Читать книгу At the Water's Edge - John Lister-Kaye - Страница 10

3

Dreams in a Jar

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

– T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Long ago I used to think that dust dancing in a sunbeam was a direct product of the sun, that these motes of weightlessness streaming into my childhood bedroom were particles of the sun itself, and that the brilliant stripe slicing across my pillow, searing me into squinting awareness, was intended for me alone. Awakening and forcing my eyes to adjust, I imagined that those sunbeams were a downward draught of bright air silently blowing my way, delivering their gleaming flecks from some unimaginable solar smelter. They burned and then vanished, like sparks. I tried to capture them in a jam jar, shutting them in with a firm twist of the lid. Then I would rush them under the bedclothes to see if they still shone.

It never occurred to me that dust was everywhere. If sunlight was just bright light, I reasoned, why, then, did it have sun-dust with it? The light bulb didn’t issue a visible fallout, nor did the precious little torch I had been given for my sixth Christmas. I was convinced that whatever I had in my jam jar was real – a gift of pure sun. I became a heliophile, a secret sunbeam worshipper. They infiltrated my dreams.

If I braved myself to face the window and opened my eyes, even for a split second, and then ducked beneath the blankets I found that I could take the whole window with me, the frame, its astragals and square encasement, branded, no matter how tight I screwed up my eyes, upon the soft pixel-palate of my consciousness. ‘Why me?’ I mused. And what could be the meaning of this fierce reveille? Was I hallowed? Had I been singled out for one of those epiphanies I had seen in graphic illustrations, Holy Ghost descending in a shaft of brilliance, which were liberally sprinkled into children’s bibles of those days? It seemed I had.

Nipping down the passage to my sister’s room confirmed this beyond doubt. She lay in gloom. There were no heliographic signals of any kind, divine or otherwise, illuminating her room. No, the sun was signalling to me and me alone, and it was private. It had picked me out and I was in no mood to share its favours. I kept my jam jar hidden in my sock draw. When pressed by my mother for what, precisely, it contained, I ducked the issue, knowing instinctively that grown-ups wouldn’t understand.

May 10th ‘Remember that you come to each day anew,’ chides the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, ‘and hallow the everyday. All real living is meeting.’ That’s where I am; a new day to hallow and some real living to be done. I’ve taken this walk a thousand times, but even after all these years every stride adopts new form, lit anew by shafts of virgin light, another priceless joust with Providence, fresh garlands to be won. On a hallowed day like today I can step out of the present and feel the future roaring at me, seeking me out, careering in to greet me, one more self-propelled plunge into the great ocean of unknowledge in which we all blindly swim.

Desk work dictates that today’s walk has to be in the middle of the day, so I’m breaking free too, springing away to the Avenue with the mischievous gladness of real escape. It’s hard to hallow the day when the phone is ringing. But now I’m out, hungry for some living and meeting.

The sun is high and mine all over again. From 93 million miles away it seems to have a gravitational pull of its own. I feel I’m being hustled along by the glow of the year’s turning. It has spent the morning elbowing through clouds to reward my truancy with a dome of hard, metallic blue. Leaves are translucent, so that once among the limes and chestnuts I stride through a viridescent haze, wading among tiger-stripes of brilliance, breathing deeply. This is it – living again; this is why I come. I’m heading out, hallowing. Every stretched pace is a triumph of living, of just being a sun-struck mote dancing above the awesome planet revolving beneath my feet.

Great tits are insisting. The shrill ‘Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!’ repeats over and over again, refusing to let go. Others answer distantly, all staking claims. The waistcoat of a cock bird, as bright as a buttercup, is split wide by the black stripe which heaves and parts as he throats his pride. His purpose is infectious; today his tiny presence on this Earth is as huge and strident as my own.

There are a few more certainties in life than Mark Twain’s ‘death and taxes’, even in our uncertain world. They are the sparks of recognition riding the sunbeams’ current, the flecks of familiarity that hold us all together and tell us who we are. I know this bird has a mate and at this moment she is snuggled into her ring of moss and felted down feathers, deep inside a nest box nailed to one of the limes. She is fluffed out in her dim hollow, baring her 90°F brood patches to the five ovals of her future, pressed close. Song resonates above her, new life stirs below. I push on, still anxious that I could be called back.

At the wooden bridge over the burn I begin to unwind. I lean on the handrail and bathe in stillness. This is what Yeats meant by ‘peace comes dropping slow’. You can’t rush it; breathe deeply. I’m emptying down, draining dross like bathwater. The burn murmurs confidingly, like inconsequential chatter with an old friend. Wrinkled ripples shine and burble behind the birdsong like a melody constantly repeating. I’m out of hailing distance and, more importantly, no one knows I’m here. I feel like Huck Finn: the bridge is my raft, the burn my ‘big ol’ Mississippi . . . ain’t freedom purdy’.

The sun is strong here and I feel the urge to sit. The grass is friendly – winter’s lifeless mat impaled by bright new growth – yet chill to the touch. The year’s first gnats dance over the pool. Cock chaffinches are bellowing in the willows and birches. A wren trills deliciously. Far away, high over the moorland, a curlew floats its sad notes into the breeze. I need a moment to work out what’s going on here.

I close my eyes and turn my face to the sun’s radiance and the world becomes pink. It’s easy to see why so many pagan cultures threw themselves before it and trembled with fear at the dark gasp of an eclipse. In seconds I am drowsy with the sun’s deception; lying back is irresistible.

Just what is happening does not bring comfort. Everything around me is grabbing its chance for renewal. In that sense spring is a celebration, a triumph of survival of the long winter. But a survival for what? Where are we all headed under this exuberant star we call Sol? The revelations of physics and the assurance that the sun is 93 million miles away, that it is halfway through its calculated life cycle and will one day run out of heat, plunging us all into ice and gas, reveal no more answers than my jam jar. The knowledge that the glow on my face is a magnificent nuclear engine driving life on Earth, delivering energy through space via photons captured by the very green plants I am sitting on and the result of unthinkable nuclear reactions at the sun’s core, consuming 5 million tonnes of matter every second and releasing 3.9 x 1026 watts of energy, hasn’t helped me a jot. I’m still in deep shadow, and I know it.

And survival at what price, and for whom? It’s not by birth and rebirth alone that we survive, but also by the relentless scythe of the Reaper. We inch our way forward over the piled corpses of the dead. No amount of romantic imagery or poetic licence can balm either the fact or the pain. They were right, those pagans, to worship the sun in dread. These warming rays, these beams that seem to ruffle the very essence of the air, that load the great tits’ and chaffinches’ breasts with jubilation, are where it all begins. Deceptive and unimaginable though it may be, the sun’s energy – so vast that we can express it only in a mathematical formula – is systematically sending us out to kill. It is the power source that kick-starts the whole girning, churning conundrum of life into violent alert. We are, every one of us, its slaves and its utterly merciless militia.

I well remember doing photosynthesis back whenever it was so long ago. It gripped me; it seemed such a fiendishly good idea. Beam down the solar energy, fire up the chlorophyll to hang onto the light, suck in the carbon dioxide and water and – Hey Presto! A bag of sugar emerges at the other end. With a wag of the finger and a shake of his bald pate, Tommy Wallace insisted of us languid adolescents never to overlook that this could happen only in the presence of protoplasm in living cells. Ah yes, of course, life – living and meeting. That’s you and me. And what, dear, kind, generous-spirited, eye-twinkling, pipe-sucking Director of Biology, is life? What is it that sparks back and forth in this wonder gel we’ve named protoplasm? And what is it for? Just what is it, precisely, that makes you you and me me? In his book The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley seems to sum it up:

Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense and at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it. We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.

Had I possessed the wit and the courage, aged thirteen, to press the point, I fear that I would have been disappointed. There were no answers in his biology department (despite having it endlessly banged into us that bios logos meant the ‘reasoning of life’), nor were they in his long shelves of books gathering dust beneath the lab windows; not even, I suspect, inside that wise old head. The answers I sought were then and are to this day back in my jam jar – dreams and sunbeams mingling.

Back in 1953 (only six years before I discovered the joys of photosynthesis) Stanley Miller hit lucky. The young Stan, of whom I have a photograph in front of me on my desk, is dutifully dressed in a collar and tie and an immaculate white lab coat. He looks serious, with trim ’50s short back and sides and horn-rimmed glasses. He seems to be posing: holding up a flask at the University of Chicago, where he conducted his groundbreaking experiment. He looks a little nervous, which is hardly surprising since at the raw age of twenty-three he had just been catapulted into the global forefront of organic science. Nervous or not, he is every inch the chemistry student. I get the impression he’s never been shopping in his life, that he has an over-protective mother, folds his pyjamas every morning and persistently ducked out of games at school.

He is standing in front of a grid of retorts from which hangs a tangle of apparatus: a flask and a pressure vessel, pipes, valves, U-tubes and cables. This is the young man who set the science world a-buzzing with what the world’s press headlined as ‘Finally ringing the death knell on Creationism’ – a final blow added to the still-haemorrhaging wound of iconoclasm inflicted by Darwin and the Evolutionists back in the 1860s. Miller had, they proclaimed, handed science the unequivocal proof for the origin of life on Earth. The question was inevitable. At a seminar presenting his results to rows of famous faces in the internationally acclaimed and predominantly sceptical audience of scientists, he was asked if he thought this was how life started. Miller’s professor, Harold Urey, leapt to his student’s defence. ‘If God didn’t do it this way, then he surely missed a trick!’

What the young graduate student had actually done was nothing of the sort – he hadn’t proved a thing. But he had managed to simulate in his flasks and vessels the primitive conditions that probably existed on Earth about 3,000 million years ago, roughly when life might first have emerged.

The Earth is about 5,000 million years old; for the first 2,000 million it was too hot and all the oxygen was tied up in rust – bonded into oxides with other elements such as iron and silicon, which form much of the Earth’s crust. The atmosphere consisted principally of four gases: methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour from volcanic eruptions. Then along comes the irreversible influence of the sun.

Somehow, somewhere, all those billions of years ago, in some anonymous mist of eye-stinging, nauseous vapour swirling through the Earth’s electrically crackling atmosphere, lightning, together with ultraviolet and gamma radiation from the sun, bombarded those four gases until they metamorphosed, brewing themselves into a stew of amino acids. Bang! (or perhaps it was Fizz! – the first building blocks of proteins had arrived on our planet.

Stanley L. Miller rigged up his pipes, tubes and electrodes with the water flask, pressure vessels and a cooling jacket, sealing the vital ingredients within a bell jar. He sucked out the air, creating a sterile vacuum. Then he pumped in the mix of gases and boiled up the water in the flask so that steam circulated throughout. Once he was satisfied that they were all in place in the sparking chamber he gave it a kick of home-made lightning.

He ran it for a week. The solution in the flask turned yellow-brown and an oily tar formed on the walls of the sparking vessel. As the water cooled he found that fifteen different amino acids had condensed out in the U-tube. This was laboratory-induced prebiotic synthesis.

The experiment was opened to peer review with publication in Science – one of the leading journals of the scientific world – on May 15th 1953. It was an experiment, no more than that – a shot in the almost-dark of inspired guesswork. It had not proved how life did start, but it did demonstrate how life could have started. Later, Melvin Calvin did much the same thing using gamma radiation, shunting Miller’s work a quantum leap further forward. As well as a mix of amino acids, Calvin’s experiment produced simple sugars, and some of the purines needed for nucleic acids. Nineteen fifty-three was an extraordinarily productive year in the world of organic chemistry. Only a few months later Watson and Crick would publish their double-helix model of DNA.

If, in fact, these primitive organic molecules were synthesised in the atmosphere, it is likely they were washed down to Earth by rains, which in time accumulated in oceans and lakes – life’s natal soup. By some unfathomable twist of chemistry these tiny molecules – now blue-green algae or bacteria-like organisms – discovered how to replicate each other (asexual reproduction) and nourish themselves by grazing on the others around them. Some stole a march – did better than the rest. Competition was born. It was probably competition that forced some of them to abandon chemosynthesis (munching other molecules for energy), and turn to sunlight – photosynthesis – instead. That was the really smart move. Now we had single-cell organisms pumping out free atmospheric oxygen – so far absent from our story – and the beginnings of a balanced ecosystem. One lot of primitive organisms was capable of synthesising organic food from inorganic materials and providing the oxygen for the rest, which hungrily consumed it and emitted carbon dioxide for the first lot to feed on – the very beginning of the cycle of interdependence of all living things, of which we are an essential part.

So there you have it – the progenitors of the plant kingdom busy feeding the progenitors of the animal kingdom. Let Darwin have his say and before you can mutter ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’ you have asexual and sexual reproduction operating side by side, both primed with variant mutations (thanks to radiation from the sun) and all replicating and out-competing themselves as fast as they can. Suddenly there are sharks and whales in oceans brimming with plankton, iguanas clambering over rocks, mountains wrapping themselves in jungle, kiwis not bothering to fly, dung beetles rolling globes of their own, albatrosses circumnavigating the oceans of the world and Red Indians chasing buffalo over cliffs. Here we all are, from the amoeba to Einstein, munching each other in glorious sunlight for all we are worth. God, meanwhile, whoever he may be and wherever he lives and moves and has his being, and whether he engineered the whole thing or not, has somehow been left in the shade.

The grass I am lying on is heading in two directions at once. The pallid stalks of winter are going to ground. The forces of decay are already breaking them down, microbes are jostling for their sugars, bacteria are ravenously ingesting, saprophytic mould and slime fungi are pitching in with the slow, mechanical infiltration of their fibres. In a few weeks the old mat will be gone, no longer distinguishable as grass, just a mushy, khaki mulch rapidly decomposing its way to becoming soil, loaded with humic microbes, providing nutrients for its own roots. The new shoots of photosynthesis are heading up, worshipping the sun, dizzy with light and carbon dioxide.

A shadow crosses my closed eyes. For the briefest flicker something has passed between me and the sun. I am instantly awake. I know I’m no longer alone. My eyes ease open, feeling the drag of my irises urgently and involuntarily stopping down. Squinting, I glance to the right and left. The sky above me is enamelled with brilliance, but the chaffinches are no longer singing. Even the busy wren has stilled her trill. Slowly I pull up onto one elbow.

Twenty yards to my left a line of electricity distribution poles crosses a field. My eye is drawn to the apex of the nearest pole. There, shining in newly burnished copper, is a kestrel. He is small, smaller than a pigeon and neat with it in a dressy way, but he gleams with all the presence of a prince. I can feel him. My skin tingles. His shadow snapped me out of my daydream and now his aura is hauling me in on a rope. For once he hasn’t seen me. Normally you can’t fool birds of prey. Their eyesight is so fierce, so finely tuned, so instantly absorbent to every twitch of life that our feeble efforts at concealment are a worthless gesture.

I raise my binoculars and scour the profile of his blunt little face. He is brand new under a hood of blue slate. His primaries are blades of black, crossed behind his back like a schoolmaster’s hands. The grey tail is long and dipped in black ink, except at the very tip, where a crescent of copper shines through. The nares are a golden glimmer crowning the arc of the neat, downward-tucked bill; yellow rings encircle dark orbs as round and glossy as puddles on a moonlit night. They dominate his brain. Behind those limpid lenses a continuous interrogation simmers and seethes.

He hasn’t seen me because he is intent, staring down. Something below him in the grass close to the foot of the pole has tracked its image up through the sunlight into the glowing sponges of his retinas. He is drinking it in; motionless – no, stiller than that, he is frozen. It’s as though a sculpture in polished slate and copper has been placed on the top of the pole. So intense is his concentration that for the moment I am safe; I can shift my awkward position and lean back against the rain-laundered bark of a birch.

Anxious for her own future, a hen chaffinch decides to brave the vivid statue that has invaded their sunlight. She flutters out to mob the kestrel, uttering a broken little cry edged with hysteria and adopting a quite un-finch-like flight, hesitant and dithery in a way that impresses no one; certainly not the kestrel. He doesn’t flinch. His gaze is as fixed as his stance. He ignores the chaffinch, not even bothering to acknowledge her presence. She dances twice around the pole, gives up and returns to the birches. The day is silent again.

Only later will I properly comprehend the emergent mini-drama that is being enacted here. For now all I see is a kestrel perched on a pole. My thoughts return to the sun. It has been at work for several hours, streaming photons my way. The ground is drying, the leaves unbuttoning their tulip wraps and motorways of chloroplasts are flooding in to work. I am forced to acknowledge (reluctantly) that only some of that solar radiation is for me. Happy though I am with my slice, I know that others are stirring too. The great tits and chaffinches have raised their song, breasts swelling, syrinxes oscillating, hurling it out, choiring the day with spontaneous, sun-charged exultation. Beside me the delicate petals of wood sorrel are lifting; their shamrock leaves are widening to soak in the soft confetti of sunlight that sprinkles the woodland floor.

There is a solemn explosion of life everywhere I look. Chemical reactions are raising their game. Protoplasm is busier than it’s been for months. Decay is smouldering underground. Insect pupae are squirming inside their leathery wraps. Egg cases are splitting. Sap is ascending the birch stems to match the call for water and minerals from high above. Every opening leaf needs the hydraulic turbidity of filled cells to stiffen and grow. Columns of liquid power are answering a call to arms. Trance-like, the kestrel stares. With the patience of a gravestone he stares into the grass.

Somewhere underground, in some secret cranny of its own, a reptile blinks and stirs – stirred by some cryptic alchemy of electro-chemical sentience. Waking from long sleep it feels the surge of the warming earth around it. Its dreams had been of pure sun. There was nothing blind about this instinct. For all heliotropic reptiles that have to raise their body temperature to get going, the sun is an imperative, an irresistible call. They have no choice. To feed, to grow, to mate, they have to find the sun. Such is the lot of the slow worm.

Normally the slow worm (actually a legless lizard) doesn’t bask in open sunlight as crocodiles and many lizards and snakes do; it prefers to absorb heat from stones. Beneath a sheet of old corrugated iron is a perfect place to heat up quickly and in safety – a quick warm for a slow worm. I have found dozens in such places – have even laid sheets down for that very purpose. Boy-naturalists indulge strange pursuits. You come back later and take a peek. You lift the sheet. Suddenly exposed to the light, slow worms look put out and urinate to make the point. And they are slow; they can’t hurry off, are easy to catch. You learn quickly it’s important to let them urinate before you put them in your pocket. Reptile urine has the rancid odour of over-stewed cabbages. As a boy I smelled permanently of school kitchens.

But this is May and the sun is high. There are no corrugated iron sheets available, nor, apparently, suitable stones. Slowly our worm-lizard ventures out into full sun. This ponderous legless lizard, who feeds mostly on small slugs, is stiff and slow. In the hand it has none of the taut, muscular flexibility of a grass snake or an adder or those almost prehensile, broad underbelly scales that zip snakes along so efficiently. Stiffly the slow worm levers his silvery inches between stems and stones using friction and the extended ‘S’ of his long body to slither forward. His black tongue flickers, testing the air. His blunt little head, the hazel-ringed eyes and pencil-dot nostrils prise through the grass like a bodkin. He is all metal, the thickness of a man’s forefinger forged in shining blue steel. And he is utterly harmless – unless you happen to be a slug. But before he can do anything else he needs the sun.

I knew none of this. I saw only the statue staring into the grass. Then it fell. It was as though the sculpture had been tipped forward by an unseen hand. Still staring, on closed wings it fell through empty air to the earth. The earth rose to meet the copper falcon in a collision that would surely bring its death. In a single burnished dart it dived to the long grass, head first. I missed the yellow talons thrust forward. I was too slow to see the black-banded tail feathers fan to brake the fall. It vanished. I was sure it must be dead. How could it plummet to earth without dashing out its brains? I stood up. There was no sign of the kestrel. The grass had swallowed it up.

The kestrel is a falcon, a member of that elite of raptorial, hooked beaks, all of which vie with the eagles for precedence. The vain and competitive aristocracy of the raptor world have never conceded a jot. Led from the front by the gyrfalcon and the peregrine, for dash and verve the falcons have it; for power and imperial splendour the golden eagle and its huge cousin the sea eagle cannot be matched. Hardened birders can never agree; the jury has long since given up and gone home. The kestrel and the merlin are the smallest falcons on the British list. Both can dazzle with aerobatic skill. Of the two the kestrel is the commoner, so familiar on our roadsides and motorway verges hovering for voles and mice, hawking the air for insects. The windhover is its old country name. It can face into a gale with wings half closed, holding its position with barely a quiver for minutes at a time. It stoops like a flash of bronze.

I peer through my binoculars. The grass reveals nothing. The whole thing was a sun-dream; I begin to think I imagined it all.

And then this little falcon, this flash of kettle, rises from the earth. It ascends on stiffly flickering wings. It rises and rises. Clenched in one black-taloned fist is a lanyard of legless lizard. Its yellow grab-foot had closed around a slow worm. The needle talons grip its tail. Sunlight glints from silver scales. It rises with the kestrel, twisting its head and thorax in an aimless confusion of defiance and despair. The kestrel circles the pole once and returns to its perch. Landing on one leg it shifts its grip, now pinning the squirming tail down with the other foot too. The slate-blue head bends to its prey and the grey bill opens; the hook curves downward like a claw. The slow worm inscribes one last, desperate loop. Levering against nothing but air it curls and flails and breaks. It breaks free. I see a flash of red and the broken body twists and falls, arcing through sunbeams to the ground.

The kestrel looked bemused. He stood with a squirming tail in his talons. Its bloody stump thrashed even more vigorously than before. The falcon looked first at the tail clenched in his feet, then down at the grass below. A sharp, yickering cry vented his frustration. He seemed to know that the prize was gone; gone the way of the survival game – some you win, some you lose.

The slow worm had played its last card. Its past and its future had collided in a moment of terrible truth. By sheer luck it had been caught by the tail. Evolution had handed it a trump to play when the chips are finally down: cast your tail.

Break free and go forth tailless into the future. Inside its tiny, metallic brain something akin to adrenaline was sending an SOS to its tail an inch behind its last vital organ. Tissues contracted and the pre-ordained hairline fracture built into its cartilaginous spine suddenly snapped. The blood supply crimped off, the muscles ruptured, the silver scales parted like slates on a shattered roof. It broke as though chopped. It shed the inches it needed least. The body cannot re-grow a tail, but the stump will quickly heal. Tailless, it can still feed and breed and function adequately for long enough to reproduce itself. That’s all that natural selection cares about – one more chance to survive.

So my sun-loving slow worm had played its last hand and won the day. Hitting the grass, it lost no time in disappearing. The kestrel flew off with the tail; I climbed the fence and walked over to the pole. I scoured the long, dead grass, lifted stones and gazed up at the perch above. The slow worm had gone. Its dreams of the sun will never be the same again.