Disbeliever

From a colleague on an email list. He lives in Mumbai.

On January 11, 1998, unidentified gunmen entered a movie theater and a small mosque in Sidi Ahmed near Algiers and massacred 120 men, women, and children at close range during Algeria's ongoing civil conflict.

Disbeliever

By the limping of the people of Iraq
By the sound of frantic running in Qana, in Kosovo
By the men and boys of Hama massacred
By the swollen bodies in a river in Rwanda
and Afghani women and the writers of Algiers,
I am a disbeliever

in everything that refuses to kiss
full on the lips the ones still living
and receive them into the bosom of the self,
no matter the religion or the nation or race
I am a disbeliever in everything
that does not say "How was the movie? I love you"

I need a body outside my life that can travel and kneel
on the sidewalk beside a movie theater in Algiers
over the bodies of the supple children
who will never be my children's playmates or marry them
over the bodies of the men and the women
who will never write a letter,
will never phone me from Algiers:"How was the movie? I love you. I love you."

I need time outside this history
where I can whisper in the ear of each of them,
By God, you will never be forgotten
By God, I will make sure the world
buries its face in your beautiful hair,
sings to you, learns your name and your music,
lifts you up in the crook of its arm like a gift

I am a disbeliever
in everything but the purity of the bodies
of the men and women–with or without the veil,
with or without the markings of the right identity–
in everything but the suppleness of children
I am a disbeliever in every scripture
in the world that leaves out
"How was the movie? I love you. I love you."

Mohja Kahf

Rock and Water

When I was in Liverpool recently I met up with Sue and Graham Lane from Newcastle, Australia. Graham knew people I knew, through the Social Ecology programme at the University of Western Sydney. They told me about a program called Rock and Water, run from the University of Newcastle. It looks really interesting, and maybe some day I'll be able to get out there to find out more. In the meantime, a collection of essays has emerged from the programme . They have also developed teaching materials.

Cuddles

I'm sitting in my front room with my cat, Nila, stretched blissfully across my chest. She seems pretty content, sounds pretty content, purrpurr. There's an effortless generosity that comes with Nila. Yes, she can seem a bit needy sometimes, especially when I've been away for a bit, but I love her anyway. Yes, Cassie (dog), I love you too, with your boundless enthusiasm.

One of Nila's ways of showing affection is biting. At first I would pull away, and end up getting scars to record her attentions. Then I worked out that if I gently lean my hand into her as she bites, the bite turns to a lick, and scars are averted. It was a hard learning.

Nila likes a little human warmth and a quiet cuddle. As do I. The online etymological dictionary refers to 'cuddle' as follows

"c.1520, probably a variant of obs. cull, coll "to embrace" (see collar), or perhaps M.E. *couthelen, from couth "known," hence "comfortable with." The word has a spotty early history, and it seems to have been a nursery word at first."

I find it really interesting that the possible etymology through 'couth' refers to knowledge as a question of presence, of being-with, of relationship, and of emotional comfort or familiarity. This is very different from later dominant understandings of knowledge that abstract knowledge from relationships, link knowledge to mental cognition, and anchor knowledge to certitude, the absence of doubt.

Cuddles aren't about certitude for me. But they allow for a confidence about being-with, a confidence in being-present-with, a familiarity with bodily warmth, gentle breathing, and fitting-together. Cuddles tend to be unregulated; what I mean by that is that they allow us a space where we aren't enticed to manage ourselves or another, a space where the headiness of logic doesn't really get a look-in, where words often simply get in the way. Cuddles for me often constitute the quintessential uncommodifying moment.

A cuddle isn't just a hug with benefits. You can hug someone you don't really know. A cuddle implies a comfort, but a comfort that comes with familiarity and trust, a comfort that comes with a vital vulnerability that opens a space for gentleness to just happen. Whether it's Nila on my lap, or my niece cuddling up with her Granda to hear a story, or the comfort of a romantic moment, cuddles are for me about as beautiful as being human gets. I'm pleased that the word cuddle may have been a nursery word first. Babies are about as vulnerable as we ever get, and any words we might use are only helpful insofar as they communicate a soothing tone, an emotional texture, another reminder of being-with; without agendas, without schedules, without a felt need to control.

So, yes, if you want to understand what I mean by gentleness, think on cuddles for a while. Or, better still, go and find some.

Nila, at this point, has decided that lounging in the sun streaming in through the french windows is way more attractive than cuddles with me.

Fare well, Da

Hi all,

I haven't been blogging for the last while because my Dad died. My Dad was my mentor, a prince of a man, a man of deep gentleness, a man of great dignity. I'll miss him.

Now that he has passed, I am very conscious that any work I might do relating to gentleness is very much part of his legacy. He may have used other words, he may have spoken about his path in ways that I would not, but I aspire to the kind of relationship with others that he lived.

What he had to teach me, I eventually realised, wasn't really any sort of information I needed to remember; rather, what I needed to learn from him was a way of being-with, a way of being present, a way of sitting. If I can remember a little of what that feels like and try to put it into practice, I'll be doing okay.

I dedicate this work to my parents.

Relational Genes

New York Times
November 11, 2008
Scientists and Philosophers Find That ‘Gene’ Has a Multitude of Meanings

By Natalie Angier

I owe an apology to my genes. For years I offhandedly blamed them for certain personal defects conventionally associated with one’s hereditary starter pack — my Graves’ autoimmune disease, for example, or my hair, which looks like the fibers left behind on the rim of an aspirin bottle after the cotton ball has been removed, only wispier.

Now it turns out that genes, per se, are simply too feeble to accept responsibility for much of anything. By the traditional definition, genes are those lineups of DNA letters that serve as instructions for piecing together the body’s proteins, and, I’m sorry, but the closer we look, the less instructive they seem, less a “blueprint for life” than one of those disappointing two-page Basic Setup booklets that comes with your computer, tells you where to plug it in and then directs you to a Web site for more information.

Scientists have learned that the canonical “genes” account for an embarrassingly tiny part of the human genome: maybe 1 percent of the three billion paired subunits of DNA that are stuffed into nearly every cell of the body qualify as indisputable protein codes. Scientists are also learning that many of the gene-free regions of our DNA are far more loquacious than previously believed, far more willing to express themselves in ways that have nothing to do with protein manufacture.

In fact, I can’t even make the easy linguistic transition from blaming my genes to blaming my whole DNA, because it’s not just about DNA anymore. It’s also about DNA’s chemical cousin RNA, doing complicated things it wasn’t supposed to do. Not long ago, RNA was seen as a bureaucrat, the middle molecule between a gene and a protein, as exemplified by the tidy aphorism, “DNA makes RNA makes protein.” Now we find cases of short clips of RNA acting like DNA, transmitting genetic secrets to the next generation directly, without bothering to ask permission. We find cases of RNA acting like a protein, catalyzing chemical reactions, pushing other molecules around or tearing them down. RNA is like the vice presidency: it’s executive, it’s legislative, it’s furtive.

For many scientists, the increasingly baroque portrait of the genome that their latest research has revealed, along with the muddying of molecular categories, is to be expected. “It’s the normal process of doing science,” said Jonathan R. Beckwith of Harvard Medical School. “You start off simple and you develop complexity.” Nor are researchers disturbed by any linguistic turbulence that may arise, any confusion over what they mean when they talk about genes. “Geneticists happily abuse ‘gene’ to mean many things in many settings,” said Eric S. Lander of the Broad Institute. “This can be a source of enormous consternation to onlookers who want to understand the conversation, but geneticists aren’t bothered.”

In Dr. Lander’s view, the “kluges upon kluges” are an occupational hazard. “We’re trying to parse an incredibly complex system,” he said. “It’s like the U.S. economy. What are your functional units? Employees and employers? Consumers and producers? What if you’re a freelancer with multiple employers? Where do farmers’ markets and eBay map onto your taxonomy?”

“You shouldn’t be worried about the fact that you have to layer on other things as you go along,” he said. “You can never capture something like an economy, a genome or an ecosystem with one model or one taxonomy — it all depends on the questions you want to ask.”

Dr. Lander added: “You have to be able to say, this is Tuesday’s simplification; Wednesday’s may be different, because incredible progress has been made by those simplifications.”
For other researchers, though, the parlance of molecular biology is desperately in need of an overhaul, starting with our folksy friend, gene. “The language is historical baggage,” said Evelyn Fox Keller, a science historian and professor emeritus at M.I.T. “It comes from the expectation that if we could find the fundamental units that make stuff happen, if we could find the atoms of biology, then we would understand the process.”

“But the notion of the gene as the atom of biology is very mistaken,” said Dr. Keller, author of “The Century of the Gene” and other books. “DNA does not come equipped with genes. It comes with sequences that are acted on in certain ways by cells. Before you have cells you don’t have genes. We have to get away from the underlying assumption of the particulate units of inheritance that we seem so attached to.”

Dr. Keller is a big fan of the double helix considered both in toto and in situ — in its native cellular setting. “DNA is an enormously powerful resource, the most brilliant invention in evolutionary history,” she said. “It is a far richer and more interesting molecule than we could have imagined when we first started studying it.”

Still, she said, “it doesn’t do anything by itself.” It is a profoundly relational molecule, she said, and it has meaning only in the context of the cell. To focus endlessly on genes, she said, keeps us stuck in a linear, unidirectional and two-dimensional view of life, in which instructions are read out and dutifully followed.

“What makes DNA a living molecule is the dynamics of it, and a dynamic vocabulary would be helpful,” she said. “I talk about trying to verb biology.” And to renoun it as well. Writing last year in the journal PloS One, Dr. Keller and David Harel of the Weizmann Institute of Science suggested as an alternative to gene the word dene, which they said could be used to connote any DNA sequence that plays a role in the cell. So far, Dr. Keller admits, it has yet to catch on.
Complex as our genome is, it obviously can be comprehended: our cells do it every day. Yet as the physician and essayist Lewis Thomas once noted, his liver was much smarter than he was, and he would rather be asked to pilot a 747 jet 40,000 feet over Denver than to assume control of his liver. “Nothing would save me or my liver, if I were in charge,” he wrote.
In a similar vein, we may never understand the workings of our cells and genomes as comfortably and cockily as we understand the artifacts of our own design. “We have evolved to solve problems,” Dr. Keller said. “Those do not include an understanding of the operation of our own systems — that doesn’t have much evolutionary advantage.” It’s quite possible, she said, that biology is “irreducibly complex,” and not entirely accessible to rational analysis. Which is not to say we’re anywhere near being stymied, she said: “Our biology is stretching our minds. It’s another loop in the evolutionary process.”

And if canonical genes are too thin a gruel to explain yourself to yourself, you can always reach for the stalwart of scapegoats. Blame it all on your mother, who surely loved you too much or too little or in all the wrong ways.

Back soon.

Hi, I'll be back soon.