Soul of the World

by Christopher Dewdney

  Plants, of course, completely outdo animals when it comes to lifespan, because their internal clocks tick that much more slowly. Nothing evokes the passage of time as eloquently as the growth rings of trees. We’ve probably all seen pictures of polished cross-sections of the trunks of giant redwoods adorned with arrows and little tags showing historical dates, such as the signing of the Magna Carta and the birth of Christ. A giant redwood’s perspective on human history must be like a time-lapse film, or like the view of the fast-forward universe that you’d see if you fell into a black hole.

  A few of the giant sequoias of coastal California have watched millennia come and go and are as gnarled and unyielding, if not as tall, as small mountains. The oldest known living redwood tree is 2,200 years old and is located in Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California. Two thousand, two hundred years amounts to 31 seventy-year human lifetimes. If we convert human years to sequoia years, then an average human lifespan of seventy years is just a little over 2.2 years for this old tree. Like Yggdrasil, the eternal world tree of Norse legend that supports the universe, giant redwoods seem immortal, surviving century after century and sustaining a forest world beneath their branches. Also like Yggdrasil, they are subject to distress. As it says in the Norse veda The Gylfaginning, “The Ash Yggdrasil suffers harms, more than men can imagine.” A few decades ago, a giant redwood in California was struck by lightning and caught fire. Because redwood, particularly growing redwood, is not very flammable, the fire smouldered for months until it was extinguished by a snowstorm in the late fall. Fortunately, the tree was hardly affected.

  For all their great age, redwoods are youngsters when compared to their elders a few hundred miles to the southeast. High in the White Mountains of California is a timeless forest of living trees so ancient they are hoary with time. Not tall trees, rarely growing higher than twenty feet, bristlecone pines nonetheless constitute a charmed grove of millennial bonsai. Most of them look like upended bits of living driftwood, or like the skeletons of mythical creatures. Their bleached branches and seemingly dead trunks, twisted and spiralled, resemble narwhal tusks or the mandibles of giant albino staghorn beetles. They gesture against the clear alpine sky like white antlers garnished with a few living branches of improbably verdant foliage. These gnarled pines, with their thick bases and weathered trunks, are miracles growing out of blanched scree, sand and boulders. One of them, with rings dating back 4,600 years, is the oldest tree in the world. A human lifetime, in bristlecone years, is barely twelve months long.

  It almost seems as if these old trees, the sequoias and bristlecones, acquire a form of immortality by becoming partially inanimate, or simply by being so old. They contain so much dead tissue—bark, wood, dead branches—that they provide a second earth from which new life can spring. Like Yggdrasil, they rot and grow at the same time. The grey trunks of bristlecone pines that appear as monumental and lifeless as rock, so ancient they are almost geological, still manage to conjure forth new leaves each spring.

  Up until 1997 the 4,600-year-old bristlecone wasn’t just the oldest living tree but the oldest living plant. That honour now goes to a shrub discovered by scientists in a remote valley in southwestern Tasmania. The shrub is a member of the “King’s holly” species, though this particular plant is a genetic freak, unable to produce seeds. It has been estimated to be forty-three thousand years old—thousands of years before humans entered North America. It’s not tall, but it’s quite large, covering two isolated river gullies. Yet even this Methuselah is not the oldest living thing. In fact, it’s like a newly hatched tadpole compared to more recently discovered unicellular organisms.

  In May 1995 scientists isolated a species of forty-million-year-old bacteria, Bacillus sphaericus, from the stomach of a bee encased in amber. The bacteria turned out to be in a state of suspended animation and, miraculously, scientists were able to revive them in a laboratory. These ancients were trumped in less than five years. In October 1999 250-million-year-old bacteria were discovered buried in ancient sea salt deposits beneath Carlsbad, New Mexico. They were also revived. They had survived inside their hard-shelled spores in the same state of suspended animation as the Bacillus sphaericus, except for millions of years longer. I wonder if they infected eurypterids. If only we could see the world the eurypterids knew. The urge to resurrect ancient creatures seems to be an almost universal fantasy, from Crichton’s Jurassic Park to the work being done in Russia and Japan to clone mammoths using frozen DNA. But in one sense, in the form of living fossils, many ancient creatures have already been resurrected.

  In New Zealand there is a reclusive, rarely seen nocturnal lizard about the size of an iguana and with the same kind of short dorsal spines. It has a large head and a lovely, delicately spotted skin decorated with misty, irregular stripes of tan and charcoal. This is no lizard, though; it is our only living link to the dinosaurs, and has remained unchanged since the Triassic era, 190 million years ago. It is a member of a family of reptiles, the sphenodontids, that arose at the same time as the dinosaurs. Continental drift marooned New Zealand just as the dinosaurs began to dominate, and the tuataras were left behind on their own island, isolated from the evolutionary and climatic changes that eventually brought about the demise of their cousins.

  The oceans also harbour living fossils. Two species of stalked crinoids, identical to the ones that once waved their arms over the shallow oceans of the Paleozoic era, still exist today in the ocean at great depths. And the pearly nautilus of the Pacific, a kind of squid that lives in a coiled shell, is the last surviving member of the ammonites that died out with the dinosaurs. In 1939 the scientific world was astonished at the discovery of another prehistoric relic: a strange-looking plated fish with fins on the ends of rudimentary legs. It turned out to be a coelacanth, a creature virtually identical to its 420-million-year-old forebears, and its discovery was as shocking as if someone had stumbled upon a herd of triceratops.

  If fossils are the three-dimensional, physical memories of the mind of evolution, then living fossils are both memory and resurrection. There is poetry here. Since the Muses are the daughters of memory, limestone must be soaked with inspiration. Even so, the past, like Orpheus’s lost love, Euridyce, is locked away in time, the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex, the long-tusked mammoths and the clockwork trilobites. W. H. Auden once wrote a poetic tribute to a fossil trilobite, his version of “alas poor Yorick,” in which he mused upon what kind of world the trilobite once looked upon, and how the same eyes, now stony blind, gaze blankly at our own time. I think that Auden’s resurrection of the lost world of the trilobite comes from the kind of nostalgia I myself am prone to, a nostalgia for the ancient past.

  I am also nostalgic for the present, because it is so fleeting. It too will pass, and if the present moment is supreme, if it contains a once-in-a-lifetime happiness or achievement, then how much more poignant is it in light of its impermanence? Even a little moment of happiness (a petit heureux, as the French call it) can be saturated with nostalgia, like my idyll with the roses and clouds that summer afternoon in July, now borne away by time.

  The summer is waning. This afternoon I drove through Little Italy and saw cardboard crates filled with grapes stacked on the sidewalks in front of grocery stores. It’s harvest time, and household vintners are pressing their grapes. September is the month of wine and corn. After supper I looked over the inventory of my wine cellar and realized that four bottles of red were mature. Like time capsules with expiration dates, they need to be opened and enjoyed. So now I’m going to do what I always do when a number of bottles are ready to drink—I’ll hold a dinner party. It had better be soon, because I like to serve hors d’oeuvres and dessert on my patio, and this weather will not hold much longer. A process set in motion in the past, the bottling and fermentation of a vintage harvested decades ago, dictates my immediate future. All these years, in the cool darkness of my cellar, a slow, complex dance of colloidal tannins, sugars and esterification has gradually transformed the
wine. I can hardly wait to open the first bottle and smell that heady bouquet of chocolate, honey, blackberries—and time.

  Chapter Ten

  THE ECHO AT THE BACK DOOR OF THE PRESENT

  In the carriages of the past you can’t go anywhere.

  —Maxim Gorky

  A DINNER PARTY

  Everyone arrived at once. They brought flowers and bread and wine and strawberries and, after leaving their gifts in my kitchen, they went straight out the back door and into the yard. It was a warm, still evening, and though the sun was low in the sky it drenched the trees in a deep golden-pink light. Earlier, in the morning, it had rained, but the weather cleared up by afternoon. I opened a twenty-four-year-old bottle of Chianti Rufina to let it aerate in the kitchen, jammed a corkscrew in my pocket and, carrying a plate of smoked salmon in my left hand and a bottle of Barbaresco in my right, joined my friends outside.

  Bruce and Michael were standing on the lawn looking at the banana tree (now more than chest-high), while Anne, Nicole and Sharon sat talking at the table, tearing off pieces of focaccia and dipping them in olive oil. Normally at this time of year, they would be fanning hornets away from their drinks, but even the wasps were co-operating. I had yet to see one, though September marks the highest population of yellowjacket wasps. (In England, during the height of the Battle of Britain in September 1940, the wasps were so plentiful that they spoiled the country outings of many Britons who tried to have picnics as they watched the aerial combat of German and British fighters.) I poured out the Barbaresco and carried two glasses over to Bruce and Michael. I was proud of my garden, which was still at its peak.

  Both men were skeptical when I told them the banana tree would survive the winter, at least according to the little brochure that came with it. “Can you eat the bananas?” Michael asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think they’re only ornamental. We’ll see about both things, I guess.” We talked a while longer, then rejoined the others at the table.

  The Barbaresco went quickly, so I retrieved the Chianti from the kitchen and took it outside. The sun had just set and the sky was turning a lucid turquoise green. “Look, a hummingbird!” Nicole exclaimed. She pointed towards the mandevilla vine. There, like a tiny miracle, a ruby-throated hummingbird hovered and darted among the pink blossoms. Its iridescent throat glowed like an ember, and we could hear the hum of its wings. Then, like an arrow, it zoomed off.

  There wasn’t the slightest breeze. The smoke from Michael’s cigarette hung blue in the air, wafting upwards in languorous arabesques. It was a magical evening, full of the energy of good friends in good spirits. I decided to use the vintage of the bottle, 1981, as a conversation starter. After I poured out the wine and we had each had a sip, I asked everyone to recount something remarkable they did during the year of the vintage. We used the bottle like a time capsule, releasing what it had captured in a long-ago summer.

  Bruce volunteered to go first. He had been in a rock ‘n’ roll band that year, and he soon had us laughing at his wry anecdotes about concerts and buses and weird venues in small towns. Nicole went next. Nineteen-eighty-one had been her first year in Paris, where, during the summer, she had been spotted by a fashion designer and asked to model. Michael told us about his first one-man exhibition of photographs in New York City. Of all of us, he seemed the most nostalgic, sighing that he was better known in almost any country other than his own. Sharon had been a member of a performance-art troupe that year. They enacted stylized, slow-motion tableaux on the themes of bondage and liberation at alternative art galleries in downtown Toronto. In 1981, Anne recounted, she met the man who would become her second husband.

  Under the stars we repeated the same ritual throughout the evening, each vintage yielding more memories and anecdotes, while moths circled my floodlights. It was as if, by opening the bottles, I was liberating the genies of our earlier, more splendid selves.

  TIME CAPSULES

  That night, as I dropped the wine corks and pieces of tinfoil and cheese rinds into a plastic garbage bag, I realized that I was constructing another time capsule, only this one was more like a piece of concept art. My collection of refuse was unique: a one-time assemblage of found art that I was hermetically sealing in plastic to be picked up and taken to a landfill site, where it would be buried so deeply that oxygen wouldn’t be able to penetrate the bag, ensuring the preservation of the evening’s particular detritus for decades, possibly centuries.

  I mused that everything is a time capsule of sorts, anything that has any past, because it bears the stamp of its vintage throughout its whole existence. My kitchen table was made decades ago, it hasn’t changed since then, and my cutlery is at least fifteen years old. Yet here they are, while the peonies that blossomed in my garden are gone, and the fledgling falcon is now an adult. That which is ephemeral seems most likely to be a prisoner of the past. Even the seemingly changeless things around us change: civilizations rise and fall, though pockets (Pompeii, Tutankhamen’s tomb) are sometimes preserved like snapshots of history. But the concept of sealed cylinders containing memorabilia and messages meant for citizens of the future—time capsules proper—are an invention of the twentieth century.

  The first time capsule was designed by Westinghouse and buried in a special wall during the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Like a windfall for future archeologists, time capsules are meant to explain, illustrate and preserve for posterity our way of life, our culture and civilization. In that sense they are like passive time machines launched on a one-way journey into time with their votive collections of the everyday. They are an act of faith, faith that humanity will still be around centuries hence, and faith that the citizens of the future will be as interested in their past as we are in our own. Time capsules are like a note in a bottle, only the ocean the time capsule floats on is time.

  There was something bullet-like about the sleek, cylindrical shape of the time capsule that Westinghouse fabricated for the New York World’s Fair. It looked a little like a rocket, which it was, in the sense that time capsules are like artillery shells fired into the future, with the earth or concrete in which the capsule is buried acting as the barrel and the flow of time itself as the explosive charge. Even the metal skin that surrounded the contents of the Westinghouse capsule, separating them as it did from the present, seemed to place them in the anteroom of the future.

  Because Westinghouse invented the concept, it also established the standard for what to put inside a time capsule. What would interest the archeologists of posterity? The company decided to group the objects in categories such as “Small Articles of Common Use,” “Textiles and Materials” and “Miscellaneous Items.” The list of contents was preposterously long—some hundred things, including an alarm clock, a fountain pen, safety pins, a slide rule, a watch, a makeup kit, children’s toys, a package of cigarettes, a deck of cards, a chunk of stainless steel and asbestos, a package of various seeds, and money in coins and bills. There was also a microfilm library (although the celluloid that the microfilm was printed on will last only a hundred years at best) that contained novels, magazines, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a record of the history of art and science up to that point. How they fit so much into a cylinder measuring seven feet long by four inches in diameter is an achievement in itself.

  A fountain pen, a watch, a nail file—how whimsical and sentimental, like the favourite furniture and jewellery that accompanied Egyptian royalty into their tombs. It’s poignant, this fascination we have with surviving mortality by communicating with our distant descendants. Yet for all that, the future is still unknown, still possibly treacherous. Only the past is fixed. As the British essayist Sir Max Beerbohm once commented, “The past is a work of art, free of irrelevance and loose ends.” When we bury time capsules we acknowledge that we will exist in someone else’s past, and what seems so malleable now, the choices we make, the uncertainties we face, will become absolutely fixed in a past with no “loose ends.”

  THE BEGINNING OF
TIME

  There is an extraordinary painting by Paul Gauguin, from his Tahitian period, hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. More like a mural than a single composition, it is almost three times as wide as it is high. The overall colour is a lush blue-green, and at first impression it seems more like an aquarium set into the wall than a painting. Dominating the centre is the almost naked figure of a young man or woman in a loincloth. The figure’s toes extend close to the bottom frame, and his or her clasped hands reach to the top. On either side of the central figure, which divides the painting into two halves, are groups of the Tahitian beauties we are familiar with from Gauguin’s other paintings of this period. We are likewise familiar with the sort of individuals who people the background. But there are some uncharacteristic elements.