Synthetic Biology: Where Will the World End Up?

We hear a lot of fearful hysteria or adoring glorification of the new large language model (LLM) pseudo-intelligences like Chat GPT.  The LLMs may show to some the imminent arrival of the Singularity, or to others the advent of over-hyped artificial entities which humans can con themselves into worshiping.

But if we must be alarmist about coming technological changes, there is another stream of more extreme hazard.  After reading “Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology“, you may want to run down the street waving your arms and tearing off your clothes to sob at the sky.

Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology

If you can manage to wade through the bureaucratic and academic language of this compilation of papers from the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme, published in 2019, you will realize that none of the authors, or indeed, any one else are able to realistically suggest how to prevent the widespread weaponization of biology.  And why would anybody want to weaponize biology?  For the same reasons we see all about us on the internet where individual hackers and state actors manipulate the digital world.  For power and money.  Biological ransomware, anyone?

I’m working on a science-fiction novel which incorporates genetic engineering and synthetic biology set far in the future, so I’m reading a lot of background information on the subject.

Despite all the attention paid to AI, synthetic biology is a technological revolution going on in parallel with it and with nanotechnology that portends much greater danger to the human race and other living creatures than a few chatbots imitating intelligence on the web.

Some of the upcoming and ongoing hazards listed in an article on biosecurity threats in the above compilation include:

Dual use
Bioweapon
Ecological impact
Accidental release
Bioterrorism
Gain of function
Societal impact
Information access
Lower barriers
Uncertain consequences
DIY community

“Dual use” in this context needs some explanation.  It describes how an aspect of technology can do good, and also be capable of causing great harm.  For instance, synthetic biology can be used to engineer microbes that can produce biofuels from renewable resources. While this has the potential to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and mitigate climate change, the same technology can be used to create novel biological agents for biowarfare or bioterrorism.

Gain of Function

“Gain of function” can mean:

By introducing new genes or modifying existing ones, synthetic biologists can create organisms with new or improved properties, such as increased resistance to disease, enhanced metabolic activity, or improved growth rate.

We’ll come back to this one, and the flaws inherent in this conceptualization.

One can also imagine parents demanding inheritable genes changed in their children to enhance a desired trait, such as musicality, tallness, large muscles or swaggering belligerence, with no idea of potential long-term consequences for their children, subsequent progeny, and the world at large.

Do It Yourself (DIY) Biology Hacking

The so-called Do It Yourself (DIY) community threat brings home a lot of the others.

The recent emergence of CRISPR as a gene-editing tool has enabled precise and inexpensive methods of engineering individual organisms, biological systems, and entire genomes.

CRISPR and similar tools along with the ability to order biological and genetic components online has enabled a movement of “citizen scientists” interested in synthetic biology experiments to become an international phenomenon over the last few years.

Often with little prior knowledge of the field, enthusiasts meet in makeshift labs to take crash courses in biotechnology and conduct hands-on experiments. Simple protocols found online and specialized kits costing US$150–US$1,600 have driven the movement’s rapid expansion. DIY Bio labs can be found in most major cities. There are hundreds if not thousands of such groups worldwide.  Bio-hackers are a reality.

A complex issue on the horizon is the development of benchtop DNA synthesizers. These devices would allow operators to synthesize DNA in house, reducing the need to order from a provider likely to screen an order.

“Managing” Biosecurity

Another article in the above compilation examines the challenges to managing biosecurity.

It makes three points:

1. Security threats from synthetic biology are fundamentally different from those posed by chemicals, explosive, or radioactive material. Actors can use genetic engineering and editing technologies to alter or create a variety of platforms, including viruses, microorganisms, multicellular organisms, prions, and even cell-free systems.
2. Exposure and vulnerability to synthetic biology threats are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify at present. We cannot confidently predict which platform might be used to generate a biological threat or weapon. We cannot know what the target of a biological attack will be, whether it be humans, important crops, livestock, native species, the environment, or other assets.
3. It is hard to predict the consequences of release because it is unknown how the weapon will be deployed against the target. The new ability to modify almost all eukaryotic cells means that any biological system could be a mechanism of disruption for such a weapon. (“Eukaryotic” cells are more complex and have a definite nucleus.)

Even such a vital and basic structure as soils are vulnerable to genetic manipulation of the organisms that dwell therein which creates the ecosystem that grows our food.

Threats Emerge at Convergence Points

One learns in this document that emerging threats are likely to arise at the convergence points of new developments. So where synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and AI and computer advances meet, we can expect new hazards, many unanticipated, to make themselves known.

For instance last year a drug-developing AI invented 40,000 potentially lethal molecules in six hours. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of “bad actor” mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference.

I wanted to return to some of the problems with “gain of function” manipulations mentioned above, which are usually lauded for their beneficial effects.  The main problem is one of arrogance, and the blinders provided by greed and ambition.

One example: Researchers hunted for unintended consequence of genetically modified potatoes with supposed improved sugar metabolism in the plant.  They produced more amino acids than they were supposed to. This “was not known to be related to the sugar breakdown pathway targeted by the genetic manipulation.”

Another: Genetically modified canola was also investigated which had been changed to increase beneficial carotene.  The scientists found that “unpredictable unintended effects, in contrast, fall outside present understanding… Where the beneficial carotene content in transgenic canola was raised, the composition of fatty acids was also altered.  There is no known connection between fatty acid synthesis and the carotenoid pathway.”

One of the problems with much “gain of function” research is that unexpected or non-target results are ignored or not reported.

Unintended Consequences

As one review of scientific studies states:

“That is, unintended effects arise because the organism is a tightly integrated whole; but because we have hardly begun to understand the complex web of interactions within this whole, the effects remain unpredictable.

“So while the genetic engineer wants control, stability, regularity, and constancy, life plays itself out in dynamism, unpredictability, and change.”

If anything, I have understated the risks that have already and will likely in future develop from the rise of synthetic biology.  They are not just here in developed nations, but across the rest of the world in the midst of all the political and environmental upheaval going on everywhere.  It is sobering.

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Additional notes:

I found, in addition to the more recent summary document that initiated this post, that two articles by Craig Holdredge in In Context #19 gave a welcome detailed overview of the nature of risks associated with synthetic biology.  They are:

“Understanding the Unintended Effects of Genetic Manipulation” and “Some Examples of Unintended Effects of Genetic Manipulation.”

The images above are from (top down): Syngulon.com and Meer.com.

Halls of Sun, Corridors of Rain

Over the years, as a would-be writer, I jotted words into notebooks which I stashed away for decades.

There are freewriting efforts, poetry, observations, quotations and many abortive attempts at stories and novels in there.  Many more than I remember.

Nearing 72, I feel the need to perform archaeology on the life hinted at in those notebooks. They run from the early 1970s until today.  It is difficult to gauge their interest, if any, to others, but I still hope that a stray insight or quote resonates with the occasional reader. 

I only seek to make more sense to myself.

*    *    *

Good title – Halls of Sun, Corridors of Rain. (1986)

*    *    *

To the adequate expression of our truest and deepest feelings.  These are the solid things. (1977)

*    *    *

This is ridiculous.  Here I am a grown man at 26, and with a few words of criticism, I’m about to cry. (1977)

*    *    *

Mad as a bag of cats. (2018)

*    *    *

See people’s characters relative to the deals they attempt to make with the essential emptiness of human life.  The terrifying emptiness.  The fecund emptiness. (1987)

*    *    *

Is this a real thing?  In bug-ridden country, tie dragonflies to shoulders to chase away the bugs.  Catching them must be a trick. (1987)

*    *    *

“Reason – by which I mean the ability to grasp the moral sense, not just the ‘facts’ of reality….” — Erazim Kohak  (1987)

*    *    *

The true sacred life doesn’t lend itself to institutionalization.  (1970s)

*    *    *

The task of culture is to provide the individual with the conviction that he is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action. (1970s)

*    *    *

So much is expressed by the spirit with which people move their bodies as they walk.  (Early 1980s)

*    *    *

Confucius: “Look closely into a man’s aims, observe the means by which he pursues them, and discover what brings him contentment.  How can a man hide his character?”  Also useful for writing.  (Early 1980s)

*    *    *

Having a notebook and being a ‘writer’ gives you permission to be anywhere, watching anything.  (Late 1980s)

*    *    *

At a café, an older woman eating cake, sipping coffee with a kind of desperation.  Her lower face, when she looks at people talking is mute, stiff; only her eyes show feeling.  She’s slightly buck-toothed, and keeps her mouth closed as if to hide. (Late 1980s)

*    *    *

“Three things are to be considered: a man’s estimation of himself, the face he presents to the world, and the estimate of that man made by other men.  Combined they form an aspect of truth.” — Paul Scott (1980s)

*    *    *

“A reader should want to know the character infinitely.” — Arturo Vivante (1980s)

*    *    *

Colin Turnbull studied the Mbuti in Central Africa and found they don’t have a specific word for ‘god’. “The closest is the word ndura which can be translated as ‘forest’. … Ultimately, ndura does mean the forest, but more than that it means forestness. And this is the quality of life by which they measure everything that is good in their lives. All that is positive is related to ndura, this life-giving quality.” (1984)

*    *    *

“We no longer recognize spiritual pain, the distressed soul, although we suffer from that disease more than any other.” — Michael Shallis (1985)

*    *    *

When my brothers and I were kids, whenever we tasted something good, we wanted to make it into a sandwich.  “Hey, Ma, I want a peach sandwich….” (late 1970s)

*    *    *

Sun sinks low

Cloud shadows ride
      the mountains

Purple and yellow flowers                                        (1988)

 

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Note: To be continued, probably. 

Writing Lessons From The Walking Dead

There’s a lot of dark shit on television, and I’m not talking just about the news.

Many of us choose to entertain ourselves watching all manner of unpleasant fictional situations and people, many of them quite horrific. That’s curious to me, and yet I am in that group.

After I recently, for example, finished watching the penultimate season of the long-running TV series The Walking Dead, I cast about for another series that might be equally gripping on Canadian Netflix. It didn’t have to be a horror show. Ozark and Dark were two series that came highly recommended.

Ozark, a crime drama, began with the main character watching porn while he’s at work talking to customers. In Dark, more in the science fiction vein apparently, the series opens with some major characters treating each other poorly in the midst of sexual betrayal.

Give Me Characters I Can Admire

I realized that I didn’t want to spend even a few minutes with these people. Give me a character I can admire or at least respect, and I will go along with the show for a long time. (I did finally settle on Prison Break, where at least the lead character is trying to save his innocent brother from execution. Lots of dark events in that show too, though.)

There’s the first lesson about writing before I even get to The Walking Dead. Give the reader characters he or she can feel sympathy or respect for.

I’m not a horror movie buff nor one normally interested in zombies or other such boogeymen. I’ve even written about my bemusement at the entire notion of zombies (see Why Zombies?).

Yet I have found The Walking Dead (TWD), an apocalyptic story about zombies and a few survivors, utterly compelling.

It’s definitely not a show for the squeamish. Its depiction of zombies in all their mutilated and tattered glory, the necessity of killing them for keeps by piercing their nasty-looking skulls, the slavering gore of their successful attacks upon the living… well, at times the show overdoes it. But it does put into high relief the dire straits the survivors find themselves in.

The premise, for those few who haven’t encountered the show, is that a worldwide apocalypse of zombie infection has destroyed civilization. The zombies, known as ‘walkers’ to the core group of survivors we become invested in, shuffle around looking for fresh meat. Easily dispatched singly, as they become attracted by noise and commotion, hordes of them show up, and you really want to have an exit plan. An added dimension to the terror for the characters is that anyone who dies for any reason automatically becomes a zombie too, and must be put out of their misery before they take a bite out of the living.

Intensity

This was the popular television series in the early 2010s before Game of Thrones came into full prominence. It has been discussed a lot. People become very involved with the ensemble cast of characters, as I have been. The unpredictable and usually awful deaths of the occasional major character somehow adds to the involvement, a mechanism the Game of Thrones also utilized. And the show is still going on, with the final season to be completed this year.

The writing, the production, the actors have uncannily combined to launch the viewer into a world where everything is broken. With the rise of nasty living villains in the chaos, the characters are often forced to decide whether keeping alive will still allow them their humanity and a sense of hope. It’s a believable world, once you accept the admittedly way-out-there premise of zombies.

I don’t want so much to explore individual characters and the meaning they have for the plot. What fascinates me is how compelling the characters are made to be. What is the craft behind this, from the very talented bunch of writers? (I will tend to speak of this from the point of view of readers, rather than saying ‘viewers’ always but it is the same thing usually.)

High Stakes

One part of this are the stakes. A zombie apocalypse allows the writers to heighten this factor, but even if we write about less extreme situations, there is a lesson. Make the stakes crucial for the characters, and they become so by extension for the reader.

By stakes, I mean obstacles to overcome that matter. If they aren’t overcome, then somebody will die or lose love forever or life’s meaning will flee. High stakes mean reader involvement with the characters, and that is a lot of what makes TWD so enthralling. We care about what happens to these people.

The ensemble nature of the characters is also important. People react so differently to the same stresses and events. To make the situation come alive for the reader, we need to see a variety of characters, acting well and badly, and ideally in conflict, on many different levels, with each other.

Some of the people lose their sanity, some become stronger, others give up. In these dire situations, the reader or viewer is constantly, without necessarily realizing it, asking themselves: What would I do in these circumstances? If you can get this to happen in the mind of the reader, than you are well along the road of success for your story.

Suffering

Tied to the matter of stakes is that of suffering. Although we may be gentle souls in our daily life, if we want to tell an involving story, we must make our characters suffer. The type of suffering can be psychologically nuanced or physically damaging, but it must be there. And the suffering, to be successful in delineating the character, cannot be merely the occasional conflicts that the plot might logically throw up now and again. No, the suffering must be great, and tailored to the stakes and the fibre of that particular character. Craft books recommend devising severe specific trouble that puts the character’s future and desires at ultimate risk. This can be tough to do.

To briefly return to Prison Break, this is done with great skill for the main character striving to escape from prison with his brother. Time after time, the worst possible turn of events arises to challenge him, and the writers fearlessly put him through that, and somehow find a way forward for him and the story.

In The Walking Dead this is also skillfully done, but often on a larger scale for the community of survivors led by the former sheriff’s deputy, Rick Grimes. Whenever they find themselves almost secure for a time, then the next terrible turn of events can be expected to arrive. We become entrained with the survivors as they singly and together strive to meet the disasters that befall them. They don’t always succeed, and that too is a lesson for the would-be story writer.

Community

Commentators on TWD have often noted that, in the show and probably real life, communities are the source of survival after the apocalypse. In these circumstances of murderous fellow survivors and implacable blood-thirsty zombies, it is clear that rugged individualists will not last long. You can only survive in a group, and that group needs a direction after the most basic survival needs are met.

Eventually Rick’s group aspires to a re-kindling of civilization, in the midst of more vicious collections of people only aspiring to dominate each other or to create a cult around some strong, sick personality.

The reality of the need for community, and the other assemblages of people also fighting off the zombies, provides another layer of interaction and conflict in the background world going through its cycles, while in the foreground we live through what Rick’s community has to deal with. In James Bonnet’s book about writing, Stealing Fire from the Gods, he says:

“The study of the Golden Paradigm is the study of the structures, dimensions, and dynamics of this larger, whole story (frame or backstory) while the study of the story focus is the study of the structures, dimensions, and dynamics of the smaller, foreground story itself. … A single value has been isolated and is being examined in great detail which adds enormous clarity, meaning and power to the story and makes this value an important unifying force.”

He also goes on to say about the parallels between community and individual:

“Because the human group shares these similarities in organization and function with the human psyche, the human group is an excellent metaphor for the human psyche. You can see this important pattern operating in many great stories and successful films.”

So in Rick’s group we find characters embodying different functions, of cowardice, fear, boldness, loyalty, caring, ruthlessness and so on.

And as writer Tonya Thompson says in a post about TWD, audiences respond to weak characters becoming strong. For instance, in Rick’s motley crew of survivors, Carol early in the series is a submissive, abused housewife, who eventually grows into one of the show’s strongest and most complex characters.

A Moral Dimension

There is a moral dimension to TWD highlighted by the depraved actions of some of its humans, who can be far more wicked than the mindless zombies. This is especially notable in the darkness of some of the later seasons’ episodes, where any shred of kindness and compassion is proclaimed and shown to be weakness. The characters of Rick’s community must struggle with this, as do we all in lesser or greater ways. But in the end (as of season 10), most want to live by values that allow them to work towards a better life for their children and their community.

I would argue that The Walking Dead, at its best, takes on the virtues of real art. In novelist John Gardner’s book, On Moral Fiction, he writes:

“True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. … Moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action.”

The show definitely does that.

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Three Books for the Writer Self – 3) Ensouling Language

It was feeling that brought you to writing, you know. Something in the books you read touched you, something in you wants to create writing that will touch others similarly, some deep feeling has driven you on.
— Stephen Harrod Buhner

A couple of the more popular posts on this site are the two I wrote way back in 2007 about Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler’s book of lectures on fiction writing, From Where You Dream. Butler is adamant that real writing, true writing can only come from the unconscious, from our intuition and our capacity to “induce” a writerly “trance.” This seems to mean making line to line contact with sensual imagery which makes up the voice of the unconscious and of your fictional characters.

And although he describes some of the ways that he uses to get to that place where the truth of what you are writing wells up, I’ve always been left with questions about that process. Oh, I’ve come up with my own haphazard ways of trying to get at that for writing of novels. But I’m always on the lookout, as many other writers must also be, for a clearer way of understanding how to do that.

In the third of this series about books that the writer self can plumb for meaning, Stephen Harrod Buhner provides that clarity, in Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life (Inner Traditions, 2010).

Buhner has written a wide range of non-fiction books on plants, herbalism and environmental philosophy, including The Lost Language of Plants, a BBC Environmental Book of the Year. This explains the reference to nonfiction in the subtitle, and he does include sections about that. However all kinds of writing come within his scope.

My primary interest, as an unpublished novelist of course, is fiction, and much of what he says about writing hits home there just as much.

A Current of Feeling

There is a current of feeling within us which often willy-nilly determines the direction of our lives, and, often unrecognized, is the core of ourselves. Part of it is a faculty of feeling which is capable of perceiving extreme subtleties, a kind of perception we are not used to developing or putting into words.

Buhner writes: “One of the tasks that lies before us as writers is this reclamation of ourselves, this ecological restoration of our interior world, this restoration of our capacity to feel.”

People use the word “feeling” to mean different things. Buhner wants to focus not so much on emotional perception, although that can be a result, but on what he calls environmental perception.

He calls it a non-physical form of kinesthetic touching. A physical form would be touching a hot stove; a non-physical form would be the sensation of coming home to an empty house. “How does it feel?” That is his repeated catchphrase for taking in the world, and people, around us.

“It is your passions and your deep feelings that are the key to your writing ensouled communication, to inhabited language. As Garcia Lorca put it, you ‘must awaken the duende in the remotest mansions of the blood.’ This can only occur if you reclaim your capacity to feel deeply and keenly.”

Duende

‘Duende’ means those unusual moments, big or small, when something is deeply recognized and makes one tremble. Buhner goes to considerable lengths to try to give the quality of this experience. He quotes the poet Robert Bly about a long floating leap at the heart of the most moving work, “a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.”

It is one thing to describe these leaps, and another to do them. Sorry to say, I am not always a-tremble with the ecstasy of life, able to delve at will into the well of the unconscious. I wish I was more often.

Fortunately, Buhner takes up the challenge of trying to tell us what the process of feeling deeply through our writing could be. He calls it following the “golden threads,” a term he borrows from William Blake.

Taking hold of a golden thread means to be attentive in our feeling to any meaning we may encounter, and focus on it entirely so that we may follow where it goes. This is what happens with writing capable of catching the heart of the reader. This can be a very delicate and tentative pursuit, easily fumbled, so we must bring our complete focus.

A Golden Thread

Buhner explains: “To the alert person, a golden thread may emerge from any ordinary thing and open a doorway into the imaginal, and through it, the mythic. Because no one can know when or where or from what it will emerge, the writer remains attentive to everything that is encountered, always paying close attention to how everything, even the tiniest little thing, feels.”

Stephen Harrod Buhner

He goes on: “You can begin to follow it then, if you wish, by simply writing down, as concretely as you can what you are experiencing, what you are feeling, what you are seeing, hearing, sensing. Bly describes this, brilliantly, as ‘following the tiny impulses through the meadow of language.’ It must be done slowly. Carefully. Feeling your way. Tiny movement by tiny movement. It is the feeling equivalent of catching the hint of an elusive scent. … You write a line, perhaps several, then you stop and begin to compare what you have written to the feeling that has demanded your attention.”

He provides some simple exercises to illustrate and develop this, and he takes it to the point of asking “How does it feel” of even inanimate objects, which I found particularly interesting. To me, the book is worth it just for this discussion of “golden threads” which is considerably more detailed than what I’m able to recount here.

But think of poetry which is particularly meaningful to you. Poetry is the most concentrated form of this way of approaching writing. As an example, he quotes the following from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

It is good knowing that glasses
are to drink from;
the bad thing

is to not know what thirst is for.

This is a duende, a long floating leap, as Buhner says: “The long trembling moment, and then the silence.”

Buhner writes:

“Mostly we feel only what we have been taught to feel, not what we truly feel. With the attentive noticing of the soul, we step away from our programming and what we think we know. We feel something and then we stop and genuinely look, identifying what has caught our attention. Then we begin to really see it, noticing whatever it is as if for the first time. The senses begin to bring us tidings of invisible things, all of them filled with meaning.”

He is careful to point out that these experiences are not only for those of us who write and feel compelled to describe our experience, but for all who want to live an “inhabited life.”

I would encourage anyone who is interested in these matters to read Buhner’s book, whether or not you accept all that he says. The essence of it is inspiring. And there is much more to it than I have recounted here, especially in a large section called “Dreaming and the Journey to the Imaginal.”

In conclusion, I keep returning to a quote attributed to the poet Paul Eluard. It’s one you take in with intuitive feeling right away, and then you’re not sure whether it makes any sense, and then you realize that maybe it does, and your mind makes that leap back and forth:

“There is another world but it is this one.”

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Notes

This is the last book considered in a series of posts:

Three Books for the Writer Self – Introduction

Three Books for the Writer Self – 1) The Soul’s Code

Three Books for the Writer Self – 2) The Winged Life

Three Books for the Writer Self – 2) The Winged Life

In the second book of this series of posts, we have The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau, by poet and rogue shaman Robert Bly, published in 1992 (HarperPerennial).

It is especially fitting to discuss this book now since Bly died just last November in his nineties after sadly being afflicted with dementia.

Reading several of Bly’s obituaries, I realized more fully how influential he became as an American poet. And not just a poet. He was famously opposed to the Vietnam War. And after his 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men (which called, the New York Times obit notes, for “a restoration of primal male audacity”), he was catapulted to cultural prominence.

As Tony Hoagland writes in his 2011 essay about Bly: “From that time on, Bly’s true companions would largely not be other American poets, but cultural thinkers.”

It makes sense that Bly would write this commentary on Thoreau, for he had many of the same values and ways of seeing that moved both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. Bly continued the tradition, if we may call it that, of the Transcendentalists, of not needing any intermediary for spiritual insight.

The structure of the book consists primarily of five parts, each one introduced with a commentary by Bly and followed by excerpts from the variety of Thoreau’s writing. (The wonderful woodcuts by Michael McCurdy add greatly to the contemplative tone of the book.)

“Part One – The Bug in the Table” sets the stage for this series of meditations on who Thoreau was as a man, and how he perceived himself and the world around him in those times of the 1840s. How different the world was then! Yet Bly lets us see how relevant much of what concerned the man of Concord still is today.

Transparent Eyeball

As noted in the introductory post, Bly highlights, at the very beginning, these sentences by Thoreau’s friend and mentor, Emerson:

“Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball.” This book is an exploration of how this kind of experience pervades Thoreau’s life. Nature is the inspiration of his entire outlook.

In Bly’s words now: “Many young men and women want to marry nature for vision, not possession. …The soul truth assures the young man or woman … that in human growth the road of development goes through nature, not around it.”

He excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden the story of “the strange and beautiful bug” which came out from an old table made from apple-tree wood, which had been in a farmer’s kitchen for a lifetime, but its egg must have been deposited in the original tree while it still existed. It was heard gnawing its way out of the table for some time, no doubt awakened by the heat of an urn or other contrivance.

Thoreau says: “Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society… may unexpectedly come forth….”

Bly comments: “This is a marvelous tale…. The story suggests that there is an unhatched abundance inside us that we ourselves have not prepared. Our psyche at birth was not a schoolchild’s slate with nothing written on it, but rather an apple-wood table full of eggs. We receive at birth the residual remains of a billion lives before us.”

In this Part One there are nineteen texts, comprised of poems, Journal passages and excerpts from Walden. This organization is similar in each of the following Parts.

Thoreau was remarkable for his rambles, his long walks in the woods almost every day. As one other selection of his writing from this Part puts it:

“I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they really are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. … It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.”

So As Not to Live Meanly

Part Two is called “The Habit of Living Meanly.” In Bly’s commentary, he notes that Thoreau observed how many of the people around him took on that habit. Living meanly to Thoreau meant living without sincerity, living to other’s standards, living like a kind of human ant occupied with small burdens. “The ancient metaphor for living meanly is sleep,” Bly says.

Thoreau sought a deeper life, which to every person must be at least partially different. Bly remembers that the first sentence of Thoreau’s that he ever memorized was:

“Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”

Thoreau feels grief for the life wasted about him. In that famous quote from Walden given here:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

Part Three is entitled “Going the Long Way Round.” As Bly says, Thoreau’s major life decision was his resolution to live what he understood to be a sincere life. “Thoreau wanted greatness, and he wanted to live greatly, but most of all he wanted not to live meanly.”

The Importance of Moratoriums

The young Thoreau insisted on taking a moratorium, a pause in the designs of the world upon him. Bly says, “I feel that Thoreau’s declaration of the need for a moratorium is his greatest gift to the young.”

In Thoreau’s case his moratorium, in the years before he published Walden, may have gone on too long. He resigned himself to not being at home in either male or female company.

Thoreau wrote in his journal: “By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.”

His pursuit of solitude is further illustrated by one of his Journal entries: “By poverty, i.e. simplicity of life and fewness of incidents, I am solidified and crystallized, as a vapor or liquid by cold. It is a singular concentration of strength and energy and flavor.”

In Part Four, “Seeing What is Before Us,” Bly momentarily revisits Emerson for his description of what it was like to walk with Thoreau: “It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it by paths of his own.” Emerson recounts how detailed and patient Thoreau was in his observations of nature, taking with him an old book to flatten flowers in, a diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, a hand-held microscope, a jackknife and twine. Thoreau knew to the day when each type of wildflower would bloom.

Faculties of the Soul

Thoreau read widely, everything from Eastern spiritual books to Goethe and Schelling. These perspectives informed his detailed descriptions of the nature around him. He seemed to take to heart Coleridge’s advice that “each object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty of the Soul.” Thoreau asserted in his Journal, against our separation from nature, that “I am made to love the pond and the meadow….”

At the end of this section, after a brief discussion of Thoreau’s ability to also know darkness, Bly writes: “We feel in Thoreau’s life the presence of a fierce and long-lived discipline, and one reward of that discipline was his grasp of the wildness in nature.”

Walden Pond

In the final Part Five, “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” Bly notes that Thoreau was certain that the civilizations of Greece, Rome and England have been sustained by the primitive forests that surround them, and “that these same nations have died and will end when the forests end.”

Bly suggests that Thoreau was one of the first writers in America to accept the ancient idea that nature is not a fallen world, but instead a veil for the divine world.

Refreshed by Nature

In Thoreau’s words:

“We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

Bly concludes his book with an insightful brief biography of Thoreau, who died in his forty-fourth year of tuberculosis.

Bly does a good job of presenting the man to us. Thoreau had his greatness, and his limitations — there is much more depth in Bly’s examination then I am able to touch on here. But what might we take from all this?

It would be wise, I think, for us as writers, and as human beings, to take long walks in wild places. And pay attention to what we see and feel. There is no good substitute.

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Notes

This is the second book considered in this series of posts after:

Three Books for the Writer Self – Introduction

Three Books for the Writer Self – 1) The Soul’s Code

For my own encounters with Thoreau and Emerson, there are the posts A Walk With Hank, and Chant the Beauty of the Good.