“In anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest.”
That’s Marianne Moore, in “A Note on the Notes.” SUNY’s Cristanne Miller provides a citation-chain analysis here reiterated: “‘The chief interest’ of many lines, [Moore] writes, ‘is borrowed.’ Such a claim... [defines] a poetic based on hearing and reading the words of others... [asserting] structures of interaction. As Tess Gallagher suggests, Moore ‘preferred the responsibility of conversation to the responsibility of orator.’” Dialogue dialogue dialogue: the facilitated breeding of stud and broodmare—“this” and “that” together making “us” in “thus.”
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From the heat of landfills, new minerals form from the rare earth elements of iPads and abandoned Linux machines. Under the beating sun of tropical beaches, sedimentary particles clump and agglutinate onto melting plastics—onto cup lids, confetti, and Trinidadian fishing nets—forming plastiglomerates. And what are we if not the same crosses of culture and nature, artificial and natural, if not cyborgs?
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The marriage is, dialogue, dialectic, hybridity. The marriage plot is a conjunction of thesis and antithesis, Emma Woodhouse transformed by the modernist Mr. Knightley. Sexual reproduction is a synthetic process; all species are mongrels; all men possess Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. Mitochondria once lived autonomously as bacteria before they were integrated—a bloody bloodless process—within eukaryotic walls. (The same, it seems, of green chloroplasts—an endosymbiosis.) Any given organism is an extensive system of symbiosis and mind-boggling cooperation. We cannot conceive of the “atomic” individual without a concept of cooperation, either at microscopic or macroscopic levels. “The idea of a tree of life should be replaced by the image of a more tangled mosaic of interacting lives in which [different species] may continue to exchange some genes for millions of years after they first separate.”1
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[Marianne] Moore read widely and shared with Darwin the collector's habit, gathering quotations from diverse sources fashion magazines, travel guides, manuals, literary texts, and scientific treatises, including those by Lamarck, Cuvier, Humboldt, and Darwin. If we think of Moore’s pack rat or magpie sensibility from a slightly different angle, she handles phrases as if they were specimens in an extended natural history: part of her queer mothering resides in breeding unusual, diverse linguistic permutations and hybrids.2
Moore’s swallowtail is half deity, half worm: “We all, infant and adult, have / stopped to watch the butterfly—last of the / elves—and learned to spare the wingless worm / that hopefully ascends the tree.” Bethany Hicok3 calls this swallowtail a metaphor for the artist-poet (alongside the “plumet basilisk, frigate pelican, and pangolin”). Hermes comes to earth as a beggar, a kind of test: if you are kind, and spare him, he morphs into deity and rewards you. “They that have wings must not have weights”; only in sparing the worm is the butterfly yielded. For some of us are hybrids in our doubleness of back- and frontstage; and some of us are hybrids in the transitioning sense of Becoming. And some evils are dragons guarding gold and gems, who must be slain to yield riches. And some dragons are all deception—flames without heat, jaws with no crushing power. And the plumet basilisk is “the innocent, rare, gold- / defending dragon, that as you look, begins to be a / nervous naked sword on little feet.”4 So what of the pains and punishments for looking away at the announcement of trouble, for peripheral glances, terrified of a newt?
The Hero of the monomyth is often a hybrid of a royal father and a peasant mother, a lost and orphaned heritage raised in peasant garments. Skywalker’s just a farmboy shooting womp-rats, but the blood in his veins rules the galaxy with a choking, blackened fist.
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Or take it from the Concierge’s “Tower”:
The idea of “cultural evolution” is as old as Darwin, the idea of transmissible cultural information bits—“memes”—at least as old as Dawkins]. For the idea of human consciousness as a collection of memes, Keith Henson coined the term “memeoid,” although he defined the term as “victims who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential.” Pleading guilty to the goofy vocab, I contend that we are all such victims. Schizophrenics are absolutely correct to be worried about the insertion and theft of one’s thoughts. Memory is a collection of memes. The so-called remembering self scores our attempts to secure the interests of such memes, the experiencing self totals the millivolts of pain and pleasure, and the algorithm to which we ascribe free will chooses between them. But by this point I hope that I have demonstrated the limitations of Kahneman’s terminology. So, in older and perhaps better words: superego, id, ego. Q.E.D.
Heritage takes memory to track—and why? To honor the dead? Perhaps—but the land will be bevelled and the marble etchings fade, and this compressive process is an enemy only of the decrepit, and an ally of all the living. Origins are erased even as the meme-or-gene lives on as delta, difference, update.
The novel inventio, the surprise, is merely an idiosyncratic remix, an offspring concealing his pedigree. “One of the things that makes reading Deleuze & Guattari difficult is their idiosyncratic set of references... Deleuze’s personal canon of philosophical influences is idiosyncratic... he draws on a tradition of philosophy he [more or less] invents...”5
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Superego, id, & ego, And all around the world, the holy number’s three, 3, III fingers.
Through darkness, trailing hands,
I drifted. Wave-gnarled images of gods
Floated upon the whale-backed water-plains.
I looked; creation rose, upheld by Three.6
For one “is a sterile number. When there is only one there can be no love, no yearning, no union. Two are required to forge a relationship. Without the other, the self has no meaning.”7
One is thesis, two is antithesis, three in synthesis. The first is local, the second a local not-first, the third is global.
Father, mother, child. Father, son, holy spirit. And we’re sexual creatures—sexually reproduction goes fucking deep in our ancestral tree, is the root of an ancestral tree to begin with—and what is sex is if not dialectic, literalized and natural? “Here is an evolutionary strategy. Here is another, whose alternate factoring & good regulation of world rebuffs the first. Here, if we combine them, we beget a fitter child.”
The Hindu Trinity factors their God tripartite, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Brahma who creates, Vishnu who sustains, Shiva who destroys. Brahma the priest, Vishnu the king, Shiva the ascetic. Shiva sings and Vishnu melts, moved by the melody of destruction. Brahma catches molten Vishnu in a cup, and pours him on the earth, creating the Ganges which nourishes our world.
Each of the three divine manifestations rule over the three Hindu worlds: the mythological, the subjective, and the objective. Each is further subdivided into three: the objective into the private, social, and natural; the subjective into the perceived, imagined, and subconscious; and the mythological into the Swarga-loka, Bhu-loka, and Pa-tala—or the celestial skyrealm, earthly troposphere of flora and fauna, and a snake-and-demon-filled underground. The Apollonian above, the Cthonic below, and the earthly task of reconciling the two. A suburb’s Lynchian underbelly, its lofty public ideals, and the reality of a Beaumont life between
And eyes are always prominent in Hindu iconography, as are hands: one the organ of perception, the other the organ of action.8 Together they are united and mediated by the mind, forming a trinity whose structured schema is that force of will which orders a world from chaos.
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America is the country of the stolen sample and the conspiracy theory, a nation of ingenuity and creation like no other, while the “white ethno-states” or “Scandinavian social democracies” you adore have created, I think, Avicii.9
An old thought, as old as the country perhaps, or at least Randolph Bourne’s pacifist polemic, “Trans-national America,” with its ode to hyphenation. Charles Berger, discussing the editorial evolution of Marianne Moore's “Virginia Britannia”—specifically those lines “The live oak’s darkening fila- / gree of undulating boughs, the etched / solidity of a cypress indivis- / ible from the now / agèd English hackberry, / become with lost identity, part of the ground”—writes:
The 1951 Collected Poems restores “filagree” and “indivisible” to wholeness by eliminating the hyphens—a shame, in my opinion—and the 1967 Complete Poems restores normative orthography to “filigree,” correcting the mock-feminized variant of “filagree” (more noticeable in the hyphenated version)—also a shame, I would argue. The major changes [between editions] to the stanza, clearly, come with the remarkable finding of “darkening filagree” as a replacement for “rounded / mass,” and the decision to make the hybridized loss of identity not issue in the unity of “one tree,” but return to the undifferentiated ground. Moore constructs the sentence so that it becomes difficult to see precisely the point—what blends into the ground, since the ornamental filigree dissolves into the tree. Rather than standing up from the ground, as if vaunting its own strength, the hybridized entity strengthens the ground from which it emerges, as one possibility among others. So-called “lost identity” is now seen by Moore not in terms of cenotaphic, monumental splendor, but as the humbled ground, proving that “‘Don’t tread on / me’—tactless symbol of a new republic” misconstrued the true locus of the republic’s vigor.
But in hybridizing (bridging, demolishing walls) we also risk a monoculture which replaces its influences. Heritage erased; what use is heritage? When the boundary that buffers world is broken, or the ocean that separates islands bridged, heterosis—quickly, like fish—reeks of the stagnancy of monoculture. And as in genetics and ecology, monoculture is fundamentally precarious; it lacks the robustness of diversity, is easily overthrown by disruption. Reads one rendition of the Hindu legends of the Tripurasura (“three Asuras”):
Three Asuras had obtained a boon that enabled them to build three flying cities. These cities travelled between the three worlds, causing havoc. Desperate, the Devas turned to Brahma. Brahma revealed that the cities could be destroyed only if they were struck by a single arrow. This could happen only if the cities were aligned in a single line and the arrow was shot by a divine archer. Shiva was the chosen archer. Meru was the shaft of his bow and Sesha his bowstring. The earth was his chariot; the sun and the moon were its wheels. Brahma was the charioteer and the four books of the Veda were his horses. Shiva waited for the cities to align in a single line. But the cities kept flying in different directions, such was their will to survive. Vishnu then took the form of a monk and visited the three cities and taught the Asuras the doctrine of renunciation. Eventually, the Asuras lost all interest in worldly life. They did not bother to fly their cities in different directions. The cities aligned in a single line. At that moment, Shiva drew his great bow. Vishnu served as his arrow. Shiva released the arrow and Vishnu pierced all three cities, destroying them in an instant. Shiva smeared his body with the ash of the cities-three horizontal lines.10
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Jordana Cepelwicz over at Quanta, writes:
[I]t’s clear that nature has a sloppy disregard for boundaries: Viruses rely on host cells to make copies of themselves. Bacteria share and swap genes, while higher-order species hybridize. Thousands of slime mold amoebas cooperatively assemble into towers to spread their spores. Worker ants and bees can be nonreproductive members of social-colony “superorganisms.” Lichens are symbiotic composites of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria. Even humans contain at least as many bacterial cells as “self” cells, the microbes in our gut inextricably linked with our development, physiology and survival.11
But it is also clear that nature loves a wall, indeed relies on them. That it is only against the backdrop of assumed love that a “sloppy disregard” might be mentionable—not just worth mentioning, but possible to say. Or rather: There is a part of nature that loves a given boundary, and a part of nature that doesn’t.
Moore’s interest in hybridity was aimed against her compatriots’ nationalisms, fascisms, purifying fires. To show the provincialism (“Virginia Britannia”) of traditions, and their partialness to the wholeness of the picture. It’s this impulse, toward larger scales of place and time, that drive one Vernon Watkins in his rejection of Welsh provincialism, and his peers’ poetic proclivities. Others—noble nonetheless—are tempted into national sentimentalities, tempted even into the political—that which Tolkien (wrongly agglutinated with such personas) so arduously avoided, given as it was to the drawing of intra-human boundaries, over a shared conflict contra entropy, chaos, time. Joyce, interviewed by A. Power, remarked of the Book of Kells:
In all the places I have been to, Rome, Zurich, Trieste, I have taken [the Book] about with me, and have pored over its workmanship for hours. It is the most purely Irish thing we have, and some of the big initial letters which swing right across the page have the essential quality of a chapter of Ulysses. Indeed, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations. I would like it to be possible to pick up any page of my book and know at once what book it is.
To which Peter Chrisp replies:
Although Joyce called the book 'purely Irish', similar gospels were being produced in Wales, Scotland and Northumbria, whose monasteries had close links with the Irish Church. The style of decoration is also not pure but a fusion of Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean and eastern influences.12
This was the Roaring Twenties; Power having met James in a Montparnasse dancehall. The same mistake two decades later, unthinkable.
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Heterosis & hybrid vigor: heterotic offspring are those whose fitness has been increased as a result of the mixed genetic contributions of parents. “The physiological vigor of an organism as manifested in its rapidity of growth, its height and general robustness, is positively correlated with the degree of dissimilarity in the gametes by whose union the organism was formed.”13
But if the species are too distant—genetically distinct for millennia, or inhabiting different environments—then fitness may decrease in what is called “outbreeding depression” (similar to inbreeding depression, the fate of European royal families & purebred dogs from cocker spaniels to saint bernards, basset hounds, miniature poodles, newfoundlands, pugs, rottweilers, great danes, shetland sheepdogs, shih tzus, goldendoodles, bloodhounds, Irish setters, doberman pinschers, boxers and bulldogs, Bernese mountain dogs, and beagles).
Which is to say—as always—that there is a Goldilocks zone, that there is always a concept of too much and too little, too hot and too cold, too foreign and too familiar; that as the alchemists knew, the poison lie in the dose. And what insightful progress is this, our mere advocacy of balance?
Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth.
Susan McCabe, Survival of the Queerly Fit.
In the Wallace Stevens Journal.
Moore, “The Plumet Basilisk.”
Jeremy Gilbert, University of East London.
Vernon Watkins, “Taliesin at Pwlldu.”
Devdutt Pattanaik, Myth = Mithya.
Some cosmologies stipulate ten sons of Brahma, called the Prajapatis. Five represent the sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) and five represent action organs (hands, feet, mouth, anus, genital).
Hotel Concierge, “The Tower.”
Pattanaik, continued.
2020, “What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.” An individual, David Krakauer and Jessica Flack of the Santa Fe Institute theorize, is not a thing in space but a stable (yet dynamic) persistence over time, verb rather than noun. A trinity of individual forms are postulated: The organismal individual, which is strongly self-organizing and defined largely by internal information and prior states. A colonial individual, a distributed system partially scaffolded on the environment. And a “driven” individual, primordial and precarious and ephemeral, such as the tornado, strongly based on environmental conditions, dissipating if humidity or temperature change. Krakauer: “This approach can be thought of as a Gestalt approach to evolution where selection makes figure-ground (agent-environment) distinctions using suitable information-theoretic lenses.”
From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay, 2013.
G.H. Shull, Genetics.