Presentation Q1-4
Presented on: Saturday, January 24, 2015
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Future and The New Past
Presentation 4 of 52
Presentation 1-4
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Transcript:
We come to the fourth presentation of 2015. And 2015 is distinct from 2014 because 2014 was a smash up of many incommensurates and 2015 is the beginning of the winnowing to bring about a more valid preparation for the future. Part of the winnowing is the process by which life selects itself in natural selection to evolve. And that the evolution involves a way that has a tuning capacity. It has a fork. It has that kind of structure built into the very process, into the very system of the way in which life evolves.
One of the, uh, very profound qualities of this, um, is briefly explained in a couple of sentences in the book that we have used for the first couple of presentations in 2015 by James C. Wang. There are Chinese Americans now in every field. And Wang is with the Cold Spring Harbor Group. This is published by Cold Spring Harbor Press, uh, out on Long Island in New York City. And it is the brainchild of James D. Watson. And his ability to go far beyond the bratty young man boyish developer with Crick of the structure of the Double Helix. This volume by James C. Wang published just a few years ago, 2009, Untangling the Double Helix DNA Entanglement and the Action of DNA Topoisomerases.
Uh, the suffix A's is like a genetic fluid by which the process of DNA replication will be ensured to continue. And Topo is from the mathematical sense of an overlaying map, a topology is one of the great branches of modern mathematics. And so, a Topoisomerase being a single variant of something. And so, this is the way in which Topoisomerases operate in the double helix because its entanglement has a linear complexity in the double helixes. This is why they coil in helical fashion, but in paired helical fashions, double helix. And it is this coiling that has an exceeding quality of linearity in that there is a super coiling of the DNA. And especially in replication, the DNA must have its selection into definiteness. In order then to reproduce, it has to split. It has to become two strands. And each of those child strands like the parent double helix will engender its complement, its symmetry, its other. And this way you get two. You get two cells instead of one. And those two become four. And those four become eight. And so, you have a development not just in linearity but in powers of paired-ness. In powers of symmetry.
The symmetry comes from the universe because there is paradise in inorganic materia, uh, in the universe. It may be a universe, but, um, there is a symmetricality, a symmetry to the way in which atomic structures become molecules, especially, um, have a paired-ness in symmetry. And in life in organic matter by the time you get to the double helix, you have a super coiling that occurs.
And one of the telling little couple of sentences. This is page 171 in Wang's, uh, 2009 volume Positive Super Coiling Replication Fork Regression and Lesion Bypass,
A replication fork and we will run into the situation again and again. One of the illustrations on page 102 in a diagram are a replication forks, in a blue and in black. And if you can concentrate on it just for a second, just to show that what is occurring here is a structural, endemic quality of DNA in its double helix when it replicates. And so, the development, the replication. And notice that the replication is by paired ness, as we would say in mathematics. It's, uh, by squares. Two squared is four. Four squared would be 16. But it is in the paired ness in a linearity that initially gives the platform, the base, by which the structure will be able to accept information and distribute that information in its structure in such a way that it is replicable.
Um, the term in genetics would be its translational. It's able to translate itself and one of the arch structures in that is not the DNA but the RNA. The replicating Di nucleic acid. It is the third quality; Uh, one would say in ancient hermetic wisdom it's a resolving third. When one has a paired ness of male and female, one has a resolving third of the child. One has this kind of atomic molecular structure to the way in which organic materia in life continue. It's called evolution. If one takes a very interesting quality, uh, to heart on page...just skipping over for just a second. Wang on page 81 gives the double helix of the DNA, but in a horizontal, in a linear fashion. And in a horizontal fashion, it is the onwards business of organic life. If you tilt it to the vertical, it is the upwardness of organic life. The old hermetic motto used quite often in the 20th century, one of the great, uh, aficionados of it was my friend, the great science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, whose motto was onwards and upwards with a diagram of the circle with the arrow. Not just for male, but for the tensor that brings a complementarity of the onwards and the upwards into a diagonal that is the tensor of life. Which is not particularly male in terms of a sign, but in terms of a symbol, it is man that mankind. Especially Homo sapiens sapiens, have that tensor quality of having a complementarity tensor, a complementary complementarity tensor of the pair of vectors of onwards, linearly, and upwards, ordinarily, into a diagonal that then is something that is beyond the limitations of the onward and beyond the expectations of the upward into something which can be fresh if it has the ability to tune the paired ness together.
And this is where positive super coiling of DNA goes into rings. And it goes into rings in such a sense that there is a pair of rings, and they are linked together without any apparent opening that would allow for them to reproduce, to become separate, and thus engender their paired complement ring. And thus, make sure that organic life has a structure that can not only live but can evolve. Because there are then possibilities with the development of the new linking. Or of the invisible way in which they separate. This is a something.
And Wang writes, "An interesting possibility. For utilizing positive super coiling involves the retraction of a replication fork when it encounters a damaged site in the unreplicated DNA ahead of the fork." So that as the translation along the line of the super coiling of the DNA occurs, it wants to occur in terms of its replication fork. But if one of the coiled super coiled rings begins to show a damage, it stops that particular aspect, that particular, um, part of the pair.
A model first postulated in 1976, suggested that when a replication or apparatus encounters a lesion on one template strand, copying of that strand would stop. Whereas synthesis along the other strand can continue for a distance past the position of the lesion in the opposing strand when the replication apparatus assembles at the fork the two newly synthesized progeny strands, which are complementary to one another because they are copied from complementarity parental strands, can pair and grow in length as the replication fork retracts. This pairing could then allow the extension of the shorter progeny strand using the longer progeny strand as the template. Subsequently, the extended strand could be used to pair with the parental strand containing the lesion, thus bypassing the lesion for continued progression of the replication fork. Super coiling, positive super coiling of DNA, ahead of the replication fork would be expected to favor the formation of the four-way junction because the retraction of the fork would relieve the over winding of the parental strands. This four-way junction sometimes dubbed the chicken foot. Chicken feet have four claws. One of them the way in which a thumb would work. Three plus four makes yes, a quaternary, a square with a resolving third able to receive an operative forth. This is extremely important.
What occurs, what is being presented here. Not taught. This is not a lecture. It's a presentation. It's not a seminar. It's a presentation. Not a webinar. It's a presentation. The dimension of operable thumbnails in an education, like a lecture, in a seminar, like a graduate education. Or a webinar, which is a planetary internet education. All education levels, no matter what they are, no matter what complexity they claim they are based upon a present moment. A presentation has a field of presence which can have an infinite number of present moments within its field.
The infinite field of consciousness envisioned as I have chosen the word wisely through a reconnoitering of civilization for many thousands of years. That infinite visionary field of consciousness is not a part of the integral cycle. It is a differential tensor that brings together the onwards of the cardinality, the upwards of the ordinality into the diagonal of the creative which is creative in the sense that it is of primordial imagery. It is not just an image of somebody's, uh, whim or daydream. Or an image of a mythic horizon. Or an image based on some kind, uh, of ritual base. Or directed by some kind of symbolic structure. It is new. It is fresh. It will have a recognition mark that brings back into play most of what is useful for the structure of life in its onwards linearity and its upwards ordinality.
And one of the first persons to designate a name for this. Uh, he named it a recognition mark. And, um, that person was Alfred Russel Wallace. Uh, in, uh, his book of 1911, uh, published here in New York, 1916. The World of Life, A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive, Mind and Ultimate Purpose. Published in New York, 1916. Uh, Alfred Russel Wallace, uh, who at the time was approaching the year in which he finally did die in 1913 at age 90.
He is always paired with Charles Darwin for the discovery of the Origin of Species in evolution. He's always the junior part of the pair. In fact, he was very gracious. Uh, there is a great biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, uh, and it's titled simply as In the Shadow, In Darwin's Shadow. Published, uh, I actually I have a signed copy here. Oxford, uh, 2002 In Darwin's Shadow the Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace, A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History. And, uh, the cover shows Charles Darwin at his, uh, table. At his Downs estate writing.
Uh, Alfred Russel Wallace was quite a different figure. He is an extraordinary figure and very gracious. His very large, beautiful book on Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications. This is, uh, published ten years after his death. This edition in London, uh, uh, 1923. And Darwinism by our friend Alfred Russel Wallace is very much alive by someone who is currently very much alive. His name is Niles Eldridge. Uh, here's, uh, a Norton, uh, publication. Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life. And, uh, Niles Eldridge is, uh, just recently retired from the, uh, Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History.
Uh, he also, uh, did a volume here, um, quite interesting. Published in 1995. Eldridge's Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory. Because Eldridge himself was part of a pair that had an operative third who discovered the theory of evolution includes in a previously invisible way that when it comes into a recognition mark pattern, like Alfred Russel Wallace's recognition marks, that something deeper about evolution becomes, to use an architectural word, salient. There is a pattern to recognition marks. Cognition has to do with the integral, with the integral cycle of nature. All the way up to the mind. Consciousness on the other hand, in a related symmetrical paired way, but distinct. Consciousness is differential. That field of conscious in its differentially is why the field is infinite. There is no upper limit to differentality whatsoever. Whereas the integral has a limit at its origin.
What is the limit of the integral at its origin? A field which is zero. Fall into presence. Forget about the present moment separating the past from the future. Giving limitation its characteristic opposites. When you evaporate, when you dissolve, that predilection for the present point. The opposition of past and future no longer hold in time. Zen like. That present point winking out. What's characteristic is that there is a continuity of zeroness. Nature as a field is a zero field but fertile. That fertile zero field is the pre origin of any cardinality or of any or ordinality whatsoever. It is zero. One can come to a present now-ness, which is precisely one. You can get to one. You can have a unity which is perfecto one. A universe. When it winks back to its sourcing, it is precisely zero. It is precisely empty, but fertile. Fertile.
Why? How can that be? Because there is a complementarity of the infinite field of differential consciousness. Loving the zero field of nature. And it is extremely characteristic of life forms to have a recognition mark of immense penetration and presence in life that this is an attraction that is sexual. It's a meeting. It's a courtship. Marriage. That is able to be fertile and produce children. It is a characteristic of super coiled DNA.
We have to understand this is being delivered in a presentation. Not a lecture. Not a seminar. Not a webinar. Not a structure of thought. It's not about human plus. It's not about aliens. It's not about something that is mysteriously revelatory that the universe is flawed therefore, the creator must be flawed. In that way you get the, uh, plus human regressions of the Gnostic instead of the creative freshness of the Hermetic. The Hermetic is able to understand that a completed circle can be emptied so that one has a vacuum. It's hermetically sealed. One of the great experiments, uh, in a previous century, some centuries ago, was a German who found a way to pump out air from two halves of a metal sphere that were just placed together. And the inner air was pumped out to become what at the time was considered a vacuum. Of course, we now have capacities to, uh, pump so much more refinedly that they were called Magdeburg spheres are, uh, actually very thin atmospheres. They just don't work in the way in which a real vacuum works, which works perfectly. They then hooked up the two halves of that sphere, joined by a vacuuming pumping out and hooked up many, many horses with riders and tried to pull it apart and couldn't do it. Something that is hermetically sealed cannot be pulled apart.
Why? Because the vacuum is an integral part of the complementarity with the fertility to the infinity. The vacuum within is similar in that sense, similar to the vacuum without. The vastness of space, so called empty space. We now know that space is full of energies, light, magnetism, etc. etc. etc. But for ordinary education, lectures, seminars, webinars, science, tech labs, working on this alien underground or post-human above ground, whatever. They all can't get it. Can't understand. Because they're still in the integral circle. And they don't understand that the other pair to that the symmetry to that is another circle that is able to escape through all of the quantum pauses in matter, in materia.
When we come back from the break, we'll take a look at the way in which the color of your parachute to escape from the completed structure is the perfection of the quantum parachute. Into differential infinity and back fresh quicker than that.
Let's take a break.
END OF SIDE ONE
Let's come back.
One of the themes that we're speaking of is the creative way in which evolution has, as Alfred Russel Wallace called them, recognition marks. When you're dealing with an integral cycle, you're dealing with cognition. Cognitive. Cognitive this. Cognitive that. And when you get down to what used to be called the nitty gritty, you get neuro. Neuro. This neuro that which is cognitive. Recognition is not cognition. Remembering is not memory. It's a theme for the second half.
I'm holding up the January 1st, 2015, issue of Icarus, which you have seen before. If you follow my presentations for some years, long years. Icarus is the International Journal of Solar System Studies. It's not studying the globe. It's not concerned with the Earth. In solar system studies we're not Earthlings, we're terrestrials because the name of this planet is Terra. And if you insist that it is global like global business. For the entire Earth. You are out of date. It is a planet named Terra that has a moon named Luna. And a star system called Sol, Solar for our Sun, for our star. And that Icarus is a journal characteristic of star system wisdom wide mankind.
This is a issue that fits into a volume. There are like two issues per year. Two issues then per volume. This is volume that brings out the number 245. So, it's been going for quite some long while.
One of its early founding editors was Carl Sagan at Cornell University. And Icarus is still edited now by editor in chief Philip D. Nicholson at Cornell. It's still based at Cornell. And one of Carl Sagan's great moments is here in, uh, an issue of Icarus. This is volume 12, number one, January 1st, 1970. This issue is 45 years before this issue. The right-hand issue 1970 January 1st. The left hand. January 1st, 2015. 45 years between them.
This issue of January 1st, 1970, is devoted to the first probe of Mars to be successful. Mariner. And Mariner is an extraordinary adventure. And here they edit, guest editorial is by Lewis Branscomb. And Branscomb was the director of the National Bureau of Standards U.S. Department of Commerce. So that space programs and space probes have been under the Department of Commerce interest and Washington, D.C. overseeing for quite some long time. He writes,
It has always been a matter of pride in good taste that a scientist publish only when he feels his data are complete, his work accomplished, and his conclusions well documented. Editors have therefore often criticized and rejected manuscripts which seem to report work half-finished or even not yet started. Often characterizing them as thinly disguised project proposals diminutive in the greatest degree. Pipe Dreams Project proposals. None withstanding this admirable tradition. It's a custom. It's a ritual. It's an integral way of delimiting. I have long felt that national scientific programs that depend on major public investments and require a large technical team deserve different treatment. In the space program, and particularly in lunar and planetary expeditions explorations the scientific knowledge gained depends on the optimal design of a single package of instruments, a payload unavailable for modification once launched from the Earth. Such ventures cannot be the product of a single individual effort. The creative and scientific talent talents, plural of hundreds, plural, of people are invested, and the outcome reflects credit on all together. All together now. And brings disappointment to the supporting public where many millions of dollars are involved, and the reputation of American science is at stake. No less than a national best effort is acceptable.
So, the publication of this precis before Mariner originally goes to Mars. Finally, in 1971 was the first time that we had a space probe that was able in NASA but of the terrestrial family planet. Carl Sagan founded the Planetary Society here in Los Angeles. In actually in Pasadena. In Pasadena, because Pasadena has one of the greatest scientific universities in the world. Caltech. California Institute of Technology. And Caltech especially, is symbiotic in a pair, in a tuning fork pair with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. J.P.L. Caltech. J.P.L. Caltech. J.P.L., they tune the origins of the space program and the thumb the resolving third that comes into play more and more in the Caltech, J.P.L., Caltech, J.P.L. tuning Fork of the evolution of the space program in America. That resolving third is Edwards Air Force Base. Also, just outside of Los Angeles. So that very early on, Los Angeles is the capital of the way in which human beings first related in terms of themselves and their technology and their imagination and the remembering of what is going not only to go on, but what can possibly go on. And not just to plan for it, but to plan openly so that it is going to be able to be viable once it is sent forth and no one else can add or subtract from it for a while. So, it has to really work very comprehensively. which Mariner worked.
So that two years later. 770 days later. Issue number, the volume is number 16 now. 1st of February 1972. And it is about the precis of the Viking missions to Mars. And what was happening with the Viking missions. The Mariner missions signaled back telemetry that was very interesting and pioneering but was extremely primitive in the sense that it was just beginning. Whereas the Viking mission to Mars was paired. There were two Viking, two Vikings which would have a pair of orbitals and a second pair. A pair of pairs of landers. And in 1976, four years after this issue of Icarus, The International Journal of Solar System Studies. Both pairs of Vikings landed on Mars. Both orbiters were orbiting Mars. And were able to send back so that in 1978, early on, NASA was able to publish the Martian landscape from color to photos from Vikings. And this, uh, beautiful volume collector's item gives the first chance and time of being able to land, in a sense, in natural color on another world and send back not just from the moon, but from the first time to be on another planet.
This is from 1971 to 1976, just five years. And this was over 40 years ago that this kind of pace of refinement was operative to such an extent that those of us who had been interested since childhood. My oldest book in my library is a big little book, Flash Gordon and the Red Sword Invaders. It has my signature scrawl. And it published in 1945. So that by 1976 I had been interested, consciously, for more than 30 years already. This is coming up on 40 years ago just then.
The regressions. The piling up smashing of lesions in the replication of DNA in the forks where both are showing contaminations threatens a technical extinction. Let's hear that. And let's not just be perfectly clear, let's be perfectly conscious. All of the earmarks are there, that we are already extinct. The contamination of the genome inadvertently already was crippling, and now it's being engineered through a myopic, integral, closed cycle circle that does not have the infinite field of consciousness operative in it anymore.
So, these presentations are a part of a whole pattern of presentations. Not only all over this planet and the star system. But one can imagine the interest in this dramatic conundrum in star systems, possibly without number. How is this going to come out? It turns out that extinction and evolution pair. They go together.
This is, uh, one of Niles Eldridge's, uh, most recent books. Eldridge was born in 1943. And so he's, uh, approaching a very, uh, nice age. He'll be 72 this August 25th. He edited a, an interesting publication with woman friend of his, Elizabeth Vrba. V-r-b-a. Vrba. She was, uh, Elizabeth was born. She's still alive. He's, Eldredge is still alive. Uh, they're still alive. Like James Watson is still alive. A lot of us are still alive. Not only remembering, but with the plural we're remembering in presence so that the past is not dead. And the future is not just plannable speculation. Called conniving in many circles. But is in a continuity with, as I call it, the new past, because it is constantly refreshing and renewing because of an infusion of differential consciousness which is not time bound.
You talk about alternative futures and alternative pasts. To use a picayune kind of integral only language well, we're going to have a multiverse. Or we're going to have an omniverse. Whereas the universe already has an infinite field operative before the get go. Before there was a dimension of time. Before there were three dimensions of space. Before a four-dimensional fabric of space time dimensioned the universe. So that whatever occurs out of the fertile zero field occurs spontaneously, not in time. And as soon as it occurs as time instantly, then space blossoms. It seems like because there's more dimensions, right, as we call them dimensions. So that time must be the fourth dimension. It's the first. And when the three dimensions of space are understood as matter. Time is understood then as energy. So that dark matter is space itself. Dark energy is time itself. And they come out of a zero field because there is an infinite field for fertility of differential consciousness already operative.
It's interesting to note, in this commemorative volume by Niles Eldridge and Elizabeth Vrba. They edited it in 2005. It's a special issue of a magazine. Uh, It's a supplement to Paleontology, a journal. A scientific journal. Macroevolution, Diversity, Disparity, Contingency" And its essays that are collected by Niles Eldridge and Elizabeth Vrba in commemoration of the death of their friend Stephen Jay Gould.
Um, Stephen Jay Gould last great scientific tome published by Harvard is, um, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory in over 4500 pages. It's a textbook in the wider differential conscious and deeper integral natural cycle of evolution. And in the middle as a pivot. Really stable structures not only have symmetry, but they have pivotal centers. And the pivotal centers are able to hold in balance not just the symmetricality but the chirality, because the way in which space curves so that energy not only has an on words, but it has an upwards. It has a kind of a double helical quality to its progression, its linearity, into an evolution that then has spaces of challenge for which the response is evolution in a special way.
And pivotal in Stephen Jay Gould in his great Harvard tome written near the end of his life. The primary claims of punctuated equilibrium. Data and definitions. "First of all, the theory of punctuated equilibrium treats a particular level of structural analysis tied to a particular temporal frame." And Stephen Jay Gould developed this theory with Niles Eldredge, and it was published in 1972.
Where have we heard 1972? We've heard 1972, because the first time that the Viking missions to Mars, symmetrical paired probes to Mars was mooted in this issue of Icarus, edited by Carl Sagan in 1972, February 1st. And at the end of the year, about Christmastime of 1972 is the pinnacle of the NASA manned space program, the Apollo 17 last Apollo to Luna. Eugene Cernan and, uh, Harrison Jack Schmitt. Gene Cernan was one, uh, those Texas drawl, cowboy booted jet pilots in the Edwards Air Force Base experimental testing the new jets. The new planes. Like Chuck Yeager and Kinslow and all the rest of them.
I was taken to, uh, Edwards Air Force Base by my father as a boy, 1948. Long time ago. I remember the jets. I remember the tone. They weren't just hotshot pilots; they were gunslinger pilots. There's a great book about it made into a fantastic film, The Right Stuff. In our Learning Civilization program one of the films that we use, The Right Stuff about the Mercury seven. The first seven astronauts. Eugene Cernan was of that ilk. He was a gun fighter jet pilot. His book is called The Last Man on the Moon. All the attention goes to the first man, Neil Armstrong, who, by the way, was very mum. He would not talk about being on Luna. His glib friend, co astronaut Buzz Aldrin loved the buzz in his name. And since has written science fiction novel or appeared and gone into all the thrills and chills and all that. Armstrong became a quiet professor and hardly ever talked about being the first man on the moon.
Gene Cernan, towards this latter part of his life, wrote The Last Man on the Moon. Why have we not been back to the moon? It's a moot question. And now the question being sidestepped, because, well, we're going to go to Mars. Oh, Mars. We're going to have a manned mission to Mars sometime in the 2030's. Another generation from now. You people that are the generation now or the generation that still remembers when. Or perhaps even the grandparent generation that remembered how it all really got going. Well, you'll be gone. Who's going to be gone is a very moot point.
Punctuated equilibrium shows why extinction and evolution are part and parcel of the same delivery system. And Niles Eldridge, whose specialty, by the way, was in a delimited section of, uh, Paleobiology. He specialized in trilobites for some 40 some years. And, uh, trilobites died off, um, 245 million years ago. But they had been around for about 225 million years successfully. So that they're very interesting quality. And when they come into play, when trilobites first come into play, about 530 million years ago in terms of the geological calendar and, uh, the geological time. Eldridge puts on one of the early pages, just like you would do for grade school. Before 530 million years ago is a big, big segment of time on this planet, geological time. It goes from the first appearance of the solidity of the Earth as we would know it. After a long, molten, contemptuous 700 million years of molten this and molten that. And so about 4 billion years ago, there began to be a geological layer that's still here. And all the way from 4 billion years ago to 530 million, half a billion years ago, is geologically called the Precambrian. Before the Cambrian.
What's the Cambrian? It's an explosion of organic life forms. Yes, there was life before there were bacteria. There were many developments. Uh, if you want to get interested in it, um, The Five Kingdoms, largely by our very interesting friend that we're going to talk about, and that is Lynn Margulis. She wrote many books on here's the five kingdoms on the way in which there are not only animal minerals and so forth, but there are bacteria. There are five different kingdoms. Sort of like the hand. In fact, she uses the illustration of a hand holding up the planet, as seen from the moon.
Uh, her co-author in many of these was her son, Dorion. And Dorion's last name is Sagan. His mother was Lynn Margulis, but his father was Carl Sagan. Associated early on with Chicago. University of Chicago. Sagan, of course, is famous not only for Icarus and his own books, which are extraordinary. What of the last of them was Pale Blue Dot, about how you can be out in space far enough away from our planet and it's just a pale blue dot. In fact, if you go, uh, to Mars, it's not a pale blue dot, but it's just a deep turquoise star. Almost like Sirius is a star. Sirius being about almost, um, eight light years away. It's quite a long ways away. And though it is a super blue, white giant star part of a binary star system, by the way. And it has planets as well. It's a twinkling blue star the Egyptians called Sirius celcus. You could tell when the Nile River was going to flood because, uh, the star rose above the horizon. So is this Sirius rose and so Sirius rising was the trigger to get ready because the Nile is going to flood. And the fertility of Egypt is going to be there. And so, the rebirthing by star pattern recognition, not just cognition. You don't just see it. You are remembering seeing it over and over. And remembering what you have been able with so many others, to put together in a dynamic which led to making something called Egypt in the first place.
The whole quality comes into play because Dorion Sagan does this beautiful little volume and it's on his mother, Lynn Margulis: The life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel. She died in 2011. Uh, this was published in 2012. 2012. Just published. His introduction, Indomitable Lin because his mother was really a rebel. A rebel with a cause. Carl Sagan went on. He divorced her after wonderful children and so forth. And went for Ann Druyan, who just recently did a redo of his great triumphal series, Cosmos 1980. And in, um, 2014, the new issue of Cosmos Redone, going through that cycle again. And it was just a cycle again. And it was interesting for being a cycle again.
But Lynn Margulis like Elizabeth Vrba, like Niles Eldredge, like Stephen Jay Gould, like James D. Watson and so many others are after something like this. And this is Dorion Sagan writing about his mother remembering her. Presencing her,
Unlike many perhaps she continued to grow and learn until the end. One of the last projects she was involved in was the characterization of the symbiotic bio zone peck cellini stella magnifica, who like Lynn loved to dwell in the possibility of Puffers Pond.
So, a microbe in this pond near to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was a professor and where he is remembering her. And the reason he's remembering her so fondly in this introduction is that, uh, when she was cremated, her ashes were strewn onto Puffers Pond.
These protozoan by zone who like Lynn loved to dwell in the possibility of Puffers Pond the lake across which she swam nearly every day that last blue summer of 2011. There it was she quoted to me the words of Emily Dickinson. That will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
And the last part of this beautiful volume is, uh, next to Emily Dickinson by a friend, Terry Allen.
Thinking of those gentle summer ripples, that blue pond and whose water the matter of my mother's body now lies, I am reminded of Krug, a fictional character in Nabokov's Bend Sinister, who, as the novelist, describes it in a sudden moon burst of madness, understands he is in good hands. Nothing on Earth really matters. There is nothing to fear. And death is but a question of style. A mere literary device. A musical resolution. If she burned out in a sudden burst of hemorrhagic overactivity like a blazing celestial object vanishing into its own glory, the end blaze was not so different from the burning life. She, as she died near the height of her powers at the peak of her coruscating personality,
She was hard to get along with, for sure. Most independent genius, especially feminine independent genius in a non-commensurate, overly compensating male world.
Dorion Sagan writes of his mother,
Death is a mystery, but it is also a sublimation, a rising up to another realm. A reckoning, not just a negation, but a planting and possible flowering. An archiving. A setting of the seed of the soul as information into the fertile, if not eternal field of collective memory.
Where, and he skips here.
When I used to stay at her house in Amherst, I slept downstairs in the drawing room with two sets of creaky sliding doors. One lined with books holding his ground on a shelf in the northeast corner watching me and over me in my sleep. Her pre-Columbian man, a beloved piece of statuary that I found part, this part out after she died, she had bought for $500.
And then her she will the statue to be returned to Mexico where it belonged. And Dorion saw to it.
More next week.
END OF RECORDING