Zooming out, it looks like the ancient ongoing process of globalization has rendered language sort of self-pruning, and now the whole system tends toward austerity and sameness, supporting just a few tidy forks instead of the many filigreed branches, the whole trajectory paralleling the journey of corn, from teosinte, corn’s bushy little Mexican ancestor, to our modern Zea mays with its one feathery tassel and two enormous ears and tall martial posture, a now insanely important crop plant that is weirdly incapable of reseeding itself yet, at least according to the promotional pablum on the back of my box of cereal, currently thrives on every continent save Antarctica, nearly a third of the world’s supply sprouting from the very same soil I grew up in.
It’s hard not to think that quantity grows at the expense of variety, the latter caving to the former as in some gross “horsemen of the esophagus”23 corn-eating contest. But there’s some other mischief involved, some speedily proliferating sham element that throws the whole thing off, some wolf-eyed sameness going around disguising itself in variety’s clothes. Take the verbiage on the back of my cereal box. The breakfast aisle at the grocery store offers an ever-expanding cornucopia of crunchy, grainy confections. The products have all kinds of different names and shapes, but basically contain all the same ingredients. Anyone who’s watched a documentary about food in the last ten years can name them. I grew up in the same dirt that the corn did.
There’s an illusion of variety, a mock diversity to which our culture seems addicted. Our verbiage reflects this. Recently I read a synopsis of a study conducted by a psychologist hoping to illuminate how the switch from mostly agrarian to more urban living has affected our social interactions over the last twenty decades. She looked at more than a billion English-language books published in the United States between the years 1800 and 2000 and found that the use of the words “oblige” and “give” and “pray” and “belong” declined over that period, while the use of their near opposites, “choose” and “get” and “self” and “unique,” rose.24 (Permit me to suggest to you to study …) The psychologist concluded that our changing verbiage reflects our ability to adapt to the changes we’ve made to our environment, like the institution of a new verbal dress code.
Modern technology lets us zoom out in ways we couldn’t in Darwin or Vandiver’s time. Maybe choice and variety and uniqueness help us counter the terror of what those views afford us: our own weed-like proliferation, depleting resources, “extreme domesticity,” self-centeredness, and leveling animalistic sameness. Maybe we rearrange corn and sugar into a million nameable shapes as a show of respect to the thermodynamic properties our bodies unwittingly defy through their symmetry and functional orderliness, as if to say, We are not the same, we only look that way from a distance. Take, for example, the popularity of tattoos. While the design of our bodies pushes the entropy boulder uphill, we lustily and uniquely label our skin. See me, our brands seem to beg. Read my message. Choose me. Exempt me. I am highly evolved. Different. In Darwin and Delpino’s time, you would have been one in a billion. Today you are one in seven billion. Does it matter to you what number the denominator is, so long as you’re the numerator? I think of the denominator and it looks like, sounds like, smells like, seven billion mouths in various states of smile and delectation and pronunciation and goo-goo-g’joob and gleam and scream and drool and root canal and curse and dirge and asymmetric paralysis and halitosis and lipstick and milk tooth and kiss. I am frightened to death by the arithmetic. I want variety. Choose me. I am different. I want to hear the words for “sex,” “home,” and “banquet” spoken in all seven thousand extant languages, one after another. I want to pretend I’m the toastmaster and then watch it all unfurl in a six-hour-long YouTube video. I want to hear and see all of those unfamiliar sounds, not the loud swallowing undulations of a few tongues cannibalistically devouring all the rest.
I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that I find terrifying, on a truly panic- and claustrophobia-inspiring level, the idea of sharing the globe with seven billion human mouths in various states of loquacity and mastication and slobber and howl and hunger and hygiene, while a playlist featuring seven thousand incomprehensibly nattering mother tongues is one I’d press repeat on again and again. This, I suppose, is the unique brand of lust, angst, rage, and heartbreak to which I subscribe.
The playlist asks to whom my future belongs. It asks to whom my land, my stock, my silica, my tassels, my TV, my history, my teeth, my dress, my domesticity, my dinner, my inheritance, my name, my children, my youth, my hybrid vigor, my voice, my language, my parents belong.
It asks and it answers.
••••••••
They’re falling in love, some of these kids are, peeling off their layers come lunchtime to use the Porta-Potties and eat from the coolers they or, if they’re maybe indulged a little at home, their moms packed up for them. Don’t worry, honey, no note. No more notes from Mom.
Some of the kids save for college. A third of all Missouri high-school graduates will matriculate at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where Barbara McClintock traumatized corn chromosomes by exposing them to X-rays. McClintock later received a Nobel Prize for her discovery of jumping genes in maize. Panicked cells mount radical responses that permanently rearrange the shapes of things. When evolution acts on internal change, we’re given a fresh opportunity to assay our ignorance.
The kids are terrified of exposure and terrified of coverage. They lower their language and lift their voices. They walk the rows on the slang. They complain boisterously about ambient smells, fret as they do over their own odors and, by proxy, bodily impulses. It’s universally true that damp places accrue odors. The kids don’t know the half of how olfaction or desire works, but what the hell does that matter? Does lifting the veil give desire any less agency over us? Pass me a smoke. Scratch my rash. Gimme a beer. Turn on that fan. According to an article from the National Conference of State Legislatures, a third of the girls will get pregnant before they’re twenty. Don’t worry, honey, no more notes.
Mom, it hurts.
Step right up.
The teenagers’ noses know by instinct what biologists diagram with genes, cranial nerves, and weird-sounding chemicals. The kids sniff out each other’s immune systems in order to maximize their own progeny’s hybrid vigor. To crossbreed. They have no idea how much of them is on the wind. They couldn’t care less. OMG. Breakfast was Cocoa Puffs and that was back when it was dark, still very dark, like the ass crack of the fattest possible dawn out, dark.
In 2013, the world’s most ancient pollen fossil was found. Its age pushes the dawn of flowering plants all the way back to 240 million years ago.
The oldest known phytolith was found in a 70-million-year-old heap of dinosaur dung.
The mnemonic for remembering the roles of the first twelve cranial nerves, exempting the pheromone-detecting neuron number zero, is: Some Say Marry Money But My Brother Says Big Boobs Matter More. S is for “sensory,” M is for “motor,” B is for “both.”
There are the things we do to delay that final moment when our names are written down in the cold diary of death, and the things we do to ensure that the ink in the diary is as indelible as pollen or phytoliths. So our genes outlive our voices and our voices outlive our regrets.
A third of the kids are cared for by single mothers.
A third of the girls get pregnant in places they’re too embarrassed to admit.
Fewer than three tassels per one thousand female designated stalks can remain if this field is going to pass inspection.
In seventy years, no innovation has been made to the mechanical “cutters” and “pullers” to improve their efficiency enough to render human hands obsolete. Some 99.5 percent of the female plants must be detasseled for the harvest to keep its integrity, a third of them manually.
Backcrossing isolates the desired characteristic by continually breeding the end back to the
beginning. Though I walk the rows, the process is sinuous; I’m on the slang forever and ever with it. Every time I open a Word document it’s to cope with the lack and the liquidity, with my arms’ awful emptiness, with the elusiveness of “home,” that old shape-shifter, and to try to render something fully in spite of the maddening insufficiencies of language. It slips through my fingers, airborne. Every time I break from the task, it’s to admit that the loftiness of words and the bluntness of distance have me licked again. Home looks like this:
(My dad’s land is hidden by steep banks from all that surrounds it, suggesting that the little river whose past and present arc contours his property was at one time a lot more powerful than it is currently. Now it’s a creek that, courtesy of some corps of engineers, courses a straighter-than-is-natural path. (Have you ever looked out of an airplane’s window and seen the pattern of parentheses that meander scars make on the land, the imbricated crescents of fossil waterways, the circumscribed ear shapes, the silt-filled pinnae, the curly pinnae, the listening, history-hoarding pinnae that slow-going rivers trace? (Let’s say a bend in a river is a parenthesis. On the inside, where the curve is concave, the river flows at its slowest, allowing even the lightest sediments to settle like ideas out of suspension. (It’s a gentle rain. The fine-grained stuff drifts down and piles up on the riverbed, deepening the curve of the meander, and forming a point bar.) On the outside, where the parenthesis is convex, the flow is faster and instead of deposition, erosion takes place. (This is the cutbank, where old floodplain sediments are plucked off, entrained, and sent downstream.) The eroded material heads seaward ’til the flow can no longer sustain it. On the inside of some other parenthesis, it falls out of suspension again. (Be they water or be they air, streams are fluid. So too are their beds. Soil and sediment are continually reworked.) A river is always on the revise.) Again and again.))
Work equals force times the measure of my displacement and in a system where energy is a constant, it’s irreversibly spent. Work is. No matter how circular I write it, no matter how many times I loop it, disorder doesn’t climb back into Pandora’s Box at the essay’s end. Instead it’s the opposite. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy is always on the rise, the whole system marching toward thermodynamic equilibrium, which is the heat death I mentioned in the last section. In the end, everything’s monotypic and homogeneous and I haven’t isolated the desired characteristic of “home” in a way that’s vivid enough to allow me to walk through its front door, sit at the kitchen table, pick up my spoon, and swallow my palliative. In the time it used to take a traveling medicine show to outwear its welcome, another language dies and a busload of Midwestern kids detassels a cornfield. Oblivion is where we’re all headed in the end, of course, but that’s oversimplifying it and also skipping quite a few really interesting steps.
What would you say if you only had two weeks to get your photo from Florence, Italy, to a sickly Charles Darwin? Would you write a crash course on the occult mechanisms of anemophilous organisms, including language and yourself among them, or would you write something else instead? What picture would you draw with your last words to assay the intolerable ignorance of incorporeality and/or voicelessness? What fragile or refractory parts of yourself would you expose or try to keep hidden? What crass grit, what elegant pearls, would you hold up to manifest your hidden function? Who would you roast or toast, and how many secrets would dehisce without your authority? What valediction would you offer at the end? Is there some way to delay that final moment, not merely of your death but of your legacy’s death—of your terrible obsolescence? My valediction is: God, I hope so. I humbly and obediently do. I want to hear the final word of every silent and silenced language, whether silent because wordless or silent because dead. Permit me to suggest to you to study this spring …
LOOSE CONCUPISCENCE
Not long after the kids pitch their detasseling shoes in the garbage, another two-week-long process begins.
At night, while the kids shed their sunburned skin and scrape their bug bites and rashes against sheets made of cotton, dew beads the tassels’ anthers. It soaks the anthers through and bloats their thin skins.
The sun’s first order of business after vexing and pinking the horizon is to wick the dew back up to the atmosphere. The fields steam with its efforts. It takes all morning.
The sun warms things up, establishes a temperature differential, and has a nice breeze going by 9:00 a.m.
Below the tassels, the striated leaves wag tonguelike, cut the air, are susurrant. Their language recalls the vinyl’s burnt-in hiss, the needle in the worn-down groove, the shush before the song begins, a sound to foreshadow every human’s playlist.
In the breeze, the tassels bow and sway. Cluster and fan. To hell with boxing the compass. To hell with cardinal and ordinal directions. Each stamen is a forked baguette in Charlie Chaplin’s miniature dinner-roll ballet. Each anther toes the sky, toes the sky, toes the sky.
By late morning, the sun and wind have dried the anthers and, in the process, shrunk them. Their skins grow brittle, pull taut.
Then a wind comes along that is more than some of the anthers can stand. A breeze comes along like a final straw and draws their skins so tight they split open. The anthers dehisce. Their twin barrels roll back like the eyes of the seized, ecstatic, letting fly their golden blueprints. From their retracted domes spills pollen.
Given a good stiff breeze, an anther can kick itself empty in as few as three minutes—about a song’s duration.
For the same couple of hours every day, for a couple of weeks in midsummer, midmorning, between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m., the maize broadcasts its pollen.
It keeps to a circadian rhythm. It minds the local weather conditions. When the dew is dry, the breeze stiff, the sun unclouded and just about to peak, the time is right for corn pollen to hitch the wind. A broken record. A cue burn on the lead-in groove. The pollen takes its two cells and makes a third.
Sometimes there is a second opportunity for the tassels to release their pollen when things cool down in the late afternoon or early evening. On cool and cloudy days, corn can sprinkle its pollen all the livelong. Pollen shed shuts down entirely when the mercury hits eighty-six, and when it rains. Temperatures of one hundred degrees or higher kill corn pollen outright.
(Because it’s not obvious: Human sperm dies around the same temperature as corn pollen does, at just a few degrees above our own body temperature.)
It takes about two weeks for an entire field of maize to shake loose its capsules of pollen. Spreading the process out means a few really hot or dry or wet days won’t wreck the whole season.
Wind speed increases with height from the ground. The tassel is an organ of flight, poised eight feet into the air so that its pollen can travel the maximal distance. Because it is big and heavy, corn pollen doesn’t make it far before the wind dumps it—usually only between twenty and fifty feet. In a field, it needn’t travel far. If lucky, the grain will alight on the stigma, or silk, of an unpollinated ear. Baby, let me tell you what I been through, what all it took me to get here.
Corn may be anemophilous, but its affair with the wind is puppy love compared to what happens next. As soon as it alights on a strand of silk, a pollen grain begins soaking up the stigma’s moisture. Immediately a dialogue begins. Pollen and stigma exchange pedigrees. Flirt. The pollen grain performs a quick chemical assay to assess their compatibility. A proper introduction takes about five minutes. While pollen and silk converse, the tissue inside the pollen wall swells from all of the moisture it’s been taking in. This creates a pressure differential that can only be brokered by the crassimarginate operculum popping open. At this point, the pollen is ready to be messed with, but the reports of its analysis still aren’t in.
If the answer is no because the stigma belongs to some other species of plant, then the pollen hitched an unlucky wind and it’s fucked, dead in the water, just another
wasteling in an incomprehensibly populated sea of wastelings—the golden film on a windshield or some poor sneezer’s mucus membrane.
If the answer to the pollen’s chemical assay is yes, a vermiform tube begins growing from the aperture. If the pollen is also lucky enough to have landed pore down, the tube burrows into the silk, lengthening and slimming as it shimmies into the darkness beneath the ear’s husk. Its progress is guided and lubricated by molecules released by the egg down at the cob. The pollen tube wriggles the length of the stigma all the way down to the white pithy bed where the egg awaits pollination.
Let’s be clear. Though chemically invited, the pollen tube must mechanically force its way in. “Drill” is a word oft repeated in the literature.
Since the beanbag chair that it escaped from is still perched up on the green ponytail, no doubt frying in the sun, the pollen tube must grow at the same time it bores through the stigma. This it does in the unique manner of our own neurons—never at the base of the cell, but only at the end. Tip-wise.
Of all the different types of plant cells, the cells that make up pollen tubes are by far the fastest growing. A Zea mays pollen tube can grow at the rate of a centimeter per hour. That’s because pollen tubes grow in competition with hundreds, sometimes even thousands of others. Darwin felt anemophilous plants were wasteful with their pollen, but others have suggested that tube competition and not the inferiority of wind-as-pollen-vector is what drives their massive pollen production. While heaps of pollen may alight on the same strand of silk, only one grain can fertilize the egg at the other end.
A typical tassel bears about six thousand anthers and releases between two and twenty-five million grains of pollen. The cob, by contrast, is host to somewhere between four hundred and one thousand fruit-bearing eggs. Each silk strand connects to a cupule where an ovule-containing egg is housed. There’s the familiar order of magnitude difference between the genders.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 3