Phew! Bang! Oops!

At 7.30 on Friday Sepember 30th I'm doing an event with actors about these gents here...an exploration of the seminal God and Darwin slugfest in Tenessee in 1925. These ornery, gallused old bastards are Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan - and we'll be performing their words...and those of their fictional counterparts in the famous play and movie "Inherit the Wind" as well as dipping into more recent rematches between men and monkeys.


Meantime, we had a terrific meeting last Thursday, I thought, at our "Translating the Genome" gathering. I went away with my head buzzing, and many thanks to all who came and saw and contributed.

Below is a partial result. Another excursion into anthropoesis. Also brought on by devouring John Banville's great "Dr Copernicus" novel over the weekend.

PHEW! BANG! OOPS!

1.

Copernicus, like Darwin,
Could only see what everyone saw –
What he had to conquer, catastrophically
Was the certainty that
All of it was meant for him to look at.
That “he” existed.

The radical decentring
That made such sense
Of the recessions of Mars
(for example)
Required him to destroy himself.

He was not just a watcher of planets
He was on one. Darwin didn’t just
Collect things. He was one.

Intuition is all we have to go on.

2.

To make sense of ourselves
We are the centre.
To make sense of planets, the sun is.

But this frightful sphere of everything…

To make sense of everything
The centre is everywhere
and the circumference is nowhere, so
Centre is not the problem -
“The” is the problem.

Sounds simple. Is simple.
Sounds impossible. Is impossible.

Depressives, paralysed with horror
Are living in the real world

3.

Not content to live with the world as we find it
We also live with the world as we do not find it
Most of it’s not there, but we make maps of it
Impatiently, "it must be real", we say, while naming things –

God, like physics, stone and water
Does not need to know His name.

4.

Our original sin against being
Had something to do with names.
With creating things twice over – a miracle
And a fleshly trap, this seeking.

Star-gazing, we envy the couple in the next room
Drinking, we are troubled by infinity

We talk fondly about losing ourselves
And taste this freedom in crowds
And return to ourselves resentfully.
Yet in these little joys
We know there is a death,
That the only cure for mind
Is namelessness.

5.

Between 1300 and 1312
Dante Alighieri
(Whose legs are black and hairy)
Wrote a poem about everything
No one since has been able to do that.

Now everything is easy for poetry again.
In us is a map, a machine, stuff made of stuff
the same stuff as all the other stuff
the bosons and muons and so on.

All the same.

So we can look at life like stars now
As if it had nothing to do with us.

So...if...

6.

For everything
The measure of everything is everything.
Which is to say that nothing ever happens
As far as everything’s concerned.
Then
For men and women
The measure of everything is men and women
For us there is all of this activity...

Yet

Most of everything isn’t anything at all.
Which is a clue
And seen from here it’s all expanding
In every direction all at once
That’s a clue too.

(Men and women
Know about time and distance and matter
We are time and distance and matter
Which is why we look at things
Down this end of the telescope.
Infinity doesn’t. Eternity doesn’t)

7. Once upon a time

there was no matter
So space and time didn’t matter.
Everything and nothing were the same.
Without matter, there could be no distance
Between matter. Nothing changed.
So there was no time. Then

Oops!

There was matter
With distances between it, changing
All the time.

And that was the universe right there

8.
(The tricky thing to grasp is that everything always was everything and still is and always will be.
And that it is the expansion into space and time and stuff and spaces inbetween stuff and time
that was and is anomalous.)

9.

The apparent expansion of space and time
And all the lumps therein
Is the diffusion of an initial anomaly.
More of a big oops than a bang.

By way of correction, happily
This lumpiness can’t last
Eventually, expansion is infinite
(one might say it always was)

Eternity is eternal just until the rocks and beetles and men and women
Are broken, spread into molecular, atomic, then sub atomic constituents
Over so much space and time it’s as if nothing was there
and there was nowhere no-things might have been.

No matter - so no mass or energy
So no distance between matter - so no space.
No change - so no time.
The singularity of the zero restored
Everything - the same as nothing.
And nothing ever happened.

10.

Call that God or cosmos if you like,
I’m fine with it. If that’s how it is.
But it’s not you or me.

Men and women
Must learn not to be God
And be mistakes
And make the most of our not being here in the meantime

11.

There is no more to say on the matter.


Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

I Can See Ouranos

My wife sings in a choir. As a result, for an atheist, I spend a lot of time in Church. And just on Saturday there, at Choral Evensong in St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Glasgow, perhaps as a consequence of all the reading I'm doing for this residency, I started hearing things.

I began substituting words for God...materialist ideas about the universe, the stuff of life and non-life...for the name of the Almighty...

And suddenly feeling, (having suspected as much) that there were deep connections between languages of belief that might reflect something deep in us, deep in our history, I speculated among the music and the architecture.

Read Your Own on 22nd September

This is another recent TED talk I think is worth a gander...not for those who are already familiar with what is going on in the life sciences so much as for those who aren't.

Like almost everything else I come across it's a mixture of hype and caution for me...and it's worth bearing in mind that the bio-industrial revolution here described is only one narrow corner of the whole picture : personalised medicine, individual genome sequencing.

To Resnick's credit he knows that it raises as many questions as it answers. But he gives a sense of how transformative the new thinking in biology is going to be. If you've got the cash...as insurance companies surely do, among others.

If I get the chance and the laptop, I'll be playing this at our Translating the Genome Free and Open discussion on Thursday next at 4pm in the Traverse bar.

May need a drink after.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

When is a Baby?

The following is hot off the press...or CNN News...via the Why Evolution is True blog site:

This is a proposed amendment to the State Constitution of Mississipi coming to the popular vote on November 8th.

Be it enacted by the People of the State of Mississippi: As used in Article 3 of the State Constitution, the term Person or Persons shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.

CNN comment:

Voters in Mississippi will be given a chance to decide whether life begins at conception, a controversial abortion-related ballot initiative that the state’s highest court has refused to block. The Mississippi Supreme Court late Thursday allowed Measure 26, also known as the Personhood Amendment, to appear on the state ballot November 8. The decision was a rejection of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and abortion-rights groups. The 7-2 ruling said those groups had not met the legal burden required to restrict the right of citizens to amend the state constitution. . .Anti-abortion forces hope the amendment, if passed, would ultimately be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, providing another opportunity for the justices to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Grow me a Robot, Skylar!

Just a quick one. I'm just starting to think about synthetic biology...and what I carried in my head as a definition of this was the idea of people building novel organic forms...like clones...

Or chimeras...mice with DNA from other organisms...or with chunks of genomes missing...so we can test what the missing parts do...that kind of thing.

Or nanotechnology...manipulating natural substances...like oil...at the genetic level to make them do what we want for efficiently.

All fascinating, wierd, stressful. Everything I enjoy.

What I hadn't really appreciated properly was that there is a lot of thinking going on in the opposite direction...learning from how nature builds things so that we can build things better.

Check this out: and keep watching till he gets to the bit about "Biased Chains"




TED talks highlight some good showy science stuff from unfeasible teenagers like Skylar Tibbits here...as well as legends like James Watson and George Gamow.

There is no end to what's out there. Almost makes it worth getting up in the morning.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

The Epigenetic Book List

Six months ago, when I was young and the weather was actually quite good, I asked Steve Yearley, who's the director of the Genomics Forum, for a steer towards stuff I should be reading. And he immediately named a book called "Genomes And What to Make of Them" by Barry Barnes and John Dupre.

On dipping into this immediately and obviously dense and elegant overview of my new subject matter from the University of Chicago Press, it was as immediately obvious to me that I wasn't ready for it yet. It does not assume prior knowledge, exactly...but takes no prisoners. It disallows dipping into chapters between TV shows or snacks...you have to sit down monastically and read it properly.

Most books don't ask you to do this anymore. Besides, I felt I had to read AROUND genomics first...orient myself. Take deep breaths. So I put it down for a while. Now I've started again. And it's great. I mean, not just good or informative...it takes you into its view of the world and shakes you till you accept it.

It is in danger of joining that personal shortlist of titles that I carry around in me like the remains of viruses...that have tranferred their genetic information after infection...so that I carry their information around with me now too, haunting anything I write myself. And everything else I read or come across.

Just for the record, this unnatural selection includes:

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.

And in non fiction, The Rebel by Albert Camus, Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt...

There's a few more...Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Crime and Punishment by you know who...

Oh and Antony and Cleopatra...

None of them very startling as choices, I know, as a list of great stuff...but they are all especially distinguished for me by the fact that I initially resisted them...I couldn't get through any of them the first time round. Then when I did get through them, I turned back to page one and read them again. Immediately.

That's almost a measure of "greatness" for me. Or "art". I was scared of being changed. Then I was changed.

Might be happening again. I'll let you know.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Some Slime Reflects at The End of Time

I'm just starting to get some notions about this play I'm going to write, and this has maybe got something of the flavour I'm looking for. At the End of Time, a single bacterium looks back:


"What they used to call 'life'
Began (apparently) as sickness
When one decent, simple cell
Like you or me
A long time ago, got invaded
Quite by accident
By AN Other.

Monsters like that die, usually,
But they found, these mutual parasites,
That they rubbed along together pretty well.

They compartmentalised, specialised.
And when they or it
got fat and split,
Their offspring kept on
going with the arrangement.

With fortuitous adjustments,
They positively flourished -
Gobbling up the neighbours,
Combining novel elements!

I know!

These experiments!
These upstarts
With their new fangled hearts!
Their sugars and their phosphates
Their guts, their mouths
Their University degrees!

But, of course, inventing 'life'
They'd invented 'death' as well.
Devouring them secerally, jointly
And eventually - utterly.

Leaving one life,
us
immortal, invisible, identical
us
As was, is now, and ever shall be.

Is it just me or is it getting hotter?



Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Why Do They Think Like that?

As I write, happily it looks like Nadine Dorries' abortion amendement to the Health Bill is going nowhere...leaving us time to concentrate on everything else that's pernicious about it.

But I wanted to take a sideways glance at the controversy and to ask: Why Do They Think Like That?

Why does Nadine Dorries think that NHS clinics try to talk women into having abortions? They're not paid by the filling like dentists used to be...(or was THAT a conspiracy theory?) ...so why would she think like that?

Why does President in Waiting (at the moment) Rick Perry buy into the idea that "scientists" are a criminal interest group who use the chimera of climate change to fraudulently extort his tax dollars?

I'm working on a play at the moment, and if I'm going to have characters who think like that, I've got to get inside their skin.

I have to grit my teeth and imagine them feeling that way in good faith - something the evangelical right is quite incapable of when it comes to its "enemies".

But as a dramatist, I can't just say to myself, "well they're just evil...or just stupid...or just lying...so I don't have to think about it."

I have to imagine people like me who genuinely feel that way...Not because I'm fair minded at all. I'm not. But I have to give an actor a steer as to how to play the part.

Elias Canetti, in "Crowds and Power", an old fave, or Amin Malouf in "On Identity", a newer fave, both argue that identification with a group is most keenly felt and clung to when it seems to be under attack. That very often, identities only come into existence when that attack is felt.

"I never knew I was a (fill in identity here) till they made it illegal."

The evangelical right attack "materialist science" because they find it self aggrandizing to characterize the scientific project as being all about them - as being an attack on them. Charles Darwin hated God - that's why he saw what he saw. Stem cell scientists want to kill babies...climate scientists hate free enterprize.
It's not so much a conspiracy theory as a conspiracy feeling.

And I do know how that feels. When the phone never rings unless it's someone trying to sell you something, when you feel you have to act under the assumption that EVERYONE is trying to rob you ALL the time...I can see why the only way to maintain self worth is to decide that you're being persecuted because they are out to get you.

It's that sense of being attacked and defined by the attack...that feels real to me, and I suspect to an audience, so that would be the way to go.

Meanwhile, as so often, the comment boards on a story online are a lifting of the bandages to reveal the wounds in the public psyche.

"Scientists have only got themselves to blame," one opined. "If they weren't so smug and rich we might believe them."

Unpick that psychology at your leisure.

It's something of a theme for the science vs religion slugfest I'm presenting at the Traverse on September 30th...


Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.