Life Force

June 6 2018

So, even NASA clean rooms

are contaminated.

Because bacteria have learned to eat

the hissing liquids, and blistering suds

the frothing foams, and caustic scrub

we were certain killed.

How clever

uncanny

unstoppable.

The life force

pushing ever outward,

like a heated gas

irresistibly expanding,

a mushroom cloud

billowing up, and out.

An animating God,

who breathes into life

and decrees it sacred.

Bacteria in rocks, volcanoes

the abyssal deep.

The dry Atacama

blasted by sun,

among our cells, and in our blood.

Exported to space

on the sleek metallic skin

of moon-landing rovers

and rockets to Mars.

Metastatic life

colonizing this blue and green planet

with its imperative to grow

couple

survive,

filling the place

until even the most extreme niche

is occupied.

If you've ever tried to kill

you know what I mean.

The crunch

of the hard coat

of the small black ant

zig-zagging blindly past;

the identical clones

who swarm in its place.

The man, gasping for breath

who simply refuses to die

no matter how battered and beaten and bled;

the faraway look in his eyes,

as consciousness flickers

and the death grip

pulls you frantically in.

The bolt to the brain comes closest.

The efficiency

of the killing floor,

when the big animal's legs

collapse like a marionette's,

and the dead weight of the carcass

seems even heavier.

Rigor mortis meat

with its pungent adrenaline edge.

But life persists.

The living consuming the dead.

Malignant growth, for its own sake

exponentially outward.

Here's a link to the article, by the Atlantic's outstanding science correspondent Ed Yong, that inspired this poem:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/bacteria-can-eat-the-cleaning-products-nasa-uses-to-sterilize-its-spaceships/562016/

On reading this, I was impressed by how indomitable life is.

And also, by nature, how malignant it is: like a metastatic cancer, growing until it outgrows its substrate, and for no reason other than the imperative of growth.**

And, by analogy, our own species: spreading relentlessly over this rare and precious planet like some Malthusian nightmare, until we will have destroyed it, and ourselves, with our insatiable appetite and extravagant waste.

So I suppose this poem is both an environmentalist's screed and a misanthrope's indulgence. With a little nod to the inner vegetarian, who wags his accusing finger every time he finds me eating meat. But no, it is not autobiographical: I have never tried to kill, except for the odd ant and biting insect!

As you can see by the date of my last post, it seems as if I haven't written forever. Amend that; I haven't written poetry forever. But there is a certain writing bug than can't be expiated via letters, and I had been hoping some inspiration would strike. So it was nice when I felt a little jolt after reading this article. But then I sat down, wrote a lousy few lines, and decided I wasn't feeling it. It was as I started to get up that another first line came, and suddenly I was into it, and that old pleasurable experience returned:  I lost track of time; and the writing came almost automatically, as if I were taking dictation and not composing. After being away from it for awhile, it definitely felt similar to exercising when you've gotten a little out of shape: hard at first, but then the muscle memory and the residue of training soon get you back up to speed.

** I realize that reducing all living things to a malignant imperative to grow would seem to demean our humanity, since we are certainly among the living. After all, we humans are much more than a mindless mass of exponentially growing cells; we have consciousness. Conscious not in terms of a state of wakefulness, but in the sense of self-awareness and the boundary of ego and and a desire for meaning. Not to mention the awareness of our own mortality! But we are the exception. Because the vast majority of living things are essentially automatons, guided by the simple algorithm of survival and reproduction, and to whom consciousness is of only limited use – an evolutionary innovation that enabled the increasingly complex systems of big multicellular organisms to interact with the outer world. Of course, this could only be the point of view of someone who is very reductionist about the great mystery of consciousness: believing that the mind and brain are one; and that consciousness resides in that 3 lb mass of protoplasm, not some hovering or indestructible or divinely created soul.