Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I hear that forsaken minor tonight, canonically, at arm's length of three decades. I hear the awful, magnificently patient structure of the Darwinian revolution, more shattering than the sum of its molecular evidence. The reduction of the once animist world has thrown the human spirit into tailspin anxiety, deprived it of soul, except for the soul's distress. Convinced of the facts, I still cannot accommodate, make room in my heart for indifferent statistics. Even accepting, I am as mythless, as bitterly stripped as those who deny the evidence.

Dozing in and out of sleep to talk radio, I hear a recent poll claiming that a bare 9 percent of Americans accept evolution. Yet this debate — amazingly still raging — about the origin of wealth beyond conception is irrelevant. It doesn't matter anymore whether a fraction of the race splits off, chooses to return to a child's Eden. It doesn't matter if 91 percent of my countrymen continue to insist that species were created by father, so long as the entire planet instantly unites in acknowledging that they are, right now, being destroyed chaotically by child. Conservatively: several thousand species extinct a year. Instant, universal acknowledgment is impossible. In the hundred acres of rain forest destroyed each minute I write this, the earth loses species not yet even described in the catalog.

The arbitrarily of our origin cuts us adrift, slack as a severed marionette. In this pivotal moment of development's first dissonance, we are too stunned to see that we are driving the life crystal back into inertness, erasing the rare hypotheticals it took excruciating convolution of chance eons to propose. The situation is hopeless, huge, advanced beyond addressing. Why do I even bother to put this down? No reason. The same reason the gene in me keeps up its random postulate.

"The universe was not pregnant with life," my friend Monod writes, "nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game." The entire, endlessly expandable text, "the replicative structure of DNA: that registry of chance, that tone-deaf conservatory where the noise is preserved along with the music," is a fluke lottery we are losing, rubbing out by the minute. Awful, chromatic awareness fills me with a curatorial resolve. "Think of it," another friend once said. "The proper response ought not to be distress at all. We should feel dumb amazement. Incredulous, gasping gratitude that we've landed the chance at all, the outside chance to be able to comprehend, to save any fraction of it."

D. Heredity

In the last, delicious twist, the width of the restless species catalog depends on the ability of traits to persist in stillness. Evolution is the exception, stability the rule. Variation depends on a larger invariability to begin its trip from home. Procreation is not creative per se. Sex is easily accomplished by anyone with a high school equivalence certificate. I did it myself once, with help. The resulting product, except in exceptional cases, is a rearrangement of existing qualities. Innovation lies beyond even the most conscientious parent.

My mother bore three children, low for the baby boom. She arranged to interleave them by sex, feeling a good mix to be better for development. My father, bravely self-educated, lectured her endlessly about the X and Y chromosomes, how sex determination sat in the male's gamete; she had no say in the matter. She replied, "Yes, dear," and went about sleeping on her left side to make a girl and her right for a boy. The idea that the left ovary produced girls and the right boys had been passed down in her family for generations. No controls, no sample mean. The children were all the empirical evidence she needed. My father calculated the probability of her black magic: one out of eight, impressive but not conclusive. My mother offered to make it one out of sixteen anytime my father was man enough to try.

Now they're both dead. The constituent commands that assembled them — voice, intelligence, even those aggregates of obstinacy and superstition — are cut loose, alleles still intact in daughters, ready for another experiment, another change-partners. What exactly is lost, destroyed, with an individual's death? Just a permutation put to rest. A combination, devastating, never to be reassembled. Its elements remain: eyes, voice, mother, father.

Meiosis, necrosis: the arcs of the ancient cycle of recirculation I'm caught in for good. Both carry on, mesmerized, churning out tireless rearrangements on the first little nitrogen, methane, lightning spark. Carry on, despite long since filling the entire surface of the earth with velvet and scum, as if some fabulous combination were just around the next chromosomal bend, waiting to be revealed. But there is no revelation. Only endless surplus versus harm.

To the population, the gene, birth and death carry no last word. Only in the chest of the next of kin does that partnership make any inroads. Slow, conservative, migratory. Once, a colt, I spoke that language. I've forgotten it all, the years I spent hungry and astonished, nights by flashlight over the illustrated encyclopedia describing mysterious, interlocked systems — water cycle, nitrogen fixation, circulation of blood, food chain. Winter weekends, whole summers out in the woods, in empty lots, in our immense, dark backyard, examining the scat of rabbits, catching bizarre electrical arthropoda in jars, convinced, sensing firsthand the terrible expanse of the place.

I remembered it this morning, to ruinous expense, so long after first elaborating the thought. It suddenly was not enough to rehash natural selection. I had to go put my hands on the gene, on evolving population, invariant heredity. I knew it would cost, that my carefully guarded nest egg would suffer. I boarded the inbound, not knowing what part of the unclassífiable, branching catalog I was after, but knowing that the biome was midtown. I found myself on the stairs to the Met, but could not bring myself to go in. Not without the one I once arranged to meet there, should we ever be separated.

Instead, I walked back through the living park and on to 53rd, the Museum of Modern Art. Time to see how Brueghel had evolved, survived, passed down to my own generation. All morning I discovered again that every observer's notebook, every act of seeing even the harshest, most politically indicting, alienated, abstract, cynical acrylic, is a frightened, desperate, amazed recapitulation of the natural kingdom. More: an effort to mimic it. Always inexhaustibly to recombine, to classify.

I stood in front of Paul Klee's Twittering Machine, a created thing at once both mechanism and inexplicable bird. It had been so long since I'd looked at anything but genetics that the sleight of hand seemed crammed with associations. I thought of Emily Dickinson's secret reaction to Darwin, five years after the publication of the Origin. Split the Lark — and you'll find the Music. Loose the Flood — you shall find it patent. Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?

On the train back, I knew it would have to be poetry for me, as well. I scribbled my fllle de Klee on the back of a MOMA flyer:

star start itself seeds blueprint climb: egg alone and only gear for eatrock lichen or unlacing umbel veil, chance, the sole mode assay-able: tumult of twittering ovation is all word forward can enlist to move embryo to ember, or drive cold scale from first bird.

It smacks of effusion and will embarrass me by next week. It contributes less than nothing to my understanding of Ressler's aborted bid for love, discovery, the Swedish Sweepstakes. But as poetry, it doesn't have to be good. It only has to contain a testable guess about being alive, the incomprehensible ability.

Back in my apartment I remember two things I long ago lost words for. The paradoxical breakout of life from mere preservation to runaway self-threat depends on two subtle phenomena. First, information represented in a certain way emerges as instruction. As in the gene, all observation is a command to observe. Dr. Ressler once showed me how an ordinary drinking glass is a data structure informing liquid where to go. The information in the life molecule is a similar vessel, informing itself how to describe the condition it finds itself in.