I celebrated the New Year on the roof of a Lake Union live-aboard, supervised by a moon sunk in an ash-splash of gray clouds. I poured champagne on my shoes– prost!– and got home to find a kitchen disaster (the kitchen’s air barbecued, a pot left on the burner, the soup inside its own ash-splash). Happy 2010! Not surprisingly, crisis and good judgment have been on my mind in the new year.
So, American readers: who makes you wave the flag?
The Descendents had Otis Redding and Mark Twain. I love our country’s unbeholdenness, our view of nature– free of history, rich with allegory– so I have, this week, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Concordian, Transcendentalist) and S.E. Luria (adoptee, from Turin to Bloomington) to make me proud I’m American.
Echoes (twig glimpsed in branching river, seasons in a life) consoled Emerson. Nature points the astronomer, paleontologist and poet past the conditional world of appearances toward the singular, listening Soul of the divine. Art “concentrates radiance on one point“; at sunrise “the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning mind.” It’s rich stuff: in reason’s “momentary grasp of the sceptre,” the genius discovers the echoes of his own mind and its pure abstractions in nature.
I missed Emerson, except for a notional self-reliance, in high school; around the same time, I learned to beat my head against the scientific method.
Or would that be the scientific leap? Emerson would, I’m sure, have swooned for the dashing story in S.E. Luria‘s autobiography A Slot Machine, a Broken Test Tube. Without X-ray crystallography, a decade before Watson and Crick established DNA’s helical structure (a consoling echo), Luria (transplanted to Bloomington, struggling with English) used a slot machine to open the science of biochemical genetics.
How? Well, no one had seen a gene yet. The early 40’s dogma was that bacteria were too primitive to have genes, so that their apparent hereditary changes had to be mere chemistry. Any bacterium which survived being fed a lethal bacteriophage must have had resistance induced by contact with the phage, not from its own natural variation.
Luria doubted this. Watching a colleague at a faculty dance lose dimes to a slot machine, he heard an echo. If naturally-appearing mutations could be passed on in fruit flies or bread mold (the last decade’s discoveries), why not bacteria?
Luria’s mind leapt something like this: if a bacterium’s survival was a matter of induced resistance, the number of resistant bacteria would depend only on the number of total bacteria. In the same way, an unprogrammed slot machine gives back a stable number of coins (say, a five-dime win every fifty pulls) over time.
But, if resistance was acquired through natural mutation, the number of resistant bacteria would depend on the number of generations the mutants had had to breed. In one petri dish, there’d be no survivors; in another, there’d be a jackpot, as one resistant parent split into two, then four, then eight… cha-ching!
Luria chose the right metaphor. After a fraught twenty-four hours (“it was a hard Sunday to live through”) waiting for his cultures, he had population booms to prove that spontaneous mutations arose in bacteria, a huge step forward for genetics. A Nobel Prize and everything after in the study of genes followed.
In “The American Scholar,” Emerson describes genius as transmuting experience into thought, “a strange process… as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin”: seeing past conditional appearances into a shining permanent relation. The mind’s “manufacture goes forward at all hours.” He calls inspiration an “instantaneous instreaming,” a candidate for my favorite phrase of the new year.
Nature is always large enough to be seen cleanly– larger than humanity, but permeated by our thought. The “frail and weary weed” of appearances (Michelangelo) diverts us from the “immortal necessary uncreated natures” which Ideas are. Now I have to go to wipe the smoke off my kitchen walls. Prost!