Nothing in Evolution Makes Sense Except in the Light of Phylogeny

Pre-Note:

I wrote this blog/essay in February, before our lives were so radically changed by COVID-19. There is much to say about that, and the way this crisis has made it manifest that “humanity” has become inextricable from “capital” in the most devastating way. If economies crumble in a matter of days or weeks, we might take that as evidence that our models of “growth” are all wrong. But I want to meditate for a minute on viruses and evolution, since animal evolution and our genetic inheritances have been haunting much of my writing for the past five years, and is what the blog below swirls around.

At first, I thought the panic around novel coronavirus and death was a kind of steam-letting response, since we don’t seem to be capable, en masse, of feeling urgency about the realities of global warming, mass extinctions, and climate refugees. We’ve had every reason to be on red alert, to radically change the way we live for a long time now, but, maybe because global warming seems too big to change (it is, unless corporations and governments are also held massively accountable), we’ve mostly just moaned about it or ignored it. We’ve had every reason to panic, and now we have something we can feel personally, rather than only globally, panicked about.

As planes have been grounded and people have stopped driving to work or school, there have been dramatic decreases in carbon dioxide emissions over all industrial regions and major cities of the world, a decrescence visible from space. We could talk about deaths from particulate matter and air pollution (the WHO estimates about 4 million a year). Is this a shift that shows us what’s possible?

I don’t want to make light of COVID-19 dangers and deaths. But I do want to remember that viruses are an ancient form. I can’t say “life” form, since they inhabit an in-between state, as thresholdy and fascinating as vampires and zombies, teenagers and seeds. And they have had a lot to say about who we are, changing the course of evolution in their copying of DNA, wiping out swathes of life, and stimulating antibody creation. We know the hideous ways they’ve been used as weapons of empire and terror (think small pox-laced blankets). Some scientists say they predate LUCA (not an Italian boy, but the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor—meaning an entity who was the common genetic ancestor of all living things). “[V]iruses in the ocean outnumber all other organisms and … their influence on marine communities may have large-scale effects on the composition of the atmosphere,” writes virologist Michael Emerman, who reminds us that we are carrying around ancient relics of viral infections in our DNA—you are walking around with viral fossils in your cells now.

***

“Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of phylogeny”[1]

I have always loved animals. I have probably also always loved trees. In 1970s California, even a kid from Section 8 housing (me) could roam through a field, brushing against the fennel, wrapping fingers with Monarch larvae for fine jewelry, stomp in piles of eucalyptus litter, releasing luxuriant, combustible oils in tufts of brain-exploding smell. My work as a poet has drawn on these deep stores of being-with the living non-human. Yet even as a child, I was aware of extinctions, fragilities of land use, territorial boundaries. My pleasure came with pain.

Later, as a student at the local community college, I was introduced to the scientists’ systems of thought that made sense of nature. As a kid who’d dropped out of high school, a first-gen college student, it was intoxicating to be introduced to such powerful structures, scaffoldings from which to understand the world around me. I had a particularly inspiring biology teacher, John Matsui[2], who excited us with lectures that mixed literature and creatures.

I still have a weakness for these systems of naming and categorizing, for this kataphatic drive to say what we see. But the dark twin of the kataphatic (saying what is there) is that other things are rendered invisible or mute. When things are unseen or silenced, they are ripe for being ripped off. Now all I can see is how the making of these knowledge systems has not only failed us but trapped us. In screaming evidence before us in every corner is the devastating colonization of nature and of thought. Bees, bears, elephants… I’ve been on a bioluminescence jag, but the history of the study of creatures who make their own light is filled with tales of men slashing, shredding, and severing them to find out how they work.

How do we continue to have faith in human language or actions? How do we stay with the struggle and engage joy?

What is poetry for? For changing minds? For grieving? For tearing everything down? We already know that poetry has not been able to win elections, and elections have very real consequences on resource allocations, on human and other lives. One of poetry’s most important roles now is to signal, to shout joy. Yeah. I do, I do, want to snout it out like a bear after ants. Poetry is one of the only places for safely liberatory pleasures.

Now more than ever, what poetry is for is remaining in the possibility of all wildness, in the mad proliferation of meaning that RESISTS a monocular reality that current and past and future systems of power impose. You can’t BUY anything with it; you can’t SELL anything in it. It is its own private revolution, word by word. It resists at the level of reality, which also means at the level of syntax and meaning-making. It rips the tawdry faux-luxe tapestry off the current moment and shows me what I really want to pant for, prod, desire, lick, hear, ear.

What I am concerned with at the moment is how to further decolonize the eco-poem. I’m working on a long project, this one inspired (in the first place, at the poem’s birth-moment) by an amphibian. I was taking part in Djerassi’s Scientific Delirium Madness residency[3], and I was watching salamanders in the woods. I began to think about phylogeny, inheritances from non-human animals that allow me to type this (eg., wrists, brain, etc., first invented by other animals). But everywhere I look in a book, I find, along with knowledge that blows my mind, some scientist who’s killed something, fucked something up, advocated for something horrible. The man who made all those beautiful drawings of diatoms? A eugenicist. So, how does the poem that engages scientific thought about the world continue to decolonize?

The past I want to evoke is an animal past, full of inventions by non-humans, where the writing is in the body, not just in the book. Here, I read in the acorn worm the first stirrings of a heart. In the chimp of course our hands. Jellyfish? Eyes, though not exactly ours. The future I want to invoke is one in which we honor our biological debts.

The poem-project is called Your Kingdom, and it is not the territory owned by the king I’m talking about, but the Animal one, the kingdom you co-inhabit with nearly 9 million other species. What follows is an excerpt from the opening essay-poem.

***

One July, among the California redwoods, I watched a fire-colored salamander lumber over a log, and so my mind was ignited to meditate on shoulder girdles. Amphibians invented them.

In the mid nineteenth century the German biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term phylogeny to contain the notion of the organismal lineages we all passed through. You too may have admired his drawings of diatoms, shells, jellyfish, radiolarians and spiders he sketched to describe life on earth;

 

phyla (φυλή): tribe, stem, branch

geny (γεν): born, birth

Phylogeny: all the plants who grew to be you. All the animals who did. I don’t mean because you were the telos causa, the reason or end-result, and I don’t mean because you ate them. I mean because they invented earth. Eventually they also invented you.

They twisted and turned and licked and hissed and allowed you to exist.

Phylogeny, a word I loved, was invented by a man who believed in eugenics (a word in turn invented by a man who invented the term “nature vs. nurture”).

eu (ευ): good, well

geny (γεν): birth, born

ecology, phylum, protista

are also words first made in Haeckel’s mounding mouth.

Here I am at the bottom of Haeckel’s World-Riddle. Every word I utter haunted. In conflict with all the animals.

Can anything ever be held away from human tongues?

Some hunters, in ritual, sidewaysed the names

for bears (arktos, ursus), a

taboo on naming what is wild.

Instead of bear, a hunter said the brown one; honey-eater; good-calf; honey-pig.

As soon as a bear

                          crept out of a word, a word

                          did its work

to erase the bear.

 

The animals’ names “light up in crackling flames”.

Names mane & unmane.

Now we are rolling around on earth draping our tongues in Latin things.

We always said the bird doesn’t care what you call it.

 

That’s one way I’m different from a bird.