The Song of the Earth

by Hugh Nissenson

  Late in 2030, he received a Nippon Fellowship and became Professor Yoshida Ozaki’s research assistant at Kyoto University. The late Professor Ozaki was the world renowned genetic engineer who in 2020 first used the noun “metamorph” to designate any organism that has been genetically transformed by a microinjection of purified DNA.

  During 2030–31, Ozaki and Plowman identified 786 arsogenic alleles common to the genetic makeup of 615 graphic artists. Ozaki declared: “They are the genes that contribute to the talent to draw.” He and Plowman then analyzed the genomes of 321 painters and discovered 659 arsogenes, active in their visual cortices, which increase the number of colors they can see in the spectrum.

  Ozaki wrote, “The possession of visual arsogenes—talent itself—is insufficient to make a truly original artist. The brains of the thirty-four creative artists we have studied crave incessant visual stimuli. They seem possessed by a ‘lust of the eyes’ (me-no-yoku), which must be constantly gratified.6 Vincent van Gogh described how ‘the lust of the eyes’ affected him: ‘I am ravished, ravished by what I see.’7 We must discover the physiological basis of the lust of the eyes.”

  In 2032 Ozaki and Plowman established that artists who have particularly intense emotional experiences associated with visual stimuli frequently exhibit a postnatal neurological hyperdevelopment: an extensive arborization of the nerve cells in the prefrontal lobes of the brain associated with the production of emotion by visual stimuli.

  In his book Visual Arsogenes: The Genetic Basis of the Ability to Draw and Paint (2035), Professor Plowman postulates that such hyperdevelopment can be activated by certain kinds of postpartum maternal behavior. Plowman indeed proposes an experimental series he calls “Ozaki’s Project” in honor of his late mentor, who was killed in a swimming accident.

  Plowman lives in Kyoto, where he is the Director of Ozaki’s Project at the Ozaki Institute of Humin Metamorphic Genetics.8

  Jeanette Firth Baker to Frederick Rust Plowman, October 23, 2036:

  I admire your beliefs, but I’d prefer the scientist and the artist—in fact, each and every one of us—to say, “Oh, je serai celui-là qui créera la Déese”—“Oh, I shall be the one who will create the goddess”—because the eternal feminine is my ideal.

  I want my son to be special. Father him for me by artificial insemination and give him a gift for drawing and painting. I’ll mother him in any manner that you think might help make him into a manual artist.

  I enclose one copy each of my health insurance genetic profile, multiphasic personality profile, and curriculum vitae.

  Polly Baker

  Jeanette read me the letter over the phone. I was like, “It’s illegal in this country to do such a thing. Don’t set yourself above the law.”

  She said, “I can’t help it! I want an artist for a son.”

  Roberta Friar

  I yelled from the kitchen, “A son! And you call yourself a Gynarchist!”

  She goes, “I do and I am, but I need a son!”

  Polly Baker

  I don’t know why Jeanette was frantic for a son. But I can guess why she wanted him to be an artist. I’m partly responsible. I raised her after Maggie killed herself. Trouble is, I couldn’t bring myself to talk to Jeanette about her mother’s suicide. Not ever. I felt—I don’t know—ashamed and guilty, as if I could have done something to prevent it. Jeanette, of course, never brought it up. She suffered in silence. But you know what? After a while, she came down with terrible insomnia. For weeks on end, the poor kid lay wide awake in her bed till first light. When she finally fell asleep, she had nightmares. She told me she constantly dreamed of looking in the mirror, where she saw her mother’s dead face peering over her left shoulder.

  Poor thing! Big brown rings appeared under her eyes; she was exhausted all the time. Her schoolwork fell off, apart from a course in Manual Art Appreciation, which was taught by—what was her name? A young substitute teacher . . . yes, the beautiful Julia Merrill. Jeanette had a crush on her. Julia Merrill introduced Jeanette to Manual Art. She got an A in Merrill’s course.

  One night when Jeanette couldn’t sleep, I said to her, “Why don’t you look at pretty pictures? They’ll relax you.”

  The next couple of nights, Jeanette turned her bedroom into a virtual art museum. She called up paintings, drawings, and statues. Soon she discovered that paintings of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child soothed her to sleep. It was a nightly ritual. Jeanette lay on her back under the covers, looking at Raphael’s Madonna, one by Botticelli, and Leonardo’s Virgin and Saint Anne on the walls around her. Then she would drift off.

  But one morning she said to me, “Life is shit, Aunt Polly! I’d give anything to be an artist, but I can’t draw a straight line.”

  Roberta Friar

  I held my tongue about Jeanette’s letter to Plowman. We waited for an answer. Jeanette chipped away at her thesis. She tried to get inside Charlotte Salomon’s head.

  Libby Ferguson

  During the fall semester of 2036 at the University of Chicago, I programmed VR immersions for graduate students in the social sciences. I designed two for Jeanette Baker. In the first one, she was a German Jewish girl on the streets of Berlin one March afternoon in 1938. It was cold and rainy. Jeanette wasn’t allowed to ride a streetcar, eat in a restaurant, or sit on a park bench. The second program immersed her for two hours in a sealed boxcar that arrived at the Birkenau station just before dawn on October 15, 1943, around the time that the painter Charlotte Salomon arrived there.

  Roberta Friar

  The second immersion got to Jeanette. She shook me awake one night and went, “I dreamed I was Jewish! I was sitting on my rucksack in a moving boxcar. We pulled into the Auschwitz-Birkenau station. The doors slid open, so I got out. Dazzling lights; I heard dogs barking. A black German shepherd bit off my nose.”

  Jeanette had other concentration camp nightmares. She called them her “Jewish dreams.”

  From: Frederick Rust Plowman, Associate Director, Ozaki’s Project

  To: The Board of Directors, Ozaki’s Project, The Ozaki Metamorphic Institute of Kyoto, Japan

  Date: November 12, 2036

  Our three-year search for a potential mother–artist-maker has ended. I recommend Jeanette Baker to you as the ideal subject in that category.

  Baker, who has a Median Multiple Intelligence Quotient (MMIQ) of 163, is a doctoral student in art history at the University of Chicago. Her mother committed suicide. She herself has a genetic propensity towards Type A-2 unipolar depression for which she takes 5 milligrams of Euphorol daily.

  If she could be persuaded to forego this medication for six months after giving birth to an arsogenic metamorph, she would probably suffer a prolonged postpartum depression like those exhibited by Anna van Gogh, Laura Munch, Regina Magritte, Franziska Salomon, Shizue Hara, and others. Ozaki-san postulated that the postpartum behavior of these depressed wimin in some way stimulated the hyperdevelopment of an infant’s frontal lobes associated with emotion produced by visual stimuli. It provided the physiological basis for their sons’ “lust of the eyes.”

  It must be noted that Baker has a normal Mest maternal complement of genes, but I believe that if the subject is sufficiently psychologically motivated, she could stifle her instinct and become a mother–artist-maker.

  From: Board of Directors, Ozaki Institute

  To: Frederick Rust Plowman

  Date: December 5, 2036

  Please recruit Jeanette Baker as an experimental subject in the suggested category for Ozaki’s Project.

  Roberta Friar

  Jeanette and I spent New Year’s Eve 2036 together. Right after the PMC hit us with the latest bad news.9 I told her, “Don’t bring a kid into this world.”

  She said, “Maybe you’re right.”

  Frederick Rust Plowman to Jeanette Baker, January 1, 2037:

  Happy New Year!

  I will father you a son by artificial insemination and provide his genome with the same
complement of arsogenes as the other two subjects in Ozaki’s Project. These arsogenes have been assembled from at least four distinguished contemporary manual artists. However, you must first agree to participate with your child in a risky postnatal experiment, the results of which won’t be known for years. The Japanese, you know, are very fond of keeping diaries. You will be contractually obligated to keep a written journal or diary of your experiences for the archives of the Ozaki Institute, which reserves the right to 25% of all the gross proceeds from its publication.

  However, in appreciation for your participation in the Project, your insemination, which is not covered by American medical insurance, will be given you at cost: $42,000.

  If you agree to the above conditions, sign the enclosed contract and get it back to me as soon as you can.

  P.S. Please understand that the genetic composition of your son’s reproductive cells will be altered. He will not be able to transmit his metamorphic endowment to his descendants. The Ozaki Institute of Metamorphic Genetics is at present conducting no speciation experiments on humin subjects.

  Roberta Friar

  Jeanette asked, “Where will I get forty-two thousand bucks?”

  She knew I had a little more than that in my savings account, but I was like, “Search me.”

  She gave me a look I can’t forget.

  Polly Baker

  I loaned Jeanette the forty-two thousand at no interest.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, January 2, 2037:

  Signed a contract today with the Ozaki Institute of Metamorphic Genetics to take part in Ozaki’s Project.

  Then I spoke with Plowman’s secretary in Kyoto—a tall, very pretty Japanese boy. He set up a teleconference between me and his boss for this coming Wednesday at 3 A.M.

  I have no compunctions about breaking the law.

  Roberta Friar

  It was a bad time for me. My mother in Calgary fell off a horse and broke her right shoulder. I had to go up there and arrange her home care. The first night, I sent Jeanette a card with Clorene Welles reciting her two-line poem “Vita”:

  Some in summer long for snow;

  I miss your pussy.10

  Jeanette Baker to Roberta Friar, January 5, 2037:

  I miss yours.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, January 7, 2037:

  During today’s teleconference Plowman and I exchanged memories about growing up.

  Plowman: “The drought hit Arkansas in July 2021, when I was twelve years old. We had no rain for 271 days. All the ponds and streams in Conway County dried up. My daddy owned a fishing shack on the north shore of Lake Conway. Buzzards and hogs fought over the dead carp and catfish. The polluted water infected the ducks on the lake with botulism, which paralyzed and then killed them. One morning, I counted over a hundred little corpses of pintails, teals, widgeons, and mallards rotting in the mud.

  “Easter Sunday, my folks and I prayed for rain at an interdenominational service in the Little Rock Municipal Auditorium. A Baptist preacher gave the invocation. Halfway through, the air-conditioning broke down. Mother fainted from the heat. Lo and behold, next morning, the famous Easter Monday Cloudburst: a polar air mass collided over the southeast with a wave of damp, tropical air. The resulting downpour lasted a week.

  “One night, I saw on the news that a flock of mallards over the Little Rock airport mistook a flooded runway for a river. Fifteen of them landed on the concrete and tore off their legs. I thought, God does a lousy job; we ought to put somebody else in charge.”

  Plowman arranged to have me fertilized in vitro with his sperm at the Institute during my next ovulation, which should be around the first of the month.

  Plowman: “Your baby’s genome will be enhanced with visual arsogenes and placed in your womb, where he should develop a brain that possesses a highly augmented visual cortex, a basic requirement for a visual artist. And then, from birth to age six months, you will systematically deprive him of a nurturing visual maternal environment in hopes that this will make him use his eyes to facilitate the hyperdevelopment of his prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that associates powerful emotions and visual stimuli.”

  Roberta Friar

  I got drunk with Jeanette on the new designer Japanese booze, Amae, which had just hit the States.

  When she awoke next morning, she said, “Fuck my Ph.D. thesis! The hell with an academic career. I’ll learn a trade, so I can be independent and set my son a good example. I’ve been thinking. I’ll go back to Lincoln, apprentice myself to Aunt Polly, and become a hair dresser.”

  Polly Baker

  Jeanette called and said, “I’ll never make a good mother on my own, Aunt Polly. Give me a hand.”

  “Honey,” I said, “come home. I’ll do what I can.”

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, January 14, 2037:

  Got my period today.

  Roberta Friar

  Jeanette left me on the morning of January 16, 2037. I’ve no memory of our good-bye; I just remember eating breakfast in the kitchen by myself and throwing up. The next two months were hell. I couldn’t sleep nights. The smell of food nauseated me. I lost eighteen pounds. Jeanette was the love of my life.

  Polly Baker

  I was in my mid-forties and recently divorced when Jeanette moved back to Lancaster County, Nebraska. Harry, my ex-husband, had made a fortune in synthetic rubisco, an enzyme essential to photosynthesis. I did well in the market. After eight years, our marriage died; we fell out of love with each other but stayed friends. It was an amicable divorce.

  Harry, who retired on the moon, sold me his share of our town house in Cather Keep at a reasonable price. I divided up the interior into four three-and-a-half-room apartments. I rented Jeanette the one on the third floor, above mine, for a song—a hundred bucks a month—and put her to work across the street in Polly’s Parlor as my apprentice. She earned thirty-four-fifty an hour, plus tips, which meant she lived on less than thirteen hundred dollars a week.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, January 22, 2037:

  Plowman, via his secretary, invited me this evening to spend all next week at his home in Kyoto. I accepted.

  Made a reservation on the Planet Train leaving Chicago for Tokyo on Tuesday at 8:06 A.M. The round trip cost $5550. Polly again loaned me the money without interest.

  Polly Baker

  Did I do right? I like to think so—despite what happened. Jeanette, you know, picked her own epitaph: “I will not wholly die.”11

  Well, she got her wish.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, January 28, 2037:

  Plowman rents a log cabin in the faculty keep (shiro) near Kyoto University. He won’t let me wander the city alone. Six wimin have been slashed to death on the streets since the Emperor was assassinated here during the night of his inauguration thirteen months ago.

  The Sada Abe Gynarchist Sisterhood claimed responsibility for the assassination. The Sisterhood’s named for the early-20th-century geisha who strangled her two-timing lover in his sleep, then cut off his pecker and wrapped it in a furoshiki, a cloth used especially for gifts. The Emperor’s assassin, a lady-in-waiting, stabbed him through the heart, emasculated his corpse, then stabbed herself.

  Plowman: “The gender war has spread to Japan, but in this country it’s mixed up with anti-Chinese phallocratic tribalism.”

  He lives with his pretty secretary, Wakinoya Yoshiharu, who was raised in Concord, Mass., where his parents owned a Japanese-style country inn. He served us lukewarm stewed dumplings, roasted mushrooms, and stale chestnut buns for supper.

  Coffee under a fig tree in the little walled garden. Plowman said, “You won’t have an easy time raising your son to be an artist. Think you’re up to it?”

  “Try me.”

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, January 31, 2037:

  Every morning, Plowman scrapes a carrot top, cracks two walnuts, and slices up half an apple for his three-yr.-old yellow-naped Amazon parrot named Sozoshii (Noisy). Her
huge cage has its own video screen, which plays all day. The bird sings along with some commercials; others make her yell “Turn that shit off!” She shrieks, laughs like a maniac, guzzles sake, chews chopsticks, shreds paper, and calls Plowman “Sweetie.” They shower together.

  Plowman: “We love each other. Yoshida gave me Sozoshii for my 30th birthday. It took me two months to hand-tame her; she was a great consolation to me after Yoshida died.”

  Yoshida drowned three years ago next month while swimming alone in the Indian Ocean off Australia’s Hundred Mile Beach. Arsogenes is dedicated to his memory.

  Plowman: “Yoshida’s nickname for me was Hotaru—firefly—because my ass lit up his nights.”

  Wakinoya Yoshiharu

  Early in the morning of February 1st, Fritz brought Jeanette three yellow chrysanthemums from his lab and arranged them among some moss-covered stones at one end of a shallow glass bowl filled with water. We Japanese call this classic arrangement, which suggests a little scene in the woods, the Water-Reflecting Style.

  Jeanette said exactly the right thing: “Oh, how lovely! They look as though they’re growing by a stream.”

  Fritz said, “Watch what happens,” and went back to the lab.

  Jeanette hung around the bowl, which was on the dining room table. About a quarter of nine, I heard her cry out, “Ah!” and joined her. The chrysanthemums were dark green. She said, “They’re metamorphs!”

  Over the next few hours we watched them turn blue, then violet, then red and orange, and back to yellow. Jeanette e-mailed Fritz at work.

  Jeanette Baker to Frederick Rust Plowman, February 1, 2037:

  Thank you. I think I understand your beautiful arrangement. It means “These metamorphic flowers have been arranged to look as if they’re growing by a stream, and therefore are to be taken as part of the natural world. And that goes for all kinds of metamorphs—flowers or people.”

  Frederick Rust Plowman to Jeanette Baker, February 1, 2037: