by Guy Murchie
Assuming this approximately so, then of what does the body really consist? Where resides the continuity of consciousness and memory which may last a hundred years? For a while I thought the body's essence might somehow lurk in the nucleus of each cell where the genes physically direct growth and development. But suddenly I realized that the double helix molecules of DNA, the material genes, are made of the same old carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and a few other atoms that constitute ordinary matter, and they are not excused from replacement any more than any other of the body's atoms, all of which metabolize in life's flamelike flow, partly coordinated by enzymes, and which in the context of time are something abstract that is really beyond mere matter. In a man, to be sure, atoms cannot renew themselves nearly as fast as in a hydra, where they do the whole interchange in two weeks, but the process is clearly the same in principle. Essentially no single atom or molecule or combination of them can be indispensable to a body for they are all dispensed by it. It is only the pattern with its message that proves really vital to life. On the ocean one could make the analogy that it is not the saltwater but the abstract energy that shapes and powers the wave. Likewise it is not the atoms in DNA but their geometric relation that makes the gene. And it is not the paper and ink but the words and meanings that compose the book.
In the same sort of way a body, I think, may quite appropriately be compared to a corporation of cells and elements, for the word "corporation" literally means "body" and my dictionary defines it as "an association of individuals ... having a continuous existence independent of the existences of its members ... " This in fact is the means by which a business corporation may exist for centuries while one by one all its members die off and are replaced every generation by younger ones and younger ones again who keep it going like any other living organism with a kind of animative momentum that has hardly begun to be understood.
If you can stand another analogy, the genes are like blueprints, each full of detailed plans of a building, which is the body. If the building should catch fire and be destroyed, it is not an irreparable loss as long as the blueprints exist, for, by following their guidance, a new building can soon be built to replace the lost one. Even if all such plans are destroyed, it is not a vital loss as long as the architect exists who made them, for he can probably remember them more or less and, with effort, redraw them and thus recover the building. Or even if the architect be dead, perhaps a photograph or sketch may turn up somewhere. The point is that it is the pattern of design itself that is the indispensable thing, and not just its representation on paper or in bricks and mortar. Of course the design is not really a thing in the material sense for it is abstract. Indeed it is a kind of intangible essence, something like Lao-tzu's best knot which, as he explained, was tied without rope.
Thus our very bodies that we always thought were material, because they are formed with atoms, fade away into immaterial abstraction, turning out to be essentially only waves of energy, graphs of probability, nodes of melody being mysteriously played in our time. And this is true of life generally: of birds singing in the sky as their feathers molt in bilateral progression, of worms hunching through the soil, of forests and tundras and plankton in the sea. And, there being no clear line defining where life begins, it, includes the sea itself and the volatile sky, and mountains and glaciers and deserts, in fact the whole earth and all planets and stars and systems of stars. In other words: all matter everywhere, as we shall see in Chapter 14 about omnipresence.
ESSENCE OF LIFE
The universality of life is strongly suggested again by the growing realization among scientists that every sort of matter is found to move and metabolize if it is only observed for a long enough time. In Chapter 15 we will speak of the metabolism of pebbles and dunes and beaches, of rivers, lakes, glaciers, storms, islands, volcanoes and even of fires, all of them composed of atoms that sooner or later disintegrate to be replaced by new ones (new in their positions), showing in many such ways the basic attributes of life.
Naturally all this action is relative: the positions, the movement, the rate of living. For no kind of matter remains the same forever, and matter in essence cannot be a mere substance but must be an event, an abstraction or even (if you can countenance the pedantry) afleeting pattern compounded by space-time into a definable entity. It is almost like saying that, to the degree that the function of substance is matter, the function of living is life. At least this becomes evident when one accepts life as matter's highest development, analogous to a river or a flame where cells and molecules not only flow through the body from day to day but diffuse through evolution from generation to generation. If you've ever been seriously ill you may have noticed that when you don't use your body it begins to disappear, for nature has in effect commanded you: "Use it or lose it!" A calf muscle, prevented from functioning by a plaster cast, can dwindle to half its normal size in two weeks as the protein and fat are released back into your blood and lymph streams. When you stop eating, your organism keeps itself going by digesting your flesh. It is a case of your body borrowing from itself, of life lifting-life by life's own bootstraps until, in better times, it may hope to restock with fresh substance from its world. This is the way any limb or brain or family or field or town not in use is bound to wither, turn fallow and, in a surprisingly short time, cease to be what it was.
But the law of use has a constructive side too, for, where disuse destroys, use creates! The classic experiment establishing creative body use took place in the 1860s when C. E. Sedillot of France performed a series of operations on puppies, excising the larger bone or tibia from the lower hind legs of each animal so half its body weight would have to be supported only by the remaining tiny fibula bones, each with less than a fifth of the tibia's diameter. And as the puppies recovered and began to walk falteringly around on their feeble fibulas, these reed-like little bones in every case were so stimulated by their inordinate burdens that within a few months they aft grew into bones that averaged bigger than the ones removed. It was as though each fibula, somehow sensing the emergency, had loyally resolved to save its host organism by becoming a tibia. Then, with appropriately dogged determination, it had set about building itself up to the seemingly unreachable goal. Yea, like the salamander in Spemann's famous experiment that proved a tail can become an eye (page 153), the fibula demonstrated anew that intrinsically any material containing the common organic elements is good enough to grow a living organism, or any clay a man.
This is a concept virtually everyone seems to share when it comes to disposing of a dead body or even a worn-out part of a living body, for, I notice, the man whose leg was amputated yesterday does not ask to keep it around today. It is no longer of him nor he of it. Neither does he consider himself less alive without it, especially after he has been fitted with a good artificial leg which, in a few months, may feel almost as, intimately his as the original. Curiously, the very deadness of an artificial limb may become a vital factor in its embodiment of the afterlife of the limb it replaces, and in the same basic way that the dead limb of a tree sometimes lives on a higher evolutionary level when it has assumed the role of the afterlife of a formerly green branch. I refer to the fact that the favored twigs and boughs that birds most often alight upon (when they're available) are the bare dead ones which liberate the birds' movement and vision from the blinding obstructions imposed by the leafier branches - this being a nice example of how death in one kingdom (the vegetable) can so often enhance life in another (the animal), which quite literally serves as its Kingdom Come. Indeed what better heaven could a dead tree hope for than to harbor a beautiful bird or later, in moldering senescence, to serve as fuel for the hearth of a philosopher?
A different kind of afterlife is that of the amputated human limb, which medical science long ago discovered capable of surviving indefinitely as a phantom, not only in the mind of the amputee but almost inevitably in certain nerves, tendons and adjoining muscles that have sensations ranging from gentle tinglin
g to excruciating pain and all seeming to originate in the limb that isn't there. In treating such a nonlimb, doctors have found that it can often be exorcised by exercise on the pragmatic hypothesis that it is real and alive even if only an abstraction. To cite a case: a young electrician lost his left arm a few years ago in a severe electrical burn that left him too miserable to accept an artificial arm, mostly because, as he said, he felt his missing arm rigidly doubled behind his back with the hand numb and electric shocks intermittently shooting through it so violently they sent "sparks snapping off his fingertips." However he was persuaded to stand before a blackboard with his eyes shut and practice writing with his imaginary left hand. And after months of this phantom exercise, with nothing physical happening except possibly in the nerve stumps and adjoining muscle fibers, he became assured that he had swung his phantom arm around and forward to where he could raise it over his head. His shriveled scar tissue meantime softened and stopped hurting while the exercise proved to have loosened it so much that "an extensive grafting operation became unnecessary," and the unexpected removal of this burden gave him such blessed relief that he eagerly accepted an artificial arm, which in turn so satisfyingly incarnated the phantom that he gratefully began training for his new profession of bookkeeper. Thus was a seemingly hopeless case cured, one might say, by faith in its own ghost.
Yet where are the fingers or toes a man feels after his arm or leg is removed? And where are the scenes the blind man "sees" after losing his sight, which in a few cases, I am told, have been so vivid he did not even realize he was blind? No doubt these presumed illusions are outside of space and time - at least enough outside that one might consider them the stuff of dreams, abstract and not normally definable. But for some reason their capacity to confuse human minds makes me think of the woman who painted the inside of her garage pale green, and, when a neighbor encouraged her by remarking that the light color would make the place seem bigger, responded with airy enthusiasm, "I sure hope so. We really could use the extra space."
A rather different illusion was experienced by a polliwog I heard of living in a farmer's pond. One November he was seen at the moment of getting frozen in the ice and looked, and probably felt, gone or "dead" if he felt anything. In any case he remained in "rigor mortis" all winter. Then during an April rain his icy tomb melted and he was suddenly free and alive. But it was as if his five months' sleep had been an enchantment for, like the sleeping beauty, he awoke apparently the same age as when he had dropped off and then recovered his active life from precisely where he had left it. He even finished biting the weed that had frozen in his mouth in November. The magic spell of winter was over. Time had stood still for a third of a year. The last breath inhaled in autumn had turned into the first breath exhaled in spring. Life and mind were simply flicked out like a light then flicked on again unchanged!
In returning now to our pursuit of life's essence it seems important to define the living unit of being. Is it an atom, a molecule, a cell, an organism, a family, a species, a world population ... ? Just what best constitutes a living individual? If reproduction is vital (and who can deny it?), a mating pair of rabbits is alive but one rabbit is not. In this context a pregnant rabbit is, strictly speaking, not alone. And perhaps (in special cases) even an unpregnant rabbit or single individual of another species capable of virgin birth (page 149) should be considered more than singular. Also a mating pair at the sophistication level of Adam and Eve probably could not qualify as a living continuum if too few others of their kind existed to enable them to avoid imminent extinction. It is relevant in this connection to recall that the passenger pigeon was doomed last century when its numbers got so low it could not roost in its customary, congenial multitudes. But that doesn't make it noticeably easier to predict how small a human community, even after thorough survival training in body, mind and spirit, could be expected to sustain and revive a stricken mankind. And such a key community, as much as any in any species, might qualify as the model unit of life.
NORMALCY
We come then to the question of what is the range of traits an individual might have without becoming a different species or a lethal mutant. What is normalcy? The Atlas of Human Anatomy by Barry Anson shows the variety of stomachs in ordinary adult humans, some
of which hold fifteen times as much food as others and are as different in shape and function as in size. The aorta has three main branches near the heart in about 65 percent of humans, says Anson, two branches in 27 percent, and any number of branches up to six is considered normal. Nerves are even freer to steer or shape themselves and, like veins, hair, guts and many muscles, so long as they do the job they may express themselves as individually as vines and roots. A throat, for example, seems a pretty standardized affair, but some men have them so big they can swallow swords with professional aplomb while others have such narrow ones they have choked to death on an apple seed. So-called normal testicles vary from 10 to 45 grams in weight while abnormal ones range from a half to more than 300 grams, and Alfred Kinsey reported an even greater latitude in sexual performance, listing one "sound" man who ejaculated but once in thirty years while another, a "scholarly lawyer," did so 45,000 times in the same period, averaging more than four times daily.
Individuals differ chemically perhaps more than physically, and a recent medical study of sooo "normal" people shows that gastric juices vary a thousandfold in their content of both pepsin and hydrochloric acid. Vision, hearing and other senses have an astonishing spectrum too, one hungry baby in a sensitivity test refusing to suck milk except when it was kept between the temperatures of 73° and 122°F. while another guzzled it contentedly all the way from freezing (32°) to steaming (149°F.) And similar findings appear in inborn capacities to reset one's biological clock after flying across longitudinal time zones shifting night and day, in mental traits like intuition or spiritual ones such as immersing oneself in a mystic Cause. Clearly every individual from a germ to a man (and indefinitely beyond in both directions) is discrete unto itself and freer in important ways than has been generally realized - and I doubt not that this realization will in time give a fresher and more spiritual meaning to the concept of brotherhood whose oneness is certainly profounder than uniformity, whose harmony is indescribably more beautiful than conformance.
Some anthropologists still seem to assume that being normal means being average, one I've read of going so far as to declare that only one person in 6500 could be credited with achieving true averageness in every measurable respect, that person presumably having molded himself into the nicest, dullest and most proper "freak of normalcy" for miles around. So this may be a good place to recall that the specter of averageness was effectively dispatched by Walter Heller a few years ago when he introduced the man with one foot in a freezer and the other on a stove, who felt on the average perfectly comfortable.
THE ABSTRACTION OF IDENTITY
If it is characteristic of an individual then to be unique, though in some cases less than extraordinary, does he absolutely have to be unique in order to exist? Does he have to be identifiable to anyone besides himself or his twin? Indeed is identity a life principle?
The classic case in point broke into the news in Detroit in January 1969 when a pair of identical twin sisters named Terry and Tracy got mixed up by their mother, who, despite having known them intimately for the six months since their birth, could not for the life of her figure out which was which, being driven ultimately, as she shamefacedly confessed, to "the eenie, meenie, miny, mo method."
This unusual event was fortunately no tragedy, for the babies themselves fairly reveled in interchangeability, neither knowing nor caring whether Mama could tell them apart. Yet a philosopher might well ponder, aside from the fact that the twins had started life as one fertilized ovum with a single potential consciousness, whether their two individual consciousnesses, be they recognized or unrecognized by the world, really required separate identity. It is an abstract question of course, yet deeply germane t
o the abstraction we know as life. Alter all, what an individual is as a conscious entity may be definable as a continuing pattern of memory, an abstraction analogous to music and which might conceivably be duplicated (or nearly so) from cognate genes in another (similar) body at the same (or an equivalent) time. This other body too, unlike an identical twin, could as well belong to the same consciousness or, putting it another way, a mind could have more than one body (as occurs naturally when a mind survives a drastic body change after a crippling injury, when one mind appropriates another in temporary hypnosis or some longer lasting form of psychic "possession") and vice versa (page 292). In other words, bodies and minds are not (necessarily) indelibly associated with each other on a one-to-one basis. Indeed body-mind disengagement has been known to occur, sometimes followed by separate existences of both, not to mention shifts in alignment and reassociation in new combinations - something that will not surprise anyone who can accept the possibility of life after death or the transcendence of consciousness (as in dreams) beyond space-time.
IMPROBABILITY
What makes YOU as an individual genetically distinct from others (assuming you are not an identical twin) is the extreme improbability that any parents but yours could have achieved the exact combination of some hundred thousand genes that directed your development, a combination considered largely random as it was drawn generation by generation from the much larger gene pool of all mankind and one among incalculably more potential combinations than the number of atoms in the entire known universe, certainly one so high that the chance that two different sets of parents might have happened to produce exactly the same gene combination in the same megamillennium of time or the same supergalaxy of space is astronomically so small as to be not worth consideration as a realistic possibility.