“A living organism is not so much a substance as a concentration gradient; not so much a thing as a proportional relationship maintained through the doggedness of habit.”
This line comes from the preface of Ellen Wayland-Smith’s The Science of Last Things: essays on deep time and the boundaries of the self.
I had originally read the book on my tablet, and found that my mind kept slipping away from it, which I wrote about last month. In the meantime I’ve received a hard copy (thank you Milkweed Press), which I found a bit easier to get through.
In many of Wayland-Smith’s essays, there is a religious component –both Jewish and the Old Testament. She also delves into mythology, in one case the story of Adonis (the god of grain) and Ishtar (the fertility goddess), and in another the story of Icarus. But she also refers to popular culture like Creature from the Black Lagoon, Cujo, Godzilla, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Emily Dickinson features prominently, especially her poetry on geology and geological timeframes. Flannery O’Connor pops up a few times, with pithy quotes near the beginning of the book.
Wayland-Smith starts with an essay about her father’s death, which meanders into an essay of having her second child when the epidural didn’t work. Wayland-Smith writes about her childhood OCD, when she becomes obsessed with the fact that she might go mad. In her first year of college she has a mental breakdown, losing her knowledge of the boundaries of self. “I wasn’t doubled, exactly—not twinned or two—but neither was I one. Caught between self and not-self, I was no one.” Eventually, with a combination of medication and therapy, she improves and goes back to school, though “I have never forgotten the stopless time when…I lay awash in chaos, without a chance or spar.”
Wayland-Smith’s breakdown is eerily similar to how she sees giving birth: “after giving birth, wherever you are, there you are not, quite, or not quite all. There is a noncontiguous fraction of you extended in space, another self outside yourself, to which, from not to eternity you are joined.” She follows this up with a discussion of amputees who feel their extremities even though they’ve been removed (phantom limbs), and explores the idea that we’re not just a ‘self’ but also ‘other.’
She writes that there’s a short view of biology, for example the rush of Painted Lady butterflies that inundates Los Angeles for three days, and a long view, when “biology seems…an endless shuffling and reshuffling of traits across time: we appear on earth, return to dust, only to reappear, in scattered bits and pieces, in our offspring ever after.” Here she refers to the telltale dimple that appears in all the women of a particular family, or the shape of a nose, or the gesture of an arm. Once again, the self that is not the self.
The essay that sticks with me the most is American Pastoral, Wayland-Smith’s account of her family’s cabin on Lake Ontario. Though warped and aged, with spiders in the outdoor shower, her family still uses it. She and her sister bring their children there. They can see the nuclear reactors of Nine Mile Point in the distance, and the bay often becomes coated with algae or overrun with dead alewives or frogs. The beach is rocky. It’s definitely not some nature idyll. As Wayland-Smith writes: “The dream of a pristine state of nature has always been a ruse.” She returns to religion again, particularly the seven plagues. She writes about climate change, and whether or not we’ll ever accept it. “All we have is this fallen planet, and fallen things require our love—even when we suspect that love isn’t strong enough to save them, or us.”
Wayland-Smith also documents her breast cancer journey, exploring the ways in which cancer was treated by early physicians who thought it was caused by worms or even a wolf. The present treatment for cancer uses Taxol, which comes from yew trees, and was used in the past for medicinal purposes. She describes the cancer as a ““…struggle between a battle-scarred protozoan from the pre-Cambrian” and its metazoan host.” Her radiation treatments, then, “mirror the atmospheric conditions of the depleted ozone layer on pre-Cambrian earth.” She sees her body as a tiny earth, and the doctors are trying to “drive the niche population that is my tumor out of existence, without blowing up the whole planet.”
Of course cancer treatment requires a lot of waiting, and she write about how we hate to wait because it gets in the way of ‘getting things done.’ She expands this into a larger waiting, “a cosmic waiting that precedes and cradles within itself all the other times and modes and tenses of being…waiting is not the suspension of human business-as-usual, but rather the oldest and most elemental form of time.”
I found her essay about rose crystal and the crux of crystals, chakras, and healing vibrations in Los Angeles to be a bit out of place in the collection. It was dominated too much by the here-and-now and the link to deep time, which seems like it would be so evident here, wasn’t drawn as explicitly as I’d hoped.
Regardless, throughout the essays, Wayland-Smith deftly engages with both human time and geological time, and the shifting boundaries of the self. She pulls not only from her own life, but from religion, poetry, popular culture, early medicine, Darwin and Aristotle, the Greek myths, and more, to make a strong case for the shortness of our time on earth relative to deep time, and the porousness of our beings in this world. Her essays deal with topics such as the death of her father, to the language of cancer treatment, to Plato’s cave and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to the mundane floaters in our eyes that occasionally swim across our vision.
As she writes: “The future is a chemical reaction, a transformation of energy, a heat trace that hasn’t happened yet.”
