Death in a world of 7 billion
Words
Drone on and on
Little pieces of property
Assasinate a Human Being
Like too many thoughts
To consume in an email
My distant Pride
Diminished Redemption
*”Tell him,” the Colonel said, “that a person doesn’t die when he should, but when he can.”
*Quote from “One Hundred Years Of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*Origin of fiction? (family) Who am I? (inalienable right to privacy) Mixed up Intentions? (dreams) Chosen One? (friend) Why am I? (others) Theoretical Depression? (religion and philosophy) Most Sane Environment? (work) Management of Others? (politics and religion) Mind vs Body Confusion? (individualism) The Most Misunderstood Concept Dreamed by Human Beings? (freedom) Better than Religion and Philosophy? (love) Altruism? (medicine) Most Ignored and Avoided? (spare time and responsibility) Confused with Freedom? (auto-mobile) Individualism? (fashion) Art? (see who I am) Rational Thought? (see freedom) Redemption? (read from *)
John Dufresne says, “There’s not enough room in here. Let’s go outside.”
I followd him out of my trailer, the aluminum 1958 ten-by-fifty Nashua I inhabited in college. Except we’re on a large lot, big cottonwoods crowding the fence line, mountains haunting the Oklahoma sky.
“So,” I insist, “I’m focusing on the psychology of my characters, through their actions, not just dialogue.”
“There’s more to it than the character’s psychology.” John put my manuscript on a fence post and popped a beer. I know he’s here to help me become a better writer.
“How the characters react with others, including the reader, how does she or he struggle to overcome, not just ‘I think I remember an uncle touched me when I was eleven, and I’ve never gotten over it.”
“Sure, I mean, well, that’s all part of what I mean.” John’s always reminded me of a big teddy bear, but older; instead of looking faded and childish, it got gray and smart, somehow grew up more than I did.
I looked around, it had been a long time since I’d been here. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was more a feeling that this place didn’t exist anymore, at least not for anyone else.
“And I’ve been playing with time.”
“I can see that. You always been linear. As if you didn’t realize a moment passed wasn’t a lost opportunity.”
“But….” I hesitated, not wanting to reverse any progress I might have made. The sky grayed, the mountains faded. I wasn’t sure if a storm was rolling in or maybe it was late afternoon. John lit the Habachi, the same one I’d used to catch the pecan tree on fire in 1979. Almost lost the Nashua, orange curtains and all. Except that night it was snowing. Now I hadn’t thought about the temperature at all.
“Think of a clock that can jump around.”
“Like God,” I said.
“Why not? You’re in control.”
I wondered why I wasn’t drinking a beer. Maybe it wasn’t polite, putting words into John’s mouth.
Then I woke up.
Alas! My fears of the inevitable demise of maleness allayed. The Y chromosone is not fading away.
A recent study determined the Y chromosone, that bastion of evolution that rendomly determines maleness in the genetic reproductive process, has stablized. Twenty-nine million years ago.
Human knowledge. Design vs Chance. Love. Sex. We’ve got a novel here.
As much as I believe there is no evidence of a giant clock-maker lording over us, even as science explains the workings of the clock in ever-increasing detail, I do not think sceintific method will ever be the vehicle to close the clock-maker down.
X and Y chromosones swap genes before producing sperm and egg in a fantastic example of natural selection. This swapping insures variation and diversity within species, a necessary ingredient for health and survival. So far, so good. In any process involving chance, ‘mistakes’ will occur, mutations leading to dead-ends and hopefully more successful versions. At times when X and Y dropped off chunks of DNA to swap, portions would flip the wrong way when patching back in, such that the X, in this instance, could no longer attach to these portions. Over time, these unusable chunks formed a kind of protective fence around the male-determining genes.
When genes don’t get used, aren’t subject to the process of variation, they are eventually jettisoned. Thus the Y shrank from roughly equivalent in size (1000 or so genes) to the X to… 19, plus another 8 ‘maleness’ genes that leapt on board; 27 total, while X stablized at 790 or so.
Is Y shrinking to irrelevance? Here’s where science and the state of human knowledge apply. The study says Y stabilized 29 million years ago.
My male compatriots and I may be simpler, but we’re not going away. (Sounds familiar, but that’s a political discussion.)
Swapping genes could be the origin of Sex and Love. Natural attraction. The now well documented mechanics of docks and ports, if you will, allowing one gene, enzyme, virus, etc., to attach to another an analogy to male and femal sex organs. Little titillations repeated microscopically millions of times within us all, manifesting chemical and emotional behaviors, cultural responses, taboos, dating rituals, laws, prejudices, silliness; like being transfixed by smooth bronze skin as an accidental effect of skin protection.
Love. X and Y need each other (the possibility of x evolving some other mechanism for aquiring/applying maleness seems plausible, the reverse not so much.) It’s all an accident, chance, natural selection, another nail in the edifice of evolution.
Unless…. I just can’t get completely beyond, when I think about X and Y dropping selected chunks of DNA in cooperation with each other, patching back together, stabilizing (how long’s that gonna last. We’re going away or becoming something else at some point,) my mind thinks as if it’s not random (Kant.) All these mechanics could have evolved per chance, and science insists this is a better explanation than the clock-maker. Science’s method and success of the method insist on it, and I agree that’s the best way to function, recognizing Science’s built-in caveat of incompleteness. But my mind keeps thinking X and Y are behaving for a purpose- to reproduce and survive; the work ethic of nature.
Y do you do what you do?
As aside; there’s something about the inherent contradiction of genes making themselves un-usable for their designed purpose (ah, look at the language,) yet serving a positive function (dropping off, patching incorrectly, forming a fence to protect Y,) and then being jettisoned because they are not being swapped anymore, that mirrors the inherent contradictions that each of us humans are. (Humans are the alien beings. We constantly strive to circumvent living in nature, driven to live artificial lives.)
Love, sex, conflict, natural selection, and the clock-maker, evolving for survival.
Y?
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