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Reconstructing a Science Fiction Poem
Frederick Turner
In this essay I propose to do something rather peculiar: that is, to take a section of "my"
poem Genesis and, as a literary critic, perform on it a close literary analysis. The
philosophical subject of Genesis is time, and the theory of time it explores is one in
which time is constituted of and by the process of reflexive iteration in both the sentient
and the presentient world. Thus to perform an exegesis of one's "own" poem is itself to
extend the domain of time by further reflexion.
But this formulation already will not work. For a poem, if it is any good, is always
already a better reading of its critic and of its own critical exegesis than they are of it.
And, as the quotation marks suggest, the poem is not "my" poem. The experience of
writing the poem was of someone (rather fumbling with the transmission and frustrated
with the result) dictating the poem to me: someone who is, or rather will be, a poet in
one of the many possible futures that fan out from the present.
The Anthropic Principle of the physicist John Archibald Wheeler implies a sort of weak
backward causality, in which the initial conditions of the universe are, because of the
observer effect of quantum mechanics, partly determined by the kind of observers, if any,
that they will end up producing. But since every moment is the initial conditions for all
of its futures, all those futures are dimly present, clamoring for existence, or perhaps for
quietus, as angels standing behind our shoulders when we make decisions, especially
artistic ones. One of those angels was my poet, who, though he was very reticent about
who he was, I have imagined as living in New York during the twentysecond century,
under the gentle censorship of the Ecotheist authorities, composing his poem in secret
about the great historical events of the twentyfirst century, about a hundred years before
his own birth.
His poem Genesis is an epic poem in unrhymed iambic pentameters, with occasional
sections in rhyme. It is exactly 10,000 lines long, and is divided into five Acts, each of
which contains five Scenes, of exactly four hundred lines each. This severely
constraining form, with enormous variations of tone and texture and style within it, is
itself part of the meaning of the poem: closure, and the further appetite for closure that is
triggered by closure, is the dynamic driving force of time, that which makes new
beginnings possible by drawing a line under, and summing up, what has come before.
Closure is to poetry what death is to a human being: the gift of being to all successors, the
definition of the specific life and meaning of an individual, the basis of all sharing. Open
forms seek immortality and omnipotence and are thus essentially adolescent in meaning.
The action of the poem covers the major historical events of the period from about 2015
to about 2070. A group of scientists and technologists, led by Chancellor ("Chance") Van
Riebeck, is charged by the United Nations with the scientific survey of the planet Mars.
Using theories derived from the Gaia Hypothesis, they clandestinely introduce hardy
genetically tailored bacteria into the Martian environment with the intention of
transforming the planet into one habitable by human beings. The Earth has at this time
fallen under the theocratic rule of the Ecotheist Movement, which divides human beings
off from the rest of nature and regards all human interference with nature as an evil.
Chance and his followers are captured and put on trial, and war breaks out between the
Martian colonists and the home planet. Though Chance and others lose their lives, the
colonists are able to gain their independence by threatening to drop a moonlet on Earth.
After a bitter renewed struggle led by the hero Tripitaka the colonists obtain a complete
inventory of Earthly lifeforms, sometimes called the Ark, or elsewhere the Lima Codex.
With the help of this inventory, and led by Beatrice Van Riebeck, they complete the
terraforming of the planet. A religious leader, the Sibyl, is born to the colonists; her
teaching reconciles the ancient mystical wisdom of the Earth with the new science and
cultural experience of Mars.
The scientific and technological material of the poem constitute not only a large part of
its content but also a gigantic metaphor of its very structure and form. In other words, the
unwritten poem is the barren planet, and the composition of the poem is its cultivation by
living organisms. But the word "metaphor" fails to capture the dimensions of the trope
which is the poem. For the gardening of Mars by the code (or "codex") of life is act,
theme, myth, argument and form at once. The forking tree of evolutionary descent is the
forking tree of grammatical and logical construction, the forking tree of plot and story, the
forking tree of esthetic form, the forking tree of family descent, and the forking tree of
human moral decision; and those trees are in turn connected as branches to the stem of
the great tree of the universe itself.
Such selfsimilar forms are now known as fractal geometries: the plot of Genesis is itself
fractal, with many small branchlets of event connecting hierarchically and heterarchically
with larger actions which are in turn tributary to the one epic action of the whole poem,
the founding of a new world. The parable of the swan's wing in V. ii., which I shall quote
below, is itself a branch or wing of this structure, as well as being a miniature version of
it.
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The tragic element of the poem is also related to this deep trope. For if one path is
chosen, then others must be rejectedor better, "set aside;" the German word aufheben
might express it, with its implication of the cancellation of a debt. The future is a sort of
wavefunction, a probability curve expressing the relative likelihood of many possible
events. The decisions that constitute the present and the very continuance of time must
collapse that wave function and prune off the branches not chosen. This is a violent act,
as all creation is violent. Mars and Earth constitute two historical choicepathways in the
poem. Both have much to recommend them, but the poet must choose to prefer one, and
the conflict between them is tragic. This procrustean choice is symbolized and expressed
by the very rigid technical parameters of the poem, the strict iambic pentameter line
relieved only by a proportion of feminine endings (many of them "paid for" by succeeding
headless lines, in a kind of rubato ), and the equal and round numbers of the lines in each
section. These rigidities compel the action again and again to come to a point, a focus, to
collapse the wave function of possibility, to choose one path of plot.
In a larger sense still the narrator is an alternate branch of the future of the redactor of the
poem, that is, myself, and the world of the poem an alternate branch to "this" one.
Possibly the future the poem describes will not come about precisely because the poem
was passed to me and I chose to publish it. The relationship between the actual branch
and its ghostly alternates constitutes the richness and meaning of time, just as the
relationship between the metrical structure of the poetic line and the actual rhythm of its
spoken presence constitutes its musical richness. In the broadest sense we may thus say
that the content of existence is essence, that being is the sacrifice of alternatives, that
freedom is the rejection of choices. The Anthropic Principle postulates that full
consciousness of the origins of the universe may ontologically privilege those origins
over any others, and that thus the choice of moral being, conscious knowledge, and above
all of beautiful unified complexity, is the logos that creates the world. In this sense the
world is a kind of drama, brought into being by its own choices; and this is perhaps one
reason why the poet named the divisions of his poem by the theatrical terms he did.
As I have suggested, the poem may be designed as a warning to past ages of the
consequences of their fear of the future; on the other hand the action of the poem may be
a kind of performative invocation designed to bring about the new choices it describes.
The work of terraforming is the work of making air, an atmosphere, the Atman or spirit,
the breath in which the poem may be spoken, the first breath of the newborn. The poem
is the Lima Codex, or Ark of the Covenant, the book of information for the construction
of a new world; and the struggle of its composition, both by its its original future narrator
and by its presentday scribe, against its enemies, historical and technical, is the
fundamental drama of the work.
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The poem is not a mere "fantasy," in the sense of an arbitrary fiction. The technologies it
describes, especially the development of artificial photosynthetic bacteria using iterative
evolutionary neuralnetwork programs, are being studied by NASA, where the poem is
part of the reading curriculum for its longrange planning groups. Other aspects of the
poem's science, such as the environmental transformation of Mars that it describes, have
been used by the ecological restoration community as a limitingcase thought experiment.
Other elements still have become issues in speculative theology and in environmental
ethics. Thus the poem has demonstrated a different role for literature from that accepted
by the Western avantgarde for the last two hundred years or so. And this new role is
itself part of the meaning of the poem, as a meditation upon the nature of time: for though
a mimesis of future events, it takes an active "poietic" role in their actualization. Thus we
cannot know time without changing it, and this is the very nature of time. As with
Oedipus Rex, if we play with predictions we end up altering our own initial conditions,
meeting our father at the place where three ways meetthat is, at the crotch of time
whence we issued from our mother.
The passage I wish to analyse is from Act V, Scene ii (lines 12226). At this point in the
poem Mars has been provided with an Earthly atmosphere by its gardenermidwives
Beatrice, Ganesh, and Charlie. The early life and teachings of the divine lady Hermione
Mars, the Sybil, have already been broached; but the poet fears that the reader will be
wearied by her mysterious and gnomic sayings, and by way of almost comic relief turns to
a description of the populating of Mars with earthly animals. "The Ark" refers to two
things in the poem. The first is the giant spaceship Kalevala, whose hull is a living beech
tree, turned inside out and genetically mutated to grow to a vast size in the weightlessness
of space. It was employed to carry selections of living genes and tissues from the Earth
to Mars, where they can be cloned into animals and plants. But Kalevala, the literal ark,
has been destroyed in battle by the ecotheists. The second, metaphorical, "ark" is the set
of eight information discs upon which the same genetic information was inscribed in
binary code; this ark is successfully smuggled from Earth to Mars by the twins Wolf and
Irene.
Thus one of the fundamental metaphors of the poembut it is more than a metaphor,
rather a selfreflexive synecdoche, or perhaps a sort of technical drawing or blueprintis
of the DNA molecule as poetry, or poetry as the further essentialized, and abstracted, and
portable form of DNAon discs rather than carried in the belly of a wooden ark. We
could say that the wooden ark is commutated into the digital ark. (The commander of the
Kalevala, incidentally, is Tripitaka, whose name is the same as the priesthero who, in
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Wu Ch'engen's novel Monkey, carried the sacred scriptures of Buddhism over the
Himalayas from India to China: another story of the carrying of the ark of the covenant
across the desert to the promised land.) Since time, moreover, is conceived of in the
poem as inseparable from evolution, as being both the meaning and the sign of evolution,
there is the further implication that the evolution of DNA by mutation and selection and
the new use of words in poetry are both timegenerating activities.
One other element of the passage would be useful to know before reading it. On Mars the
gravitation is 3/8 that of the Earth, and in an Earthly atmosphere human beings would be
able to fly under their own power. The metaphor of flying, which can be taken to mean
the new human capacity to inhabit time in depth by means of knowledge and
interpretation, is connected through the device of the geneticallygrown wings to the other
great metaphor/synecdoche of DNA.
Let us go now to the passage itself, which begins with our exhaustion in the attempt to
scale the holy mountain (Pavonis Mons ) where the Sibyl has her cell, and which will turn
into a lesson in flying.
But till we are prepared to reascend
The cliffs, let us go to and fro and and see
How Charlie and Ganesh have broached the Ark
And let forth all the curious animals.
Most familylike to us, the vertebrates:
Elephas bearing his head's gondola,
Bufo the toad, who bloats his moony toot,
The bustly cassowary, with slim toes,
The teleosts, their scaled eyes set in bone, 20
The shad, the arched tunny, and the perch;
The pangolin, with her smart streamlining,
The salamander, who must work each foot
Out of a different idea; the shrew,
As swift and vicious as the village sneak,
The gentle cow, her eyes rimmed with kohl,
The heron, like a purple thundercloud
Seen across marshland in the setting sun;
Pissing against the odorous stump, the dog;
The hummingbird who throws his huge helix 30
About the jacarandas and who leaves
5
A flash of green buzzing into your eyes;
The valved and wallowing baleen, her flukes
Awash with bitter curds of cream, her breath
Thumping like furnace from the pouched blowhole;
The jackdaw in a mob of clever jackdaws,
As exercised as Guelphs or Ghibellines;
The crosseyed skate, who sidled for too long,
The gorgeous flowing camouflaged jaguar,
The pig with his shrewd eyes, the staring owl, 40
The lemur retinal, the manatee,
And Mus the mouse and Pan the chimpanzee.
But Charlie and Ganesh had more in mind
Than filling out the plenum of a zoo;
They were composing a community,
A new branch of natural history.
Consider the creation of the swan.
Whether we picture it in space or time,
It owes its being to a hierarchy
Of other organisms. We must learn 50
To find the beauty in this web of lives,
This seething texture of dependency.
Inside the lungflesh of the leopard frog
That the swan preys on in certain habitats
There lives a nematode which is in turn
Parasitized by zygomycota.
The frogs prey on the ephemoptera
Which feed as larvae on the fungal growth
Of fecal matter from the waterbirds.
Mites populate the feathers of the swan; 60
Its colon swarms with microsymbiotes.
Follow the swan's genes back, and there are branches
Where grebes and petrels, storks and pelicans
Fork outward from the stem, then distant kin,
The swifts and passerines; and further back
The archeopteryxes, and their roots
Which also fed the undreaming monotremes,
The platypus, the anteaters, and so
Turning a moment to climb up the stem
6
Marsupials, the mammals, and ourselves. 70
And further down the chordates split again
To tunicates and dim cephalochords;
And now the great branch of the arthropods,
The insects, spiders, and crustacea;
And the mollusca, with their pearly shells
(And such strange creatures as the echiura
Whose tiny male lives as a parasite
Inside the female's kidney; she is called
The fat innkeeper and is used for bait;
One of Ganesh's favorite animals, 80
The bat ray, pops her from her hole as you
Might clear a toilet with a rubber plunger);
Then down the stem again, where rotifers
And mesozoans branch away; and then
The radiates and formless parazoa:
The sponges in their blind communities.
And down again, to the stromatolites
Which lived two billion years without change;
And then to mineral colonies and clays.
Sometimes the way down is the way up. 90
If we could take this path a little further
We'd find those silicates and carbonates
To be compacted ash of burntout stars;
The nuclei themselves cooked up inside
The crushing fusion of their whitewhite cores;
Their particles the frozen motes of light
That burst in nightmare from the primal atom.
And we would know that moment as the fall
Of the Uranian Goddess to Her dream.
But if we took that way then we might err, 100
Believing that the arche of the joy
Of all creation as it sings itself
Is found by a retracing of the path
The world took in its long ecstatic fall;
"To thy high requiem become a sod."
Pass through that point where down is changed to up;
And as the sounding whale breaks for the surface,
7
And as the vaulter strints behind his pole,
And as the poet must not yet look back
Lest the beloved be reclaimed forever, 110
And as the swan's wings whoop above the water,
Gold feet spurning the lower element,
Let us turn back toward the holy mountain.
First we must learn to fly. But who will teach us?
Recall the story of the willowpattern:
A mandarin engaged the poet Chang
To teach his daughter, beautiful Hong Shee.
Though he was young and poor, they fell in love.
The father in a rage locked up his daughter,
But she escaped out of a secret gate 120
Where Chang was waiting, and they fled toward
The little bridge engraved beneath the glaze;
But they were seen, and men with guns pursued;
And Chang was shot and Hong Shee drowned herself.
But the gods changed them to a pair of swallows
And they still dance the lakes and willowwaters.
Wolf and Irene, who learned that planet's skies,
Will be our flyingteachers so that we
May be as swallows in the air of time.
It was the children first, of course, who took 130
the sky, their natural inheritance.
This large land mammal always yearned to fly,
As if the wrong circuitry had got wired
Into a biped quite unsuited to it:
Large boned and dense, "bad powerweight ratio,"
Ganesh liked to point out; and yet nature
(Being fantastical in her conceits,
Not above cruelty, even, if the joke
Seems worth it; or ios it incompetence,
Which governs, after all, ninety percent 140
Of what goes on anywhere?)yet nature
Makes us dream of being mighty birds,
Coasting the buttresses of mountain chains,
Lifting away upon a breeze of power,
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Escaping monsters, terrors, to the air.
Wolf stands upon a windy hill, his goggles
Pushed up on his head, his grey eyes distant,
A skydauphin, like SaintExupery:
Let's listen to him lecture to his students.
"Your muscles were evolved to bear your body 150
Against the leaden gravity of Earth.
By now the exercises you have done
Have given you that strength again. On Earth
You could all jump a meter in the air.
Here some of you can leap to twice your height.
Now watch Irene. She weighs forty pounds.
See: she can longjump over thirteen meters
And her hangtime's what? Two point eight? Thank you.
That's enough time, you'll see, to take two strokes,
And get a glide you find you can sustain. 160
You can all press an easy eighty pounds,
Enough to beat the drop rate and the drag.
Then you can get your feet into the stirrups
And make your flying height. A hundred meters
Keeps you out of trouble, and you still
Have depth perception while you feel you need it.
Landing is tough, I know. For those of you
Who really can't, we've got the brained wings
Which do it for you, 'drop the flaps,' we say.
That means extend and cup the primaries, 170
Open the secondaries, and stall out
Just as you hit the ground. If you're afraid,
We'll start you on the old folks' muscled wings,
And we can even strap a gasbag on,
Though that's against the spirit of the game."
If you have ears to hear. The metaphor,
This feathered glory I ask you to put on,
Is not intangible, light though it is.
Consider how recursive is its order:
First, the full wing itself, white as an angel; 180
Then the wing's wings, which are its fletch of feathers,
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Each with a tuft of warm and gentle down;
But then the feathers too are feathered with
the crispy barbs that clothe the inpithed quill
To form the rigid vane; and these have barbules,
Which again bear hooklets, set to catch
Any chance split and heal it without seam.
(The Sibyl likened wings to our felt time:
She said that underneath the surface structure
We knew the time of animals and plants, 190
The time of stones and atoms, and of fire.
So many pens are woven to a pinion,
The prince's pennon bears his sister's swan.
Oh fly with it, fly with it, fly with it!)
Wind sifting by, divided by your blade;
Wingtips trailing a curl of turbulence;
Your fingers rule the carpus, metacarpus;
Your masked face feels a burr of parching speed;
A long glide down the aeroclinal wedge
Into the sudden buoyancy and fetor 200
That rises from the sweetness of a meadow;
The swiftapproaching wavetop of a ridge;
The gasp and fall away into the chasm
That succeeds, the flicking turn along
The cliffwall till the updraft catches you;
The spiral up into the towering sky
As fields and trees diminish like a lens;
The silence as you leave the world of bells,
Cries, stamp and snort of animals, the rush
And burble of the streams, the sigh of trees; 210
The sunny blisses of the middle air,
The dizziness of summer afternoons,
The suck and dumbness of the ear's drawn drum,
The choice of detail from a hemisphere
Of world, all given sharply to the view
Like a crisp plateful of delicious viands,
Like a soft carpet stitched with tiny needles:
The manycolored coat of mortal dwelling.
How do we get down? We should have a kitestring,
10
We should have a fishingline, a reel, 220
A spool to reel us in, a puppeteer,
A yoke, an apronstring, and we have none!
Ah joy and terror, now we truly know
The meaning and the function of a roof:
It is a lid to keep the sweetness in!
Thus lesson number one, the school of joy.
The first thirty lines of this passage are a traditional bestiary, using the anthropomorphic
metaphors, epic epithets and cartoonlike stereotypy of the human sensorium, which was
until recently the only resource of the poet who wished to describe the world. The beasts
stare out at us with their eyes, which is the feature to which the human eye goes to read
expression; and there are references to earlier epics, to the creation scene in Paradise
Lost, to the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Dante's Florence, to the etymological play on
"whale" in Melville's Moby Dick; less obviously, to Jaques' stereotypical "seven ages of
Man" speech in As You Like It.
This rich and userfriendly system of perception and description is the default option of
human knowledge. But Charlie and Ganesh are not collecting a zoo, but creating a world.
Mars is a new way of knowing, knowingfromtheinside, knowing by creating. The poet
of Mars believes that if the human default system of experience is taken for granted, and
not reenergized by a deeper understanding that derives from analysing and literally re
creating the perceived, then it generates an increasing belief that things are always better
unchanged and that the world is most beautiful when least participated in by human
beings: this is the creed of the ecotheists and it is finally a nihilistic one. Human
metaphorsthe shrewishness of the shrew, the gondola of the elephant, the gentleness of
the cowcan be evocative, but unless they are validated by true scientific understanding
they are superficial and secondary, and lead to a kind of perceptual conservatism. We
must learn to experience the rest of nature as it experiences itself; and our way of doing
that is through the alienation of exact scientific language. Phenomenology without
science is a cheap and lazy shortcut, a sort of autocannibalism which eventually runs out
of fuel and futures.
In the next passage a supremely heraldic and emblematic bird, the swan, a favorite with
poets and an important symbol throughout this poem, is treated strictly as a subject of
biological inquiry. This beautiful and majestic bird is seen in the ecological context,
including the stomachfauna of its prey and the fungal decay of its wastes: and we are
invited to find this ecological interdependence the more deeply beautiful, because truer.
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The swan that we could construct out of DNA basesthe swan as God would know it, as
its makermust be more beautiful than the swan that is merely perceived.
The poet then turns from the spatial existence of the swan as part of an ecology, to its
temporal existence as an evolving species. As we will see, time itself evolves, and the
richest temporal experience of something is the one which not only includes the
elaborated spatial relations which have arisen out of its past, but also its evolutionary past
itself. The poet traces the evolutionary tree of the swan all the way back to the common
ancestor that we share with it, and then to the preorganic matter of the early Earth; and
finally, in a further leap, traces that matter back to the Big Bang. In the process such
utterly alien organisms as the echiura are literally familiarized, made to feel part of our
whole living family.
But it is not enough to analyse, to elicit origins, to deconstruct the exquisite and elaborate
forms of contemporary living experience into the "archetraces" of electromagnetic
energy out of which they are made. The poet signals this new turn in the argument by the
ambiguous reference to the Uranian Goddess. The phrase is the Sibyl's, and is part of her
suggested and partly withdrawn theology, whereby the Big Bang origin of the universe is
retold as the fall into matter, and thus into the beginnings of true awareness, of an original
deity. But this deity begins without mind, freedom, inclination to action, or existence in
any meaningful sense, because all these things depend upon limitation. Material
existence is likened to a dream, but the Sibyl reminds us that consciousness is, after all,
only possible for an entity that can dream. Divinity takes on being by taking on
limitation. This theological story is partly withdrawn, since after all the properties
attributed to the deity are identical to those attributed to it by atheists: that is,
nonexistence and insignificance! But it is only partly withdrawn, because the universe, as
the evolving fetal body of a god whose neurons we are, is in the process of bringing about
a divine integration that, by observing the origin of the universe, partly determines its
parameters and future direction.
The point is, though, that mere analysis, mere seeking for origins, is not enough. The
poet has already quoted Heraclitus' aphorism, "the way up is the way down," though in
reverse: the way down is the way up. That is, we can only understand the result and
wholeness of a thing by studying its process of origin and its parts. But this study is not
enough, and must be reversed to reconstitute the wholeness and result; we err if we
believe that it is enough to go back along the path we took to get here. As Virgil says, it
is easy to pass back down into Avernus, whence we came when we were born, but to
retrace one's steps: "hoc opus, hic labor est," this is the toil, this is the task. We must
pass through the center of the planet, like Dante and Virgil when they climb past the waist
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of Satan frozen in the midst of Hell; we find that gravity there reverses itself, and instead
of analysing and seeking origins we are now synthesizing and creating. We can now
return to the rich and beautiful "default option" of human perception, after having
undergone our sojourn in the underworld, our immersion in the past and interior of
things. The whale and the swan of the bestiary return, this time as symbols of the
crossing of levels, the transcendence of previous limitations, and the bootstrapping
evolution of time into higher and higher integrations. The swan's wings begin to beat, the
holy mountain beckons once more, and we can begin to learn to fly.
But for this we need teachers. And now the poem takes what seems to be a strange and
irrelevant turn: it tells the story of the willowpattern, the odd little picture in blue and
white that decorates traditional china. This story is actually a test of our new powers of
hermeneutical flight. It has four levels.
The first level is that this is a metamorphosis tale; from Virgil we have gone to Ovid, to a
naive/sophisticated origin myth or Aesop'sfable or Justso story of "how the human being
got its wings." It gets its wings through sacrifice in love, and sacrifice of love; more
specifically, by an unsuccessful but selfvalidating attempt to enjoy a forbidden love,
which, in its denial, results in transcendence of the milieu in which that love originated,
and enjoyment of that love on a higher level. The characters Wolf and Irene, who are
literally the flyinginstructors of Mars, have passed through precisely this ordeal. They
were forced to renounce their incestuous love for each other in the process of rescuing the
Ark of life and carrying it from Earth to Mars.
And here there is a further literary implication, a second level of interpretation: the poet
associates brothersister incest, and the feelings that go with it, with the Romantic
movement in poetry. (We do indeed find this theme in the lives of Wordsworth, Shelley,
Byron, and the Brontes, and throughout German and French Romantic literature.) The
poet's critique of Romanticism is not in its discovery and exploration of this psychic realm
but in its failure to return with the insights that realm proffers, its failure to renounce and
therefore to both preserve and transcend (aufheben) that forbidden love. Thus a new
meaning is implied for the Orpheus myth, where the poet, having gained possession of
the dead beloved, loses her again by attempting, with his symbolic look backward at her,
to consummate their love before it has reached a level where it is lawful. This reproach
against Romanticism holds equally against its offspring, modernism and postmodernism;
in each case the imagination of the epoch is unable to see beyond the attraction of looking
back at Eurydice, of defying the ban against forbidden love. The Genesis poet's strange
transgression is precisely to obey the ban but, by his faith without ocular or sensual proof
that Eurydice is really still there, to render the ban void and harmless: and thus he
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qualifies as a flyinginstructor. This exegesis could be pursued still further, but the very
process of interpretation in this sense is the flying that the reader is learning to do by him
or herself.
The third level of interpretationanother depth into which one might flyconcerns the
medium of the story, the china pattern, and requires some antiquarian knowledge. Why
china?because of all arts this one uses the cheapest and basest materialsmere dirt. But
this dirt has, like the tragic love of the twins, been refined and Earthly life to Mars. It is
thus that we shall "be as swallows in the air of time."
One last level of interpretation concerns the strange relationship between the poet and
myself, his redactor and twentiethcentury mouthpiece. The name of the English china
manufacturer who invented the willow pattern was Turner, which is my name; one of the
meanings of the word "turn" is to translate or to transmute. And the name of the poet of
the storyto pass from medium to messageis Chang, which is my wife's maiden name.
She, like the willow pattern, is a double import, in ancestry from China to Britain, and in
person from Britain to America. Our family china pattern is the willow; and it has
become for us a symbol of our marriage, as the olivetree bed was for that of Odysseus
and Penelope. Thus in some way the poet of Genesis has complicated by translation and
importation the life of an obscure professor and essayist of the late twentieth century.
In the next passage the poet refers to an earlier episode in the poem in which Wolf, Irene,
and Chance the Younger, as children, invent the techniques of flight on Mars. Evolution
often proceeds from the neotenic or infant stage of the organism; likewise here. The irony
is that nature has given us an unnatural yearning to fly, a yearning that expresses itself in
our dreams; the only way in which that yearning could become natural, and issue forth in
an appropriate physical behavior, is through the "unnatural" transformation of Mars into
an Earthtype planet and by means of the technology of artificial wings. Nature is
fantastical and cruel rather than wise, as the history of species extinction proves; so our
human fantasies are entirely in keeping with it.
Now, finally, we get a straightforward and slightly comic flyinglesson from Wolf who,
though a hero like the aviatorpoetchildren's writer SaintExupéry, necessarily sounds
like any scuba or skydiving instructor. The lightness of the tone matches the lightness of
Martian gravity; but though the weight mass of our beginning fliers is diminished, their
inertial mass, the gravitas of their own being, is not.
Flying is a game, as the poet says; but it is a game that is also a parable of salvation. "If
you have ears to hear"the quotation from Jesus (line 176) changes the tone once more, to
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one of severe exegetical precision. Once more the poet will make us descend through the
evolutionary levels, down the tree of internal structure and past evolution; completing
after a long parenthesis, as it were, the biological description of the swan begun over a
hundred lines before. As Rilke says, we must trace Orpheus through the intricate
branches of his lyre. The lyre in this passage is the swan's wing, with its intricate
hierarchy of structures: wing, feather, quill, barb, barbule, hooklet. This hierarchy
exhibits the property of selfsimilarity across different scales, or internal symmetry, a
property characteristic of the fractal attractors of chaotic (or more accurately, antichaotic)
nonlinear positivefeedback selforganizing dynamical systems. The poet follows the
Sibyl in seeing the entire evolution of the cosmos as driven by such systems, and in
identifying the human experience of beauty with an inherited but trained capacity to
perceive their attractors at work.
Jesus' injunction to interpret the parables is explained in the parables themselves in terms
of the germination and branching growth of seeds. In the GrecoRoman tradition too, and
throughout the great branching tree of the IndoEuropean languagesand perhaps the
great tree of all human languagesmeaning is associated with seeds. The words sememe,
semiotics, semantic all derive from the same root as semen and seed; and the very process
of "derivation," a "turning," whether mathematical or etymological, is modeled by the
branching growth and descent of plants and animals. In this case the corn seed or
mustardseed which Jesus used to describe the kingdom of heaven has been unpackedor
watered to make it grow. The passage now implies that the DNA of life, and words, are
two media in the same evolutionary process, DNA part of the microstructure of verbal
language, poetry a faster form of living growth, life a slower form of poetry.
The word "light," in line 178, is an obvious pun, but one with further depths. Like any
other piece of matter, the wing is made of light, which is in itself weightless. But the
selfsimilar recursiveness of its structure compensatesgives a countervailing weightfor
the otherwise unbearable and intangible lightness of its being. If a large enough bundle
of light (mc2 worth) is trapped by its own energies into a selfcontaining feedback
system, it becomes a ponderable particle of matter. The light wing achieves weight, both
in the sense of mass and in the sense of biotechnological usefulness, through its
recursiveness, in which is recapitulated the entire evolutionary history that gave it birth.
The Sibyl brings us back to the theme of time by reminding us that our own experience of
time, though apparently simple, is, as J.T. Fraser has brilliantly shown, composite and
constituted by a nested hierarchy of temporal levelsnootemporality, biotemporality,
eotemporality, prototemporality, and atemporalitythat are like the inner, "deep"
structures of the swan's wing that go to make up its outward simplicity. The Sibyl is the
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prophetess or messiah of the the new world of Mars. This parable is hers; she compares
the wingwith which we are all invited to flywith the nature of human time. Human
time is not merely a spacelike dimension, but layered, carrying within it a history of our
evolution, together with the characteristic conflicts that have arisen within, between, and
in the moments of emergence of its levels. Thus when we "fly"which in this sense
means to interpret with the full powers of the spiritwe become aware of all the inner
construction by which we make the world concrete and meaningful, and the sacrificial
history of time, by which naturenow concentrated into mindachieved that construction.
And here the metaphorical and literal meanings of "fly" are becoming more and more
indistinguishably fused: the flyingstudents' wings, after all, have been cloned by
Ganesh's biotechnology out of chimerical bamboo and swan genes! The wing is the
metaphor. The new kind of metaphor is a concrete piece of technology. It is also a
metonym and a synecdoche, and an example of a genetic process which is itself a
continuation of the evolutionary process of increasing selfreflection and positive
feedback that is the central theme of the poem. This density of meaning restores the
richness of medieval interpretation, in which the literal, the allegorical, the anagogical,
and the moral formed a superreal density of being in their mutual identity. A sufficiently
powerful metaphor is technologically efficacious, and does what it means. A sufficiently
beautiful piece of technology becomes the perfect metaphor for its own function.
The next three lines are perhaps the densest in the whole poem.
(. . . So many pens are woven to a pinion,
The prince's pennon bears his sister's swan.
Oh fly with it, fly with it, fly with it!)
This parenthesis is a verbal example of that interpretive depth, with which we are invited
to fly. For instance:
Pen 1. A quill or feather.
2. The instrument of écriturenow somewhat obsolete, but part of the evolution of
writing.
3. An enclosure or constraint; metaphorically, a law, like that which forbids the love
of Wolf and Irene.
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4. A female mute swan. It is in Irene's character (unlike that of most Van Riebeck
women, who are very eloquent) to keep silent, as she does in this passage. Perhaps there
is a suggestion that human evolution required the sacrifice of speech, and writing, by the
many mute womenmothers especiallywho are not commemorated in history. But in
Irene's case, she has made the opposite sacrifice, giving up her baby (who turns out to be
the Sibyl herself) in order to be the bearer of the Ark of earthly life to Mars.
5. Faint contextual connotations of a Knight's banner or pennon (see the next line,
and line 148, where Wolf is a "skydauphin," evoking Gerard Manley Hopkins'
Windhover, another flying "chevalier"); also perhaps penitentiary or penance, and of
course penis.
Woven1. Refers to the fractallike technology by which a onedimensional thread is
turned into a twodimensional sheetand thus, metaphorically, to the activity of the
strands of DNA and RNA, to writing, and perhaps to the transformation of a computer
program into a graphic or a physical reality.
2. Traditionally connotes the work of a woman's womb in forming a fetus, one of
the key metaphors for the ecological transformation of Mars.
3. Metaphorical reference to the work of storytelling ("spinning a yarn," etc, and
to the weaving of fate.
Pinion 1. A bird's wing.
2. A feather: thus this word refers to both the whole and the part, and suggests the
fractal selfsimilarity of a wing.
3. To bind or restrain.
4. To cut off the flight section of a bird's wing in order to domesticate it: both
these last meanings refer to the sacrifices by which the leveljumps of evolution are
achieved, including the sacrifice of certain knowledge that would be necessary to ensure
that Eurydice be recovered.
Prince 1. One of the seven or twelve brothers in the old folktale of the princess whose
brothers are transformed by witchcraft into swans. She restores them to human form by
weaving them shirts out of nettlesall but the youngest brother, whose shirt lacked a
sleeve, and who thus retained a swan's wing instead of an arm.
2. The prince in the other fairytale, with whom the fairy swanprincess falls in
love, and who must give up her immortality to do so. (This tale is culturally universal.)
3. In other contexts in the poem, Lohengrin the swanprince.
Bears 1. Carries, as in the way a wing carries a flier.
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2. As in an armorial bearingthus, a reference to the syntax of heraldic
signification.
3. Gives birth to.
Sistercontextual reference to Irene and Wolf, whose relationship involves a deliberately
suppressed and sacrificed incestuous element in the story; this suppression is the
constraint, or pinion, or penance, that has enabled them both to carry the book of genetic
codes from Earth to Mars and to invent the new techniques of humanpowered flight.
Thus collectively this set of words implies the whole process of sacrifice and
nomogenesis by which evolution produced human beings.
Fly with itThis triple injunction is an extension of the quotation from Jesus by which the
passage began: he who has ears to hear, let him hear. To fly is to hear, in this sense.
The following passage, which I will not analyse in depth, is a naturalistic and sensory
description of flight, but also a metaphorical description of the pleasures of interpretation
and meaningmaking. We have returned here to the "default option" of human sensory
perception, but now enriched by the awareness of everything that lies beneath the surface
of the "manycolored coat of mortal dwelling"the present moment and the beautiful
appearances of the world. The joy of this experience is beyond "jouissance"; it is a
sharing in the divine joy of creation.
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