was my father who imbued this state of awareness into me, unwittingly I believe. From a very young age, he spoke to me as an adult; how do you know where you are going, if you do not know where you have come from? He said many such aphorisms and numerous others occupy deep vaults within my mind. In sudden moments of caprice, they will spring free along neural pathways and fire off my synapses. This implicit knowledge haunts everything we do and it must have haunted my dad greatly. For on the 26th of June 2000, Bill Clinton made an announcement in the White House, at 10.19 in the morning, of quite phenomenal proportions. At 3.19 in the afternoon, three thousand and sixty-five miles away, my father called me in to the lounge and told me to watch the television. He occupied his customary sofa. What struck me as I entered was that he was not lying back as was his perennial condition; a condition my grandfather would surely have praised, as he was oft heard stating that man is happiest when horizontal. He was instead leaning forward, forearms spread across his jeans as his hands met in the middle. I would come to know this as his reflective position. At this point in time, I was only 10 years old, but Bill Clinton's announcement of the successful completion of the first ever map of the human genome had a profound effect on me. I did not know it then but I would come back to this memory that my father had imparted in me, more than he even would have foreseen. Bill Clinton referred to this accomplishment as the most wondrous map ever created by humankind. I remember thinking in that moment: a map...how can they read it? Yet as I grew estranged from my father and almost as tall, I thought of another question: what is it that the map shows? I presume that one would have to repeat the documentary sound-bite, the building blocks of life. No, it is more than just this; it is the great transformation that courses through and from helix to helix, down the ages and binds all things in their DNA as being intrinsically one.

     In the Philippines, there is a small mountain province named Sagada; its inhabitants, no more than elven thousand, believe that we obtain our spirits from the mountains and that when we die, our spirits return to these great heaps of earth. This is why, supposing you make the hike, one can see coffins lining the fissures and faces of the mountains the people inhabit. On November 1st, the Philippine people celebrate the day of the dead; the Sagada people choose to light fires beside or even above the coffins of their loved ones in the hope of communicating with them. The awareness of their own connection to their ancestors must be cherished. It is a connection that reaches all the way to the fundamental 1st law of thermodynamics. Energy is not created or destroyed, it is only borrowed, coursing through time. One can debate where this first began; we can look at the earliest zircon crystals, found in the Jack Hills of Western Australia. They show that the earth was formed a little over 4.5 billion years ago. Yet, the cosmologists would state this does not suffice, we must go back another 500 million years to the creation of the sun. A sun that has radiated heat down on our earth since its inception. Then, the physicists would weigh in and ask that we go back even further. They would have us look at the cosmic background radiation so that we may pear through light and even time to the creation of the universe, some 13.7 billion years ago. Inevitability though, some eccentric with recklessly untamed hair would stand up in the back-row and squeak; what about multi-verses, quantum string theory and so on and so on. We find ourselves then in an endless pursuit, or as Jacques Derrida would call it, the trace. Accepting then Derrida's assertion that we must begin wherever we are. I believe it best to return to planet earth some 3.6 billion years ago, when the crucial step was made from energy to life. It would not be until 1757 that August Johann Rosel von Rosenhof first discovered the Amoeba, the most basic single-celled life form on earth. Naturalists of the period referred to it as Proteus animalcule, after the Greek god Proteus, who could change his shape. They were right to; over the next three billion years, it would indeed change its shape and much more, leaving us as its unfathomably old descendants. The first ever group of Amoebas, Prokaryotes, began this great chain of events whose wonder only arrived fully in our collective consciousness with the announcement, on June 26th 2000, of the first ever complete map of the human genome. The effulgence of this moment was not lost on my father who, whilst I sat and watched Bill Clinton address the world, seemed instead far more concerned with me. Regarding me quietly in contemplation as he had perhaps never quite done before.

     It is only now as I stand before a mirror that I can see those eyes differently. I see his rich brown with flecks of green and yellow now burgeoning in mine, but I also see the fear and jealousy hidden behind the pensive thought and awe of that moment. As the years passed by, those hidden aspects became more prominent. For months on end, he sat hunched over his laptop, a small smog of smoke leaving in puffs from his mouth, his fingers struggling to move, the coffee failing to invigorate his brain. Twenty years he spent like that, each manuscript growing shorter and shorter with each attempt, until he would only talk about his writing and then eventually not at all. His moods became increasingly volatile, never physical; that was not his way. He instead exercised his great vocabulary in the only way he could, on his children. Bitterness came to his lips with unnerving ease, no matter what the situation.

     At fifteen I left.

     I remember distinctly the feeling of contamination, like his poisoned words would seep into me somehow and transform me into him. How ironic then, that in leaving home at fifteen, I had already embarked upon the same road as him. Then a year later, I followed his footsteps almost exactly. With the slight difference of finishing my first novel. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of achievement, of affirmation even. I remember my mum saying: see you have the best of him. Those words still ricochet within the dark sepulchre of my memory. I wanted to believe her but as the years passed by, my novel receded beneath a great weight of dust that seemed disdainfully familiar. In spite of this, I persevered and pushed myself further from him; I ignored his letters, changed my phone number and deleted my emails until on December 26th 2007 my father arrived at the door, smiling like a cunning clown with wine in his left hand and presents under his right arm. How are you son, he bellowed out. All the walls I had erected around myself, years of careful construction and calculated denial hammered into certainty by my absolute will, evaporated at the sight of my father. We embraced and I let him in. He had become incredibly fat, although he had always been a large man. I thanked my genes for fumbling that baton. He said it was because he had quit smoking, it was part of the new him. His lie turned my mouth acerbic though I nodded and smiled. Nonetheless, those first two hours were wondrous; we exchanged all that was similar in our polymath manner, jumping from religion to physics to biology to sport then to our favourite field, philosophy, before continuing on through the spectrum of learning. In the course of our great debate, I informed him that I had finished my first novel. He smiled, too readily, and took a large gulp of wine. Really, he said, how fast? I replied six months, still hoping he would enquire further. Inevitably though, without even the slightest attempt to disguise it, he moved on to talk about a new business card he had. It said writer/journalist in the bottom right hand corner, but I knew he had not written in years, except to send diatribes to tabloids. As for his career as a journalist, well he was press-officer of the Militant tendency once, but his press-card had long expired, its laminate edges peeling back to reveal a face twenty years missing. I saw him hastily to the bus stop; by then, he really was back on form, insulting my sisters, loveless he called them, before urging me not be like them. He was oblivious to the fact that we were all trying not to be like him. Then as the bus pulled away, coldly and savagely in the middle of my chest, I felt how much of him was in me. I could feel the helix of his inheritance coursing through me, scurrying across every blood-cell and driving through every neural pathway. I ran even further from him after that. It is only now, as I try to see the number 156 bus accelerating down Merton road, that Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist confronts me.

     When Feynman was just a young boy, his father would sit him down on his lap and read to him from the Encyclopedia Britannica. They would read about anything and everything. In a candid interview in 1981, Feynman recounted how his father would mediate the complexity of such a book to him with a specifiably vivid recollection. In enumerating the vast dimensions of a dinosaur, Feynman's father would compare it to their house, describing to his son the shape of the beast's head as being too large to fit through the bedroom window. Everything was translated into some understandable reality. I too was taught by my father in similar manner, except that our Encyclopedia Britannica was digitized. This upbringing drove Fenyman to be fascinated by all sciences, as my father too had taught me to be interested in multitude disciplines. Moreover Feynman's parents were also non-believers and by our early youths, we both acclaimed ourselves to be avowed atheists. Feynman also did not speak until he was three, as did I, yet later he too found words a natural sanctuary. I think it is these early mirroring effects that made me so interested in Feynman's one electron universe theory. On the 11th of December 1965 Feynman chose to underscore his Nobel Prize acceptance speech by broaching a new astounding concept. A concept that went back to a telephone call he had with his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, in the spring of 1940. It was a concept, later to be known as the one electron universe theory, which attempted to understand the infuriating coincidence that meant every electron had an identical mass and charge. Wheeler exclaimed to Feynman that it was because they were all the same electron! This single electron moves constantly backwards and forwards through time and every time it crosses our time, now as it were, we see electrons. The beauty of this explanation made me realise that the billions of electrons that are in my hand, now, as I write are shared with you as you read and therefore with my father. I know that many physicists since have debunked the idea, for numerous reasons, but the ideal of the interconnectedness of everything overwhelms me now, in almost anything I attempt to do. I see it in every walk of life, in every examination I undertake. Every electron that has ever existed is neither created nor destroyed. Once again we arrive at the 1st law of thermodynamics. Energy is eternal, passing through one form and into another. This cosmic exchange first began 13.7 billion years ago, when every single joule of energy that has ever existed was already present. This potential energy was held in primordial clouds of gas that covered great expanses of early space until they collapsed in on themselves, releasing kinetic energy that began to form stars and planetary systems. Our solar system, contained in the Milky Way galaxy, was formed in one such gravitational collapse. As matter slowly spread out to form the planets and stars we were taught as children, a great majority of the matter gravitated towards the centre some 4.6 billion years ago, creating the sun. As the mass of the early sun grew hotter and denser, it initiated a thermonuclear fusion at its core. Hydrogen became helium and nuclear binding energy was released, heating the surface of the sun to 5778 K. Our infant earth began to bathe in a precious light that would metamorphose energy into the first proteins and amino acids, connected by carbon, to form the incredibly complex structures that we today consider as life.

     Carbon, a precious element that was born in the collapse of stars now billions of years dead. Stars that had burned through their hydrogen and then turned to their remaining helium. As their temperature rose, their helium nuclei fused in groups of three, forming carbon. Eventually, these stars exploded in flashes of light so bright and varied we can only imagine them, and within their dying hurrah, drifted carbon. Slowly and steadily across the universe it coasted, ebbed and diffused, until it was swept into the gravitational pull of a forming planet that we have affectionately come to recognise as earth. As energy continued to envelop our young earth, the carbon was transmogrified by its insatiable hunger for complex structures. It joined its four electrons with other molecules; hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and decisively with other carbons to build the immensely complex structures of amino acids and proteins that make up me, you and the mayfly. So that one day, humans could gather on a river bank to watch their carbon cousins affirming not only themselves but us. In spite of death, carbon persist; in spite of the universe heading always towards maximum entropy, carbon continues to pass on its insatiable need to make life. For three hours, those mayflies dance and absorb the sunlight and above all reproduce, continuing the carbon backbone that makes DNA; a structure that flourishes against all obstacles, that laughs in the face of death and demands of me a recognition of the inheritance it has passed on to me.

     I did indeed feel the inheritance of my father coursing through me as I watched the 156 bus disappear. However, I only sighed with relief as he left, not recognizing that as my most immediate link, the most influencing contributor to my existence, whether I wished it so or not, I had to understand him so as not to become him. Because, unlike the mayfly, I can look back and I can comprehend the weight of all that I have inherited and all that I can be, and this continues to cripple me. It would seem that I am not the first to be so concerned with the question of metamorphosis. As early as AD 8, Ovid wrote an Epic poem recounting tales from Roman and Greek mythology in which men were transformed into werewolves and women into trees. Ovid named this epic Metamorphoses, from the Greek word meaning transformations, now widely regarded as a masterpiece of Golden Age Latin literature. Later, as scientists observed nature and its wondrous transformations, they would borrow the title of Ovid's Epic poem and apply it to biology. Similarly, although two thousand years later, Kafka would write The Metamorphosis, also widely regarded by many as a seminal piece of 20th century literature. Except Kafka would transmogrify the concrete meaning of metamorphosis into a more abstract concern, pertaining to society and the individual.  Both these texts presently occupy privileged positions within our society and continue to exert their influence on western culture. It is hard to say why they do and why people are so interested by them, but it strikes me that at our core, there is a fascination with the ability to change.

     Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.

     I discovered this maxim only recently, and was most in debt to Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier for its creation. Antoine Lavoisier was a quite remarkable mind. Regarded by many as the father of modern chemistry, he can lay claim to the naming of hydrogen and oxygen and to the formulation of the metric system, not to mention the first extensive list of elements. He had even passed the bar exam, although he did not practice law. It is no wonder that Joseph-Louis Lagrange later pronounced: it took them only an instant to cut off his head, but France may not produce another such head in a century. Little over a year later, Antoine Lavoisier was exonerated by the French government and his reputation restored, although his head could not be. Yet, it is only now as I research his past that I find that he never said the maxim. In fact, he only rephrased the words of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in his Elementary Treaty of Chemistry 1789. Antoine Lavoisier's original quote was far longer, almost half a page in length and thus greatly lacking the power that comes from brevity. Nonetheless, through the years, in schools and classrooms, from mouth to mouth, Antoine Lavoisier's maxim has metamorphosed. Some would be concerned or even affronted by having words attributed to them that they had never in fact said, but it strikes me as poignantly serendipitous. Antoine Lavoisier was widely known to have never discovered any new substances or to have created any new apparatus. He was instead a theorist building upon the lineage of others. I do not think he would have any objections to the transformation of his work, because he examined and apprenticed the flow and inheritance of all things changing and connecting to one another.

     In 1774 building, as he was known for, on the work of men such as Mikhail Lomonosov, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Black, Antoine Lavoisier proved, most crucially, that although matter may change its shape or form, its mass always remains the same. This astounding fact leads us, once again, to the irrefutable 1st law of thermodynamics. All things change but remain the same; everything is preserved. The Palingenia longicauda will spend forty-five days to transform from an egg to a larvae, then a further three years in which it will moult its exoskeleton up to thirty times. Eventually, when they can emerge from the river, they must transform a further two times from sub-adult to a fully-fledged adult.

     Through all these stages of metamorphosis, their unique genetic code will remain the same, utterly unaltered. They will be both at once the same and yet different.

     Perhaps it was this double gesture that moved inside me when, on the 31st of January 2012, my sister called me to tell me that my father had a collapsed lung and was in hospital. I felt strangely still, cold even.  Shortly after, my mother phoned and stated that it could be worse than first thought. Then like a desolate well left untapped for decades, I spluttered into life and tears overwhelmed me in childlike suffering. Voices all around me urged me to visit him, for the usual reasons in moments of such consequences. And for all the above I did, but as we drove down from Norwich to London, I could not help but sense a more acute reason was at play. His shadow still loomed over me, and above all my writing; if he were to die now, then there would be no way in which I could rid myself of his silhouette. It would contort itself into me and withhold me from my metamorphosis; a struggle that could not be accomplished without probing the root defects in his being.

     He was still fat, but somehow it was more macabre in that sterile bed half raised towards the ceiling, pulling at the thin hospital garment that exposed his hairy underbelly. Tubes extended out towards blinking machines, keeping him human with none of his humanity. A large orange stain of betadine thickened his chest. Then he saw me and wrenched the mask from his face, pure oxygen spraying his eyes as a machine buzzed wildly in alarm. He made some joke and called me son. The later was the only part of his slurred, rattling, oxygen deprived speech, that I could comprehend. A nurse interrupted, demanding he reattach the mask, and despite his collapsed lung, despite the presence of his prodigal son, despite his increasing decrepitude, he argued. He summoned the little air he had remaining in his distorted right lung and charged it emphatically towards yet another argument. I urged him to stop and he did. There was much I wanted to discuss and much I wanted to ask, but it quickly became apparent that nothing had changed. My pain and love quickly transformed into anger and despair, there were no answers with this man, only accusations. He expelled an astonishing amount of energy, in rattling off opinions and scathing attacks on everyone, from his friends to the doctors that had kept him alive. He showed little interest in my writing and only persisted in trying to show me his new business card, the deck was full. As I flicked through it and read its vague job description, I sighed as I had when watching him disappear on the 156. Only this time the sigh was not made in fear or angst but in realisation. The stars had exploded, imparting in him the essentials needed for life; a cloud of gas had collapsed in on itself to form the planet he was now fortunate enough to inhabit; his one remaining lung beat with the energy of a millennia and with it all he had produced, in me, his continuation of the project; but he was incapable of bearing witness to any of it. He was instead far more interested in recounting the story of a politician whom he had publicly belittled before I had even undergone spermatogenesis. I left him that day, to stagnate and bark out opinions to those paid to suffer them.

 

Epilogue

 

     Today, we know of more than a million species of insects who undergo some form of metamorphosis, an ability they discovered some 300 million years ago. However, metamorphosis is even more ancient than insects, existing long before: in crustaceans, amphibians and marine invertebrates. It is a phenomenal process that acts in us in a most peculiar way. Thomas Brown attempted to mediate this in Religio Medici which he wrote in 1634, although it was not to be published in pirate form for a further decade; who wonders not at the operation of two souls in those little bodies. Who indeed, because we are intrinsically the most metamorphic of creatures, constantly building and destroying, raising great towers of babel all around us through which to see the nebulous expanse that created us. We humans seek out change; no one forced the potion upon Dr Jekyll so that Mr Hyde could emerge. It was a self-inflicted curiosity. A curiosity my father seemed always to be lacking, living constantly in fear of change, in fear of failure and most of all the blank page. He could not perceive that we are the authors of own transformation. Unlike the mayfly, caterpillar, or the tadpole, we can choose to metamorphose into things as yet unknown because our unique genetic code has gifted us with the most metamorphic of tools, our brains. A brain that allows us, unlike any other creature to wonder, to lament the loss of what we once were and to fear what we are becoming and yet walk on, beset on all sides by ourselves.

     Perhaps this is why my dad was so enamoured with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, as am I. I had little choice, what with my father sitting beside my bed as a child, reading Wilde’s sumptuous prose with eloquence, in that baritone voice of his. Since then though, I have realised that we loved this book for quite different reasons.  My dad was in essence Dorian Gray, terrified of change as Dorian was of ageing. My father's blank manuscripts were to him as the portrait was to Dorian. Here though, I feel my father missed the truth captured in Dorian's grotesque portrait. A truth that rears up at me constantly like the immortal tides of the ocean crashing against land. The portrait was all that Dorian left behind. It was his only inheritance to those that would come after, to those who would lie in bed as their father read them the story of Dorian Gray. A story that seized my being and demanded I create, that I leave something of some inheritance to those that would come after me. That I must write where my father could not because I have my own unique genetic code. A genetic code with such a gargantuan amount of possible permutations, which could have altered my being so irrevocably; that there are not enough atoms in the observable universe in which to write the figure. Such a fact demands that I must metamorphose my DNA into the art of literature. Only then can I affirm my existence in the knowledge that I have left my own unique inheritance behind; ars longa, vita brevis.

     Ovid wrote in his epilogue to Metamorphoses: now stands my task accomplished, such a work as not the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword nor the devouring ages can destroy. In this knowledge, Ovid was able to pass over and into the cosmic exchange of carbon. I only wish that I too will dissipate into the effervescent plains of energy, at peace with my final transformation; re-emerging, as I will, into something as of yet unknown but perhaps obtaining moksha.