My Time in Space (27 page)

If every garden has a secret, that of our garden is the sea.
Behind the fuchsia hedge the ground falls almost sheerly for
eighteen
feet or so to the seashore. Gaps in the hedge give us
irregular
windows onto the waters of the bay, and when one of Roundstone’s half-deckers goes by one hears waves on the rocks below discussing the event for some minutes afterwards. There is a little patio outside the garden door, and from a corner of this one can lean over a wooden rail and look along the cliff face, a tangle of brambles and nettles, with ledges settled by sea-pink from nature below and montbretia from culture above.

The cliff meets the gable end of the house at an angle and seems to disappear; it is difficult to make out how it is folded into the structure of the building. This becomes clearer when one goes round to the other side, past the conservatory or front porch, where a broad flight of steps descends to a courtyard between our inland gable and the apartments next door. From here one can see that the nucleus of the building has two stories and is built against the cliff; the upper storey with its old slate roof looks like a long cottage, and consists of our library and the big sea-room, with the extension running back from it at clifftop level. The lower storey also has an extension, to the front, at sea-level. There is no
interior
communication between upstairs and downstairs. Above is our home, which we call Nimmo House after the Scots engineer who founded Roundstone in the 1820s, built the pier just outside the courtyard gate and may have had a store on this site; below is the premises of Folding Landscapes, publishers of maps, archivists of local lore, lookers-out at the sea. When we acquired the
building
in 1989 it had long been in use as a rubbish dump and store for a dreadful knitting factory next door, which had gone into bankruptcy and is now replaced by the holiday apartments. The front extension in particular was a concrete shell, a dismal clutter
of windowless cells, broken-down garage doors, rusty boilers. Penetrating its filthy corridors we found at the back a huge room the low ceiling of which had partly collapsed onto the heaps of plastic bags full of reject woollen socks that almost filled it. The rear wall of this dank cavern masks the cliff face. Nowadays
Folding
Landscapes is full of light that floods through many windows, interior openings and glass screens, but I am still aware of the cliff it is founded on, that has not been seen since Nimmo’s time, or at least since the Robinsons of Letterdyfe had turf-stores and sheds for carts and pony-traps here, and I imagine it waiting,
unresignedly
, until we have all gone away.

Once, looking out into the poplartree that tapped with hundreds of triangular leaves at a window of our first-floor flat in London, I saw a small furry caterpillar. I have always been fond of
such creatures, so I opened the window and collected it into a jamjar. It had a creamy stripe down the back from which four tufts of brownish hairs stood up like a liner’s funnels, and longer sheaves of hairs stuck out in front of it and to the rear. I still possess my 1946 reprint of Richard South’s
Moths
of
the
British
Isles
,
probably the most intensively read book of my childhood, and from it I was able to identify this curiosity as the larva of a Vapourer Moth – ‘quite a Cockney insect, and found in almost every part of the Metropolis where there are a few trees’. A few days later it retired among the leaves I had given it to feed on, spun up its cocoon, and pupated. I left the jamjar open on a windowledge, and a month or so afterwards noticed that the moth had emerged and crawled out of the jar, and was clinging to the inside of the
windowpane
. It – she – was a poor-looking, greyish spider-like object; the female of this species is wingless. She was motionless,
apparently inert. I raised the sash window a few inches to see if fresh air might invigorate her.

By a marvellous chance later in the day I was passing through the room and happened to glance out just as a small moth came flying towards the window from across the lawn. Its course was slightly irregular and side-slipping, but as purposeful as a saw
biting
through wood. It shot in through the gap under the sash, went across the room and down to the floor, where it fumbled and tumbled, gradually back-tracking to the window and eventually finding its goal after many dartings and near-misses. It – he – was a bright-winged little creature, red-ochre with a whitish spot on the trailing edge of
each forewing. They clung together
immediately
, and she began to lay her eggs as they mated, egg after egg after egg, her body slackening and thinning, until after a few hours and about two hundred eggs, she was empty, spent, dead.

One of the hundred threads of implication one could tease out from this passionately observed event – like all such, a knot of parables – is that the transparent space above our lawn that day was seething with messages. The male moth had been able to lock onto the plume of eroticism emanating from the female, which if it had been visible would have looked like a wavering magic
carpet
unrolled through the air from the narrow slit under the
window
sash. Simultaneously, countless other insects, indifferent to the Vapourer’s aphrodisiac effluvium, had followed the scent of their own destinies across the garden. But these pheromones – externalized hormones that co-ordinate, and sometimes
destabilize
, social and sexual behaviour – are not peculiar to insects; from the single-celled protozoan partaking in a slime-slow
conglomeration
with indefinite numbers of its like, to the rational human being flustered by a
je-ne-sais-quoi
wafted into the margins of
consciousness 
by another’s passing-by, we all are subject to their
persuasions
. The substance secreted by the female Vapourer’s
sex-glands
is known to the specialist as (z)-6-Heneicosene-11-one (there is a web site on which one can find such recondite
information
). Its molecules are built of twenty-one atoms of carbon, thirty-eight of hydrogen and one of oxygen, combined in a
specific
shape; they go twirling through the jostling throng of lesser molecules constituting air until, perhaps a mile away, some of them happen to fall into the right position to fit the equally
specific
shape of receptor molecules in cells of
the male Vapourer moth’s antennae. Pheromones are clouds of keys, drifting at
random
; but in such billions they will find their locks.

The Cockneys’ mating took place in high summer: the Earth was rounding that part of its orbit where its northern regions are favourably inclined towards the sun by day, splendid energies were being lavished on the Metropolis, and sequences of influences we hardly know about had primed the moths to multiply while food for the next generation was green and juicy. What are the
proportions
between these realms, of the solar system and the moths’ sexual chemistry? When I was a child my fond parents wrote a rhyme in which they boasted: ‘Tim will discover stars / forty times as big as Mars!’, and although I may have disappointed them in that respect, I have learned something of
the relative scales of things. The diameters of the smaller planets such as Mars and Earth stand to my height in roughly the same ratio as I do to a single cell of my body, while stars, like molecules, figure in ranges much remoter from the human scale. It is only in a very narrow range that we have a natural sense of size. The degree of smallness that most impresses us is, by a perspective effect, the closest to us; not the microbial or atomic but that of objects a tiny but appreciable
fraction of our own size, down as far as dust-motes, the vanishing points of the domestic. In folktales a sprinkling of ‘fernseed’
renders
one invisible, and indeed the size of fernspores marks one of the two exits from the world of naturally visible objects. The
further
reaches of smallness, like the figures astronomy offers for galactic distances, fade into the abstract, the inconceivable, the incomprehensible. Contemplation of these two vistas led Pascal to his magnificent meditation on the abysses between which the human being is suspended:

Awe-inspiring as this is, and profound in its anticipation of so much that has been established or hypothesized since his day, I feel that it runs off to infinity too readily, too tendentiously;
Pascal
is frightening us into the arms of God. Believing that for good or ill our life is totally of this universe, I will look down these
perspectives
again.

Powers of ten are a useful way of keeping one’s head in plumbing these dizzy gulfs. Let multiplication by ten and division by ten be taken as steps up and down, respectively, in the scale of lengths; then one step up from me is the height of a big house, two steps, representing a factor of a hundred, is a hill, three a mountain, four the distance across a town, five a great city, six a country, seven the diameter of the Earth. Downwards, one step brings me to the rat, two to the moth, three to its egg, four to a single iridescent scale of its wing, five to the single-celled forms of life. Already I need instruments to extend my senses. In exploring my landscapes in the West I have often called on scientists to show me how much I’m missing, and what they let me glimpse through their microscopes is astounding in its variety and complexity. A drop of pondwater from the Burren is a toy-chest of darting, wriggling, lumbering, colliding, shunting, contraptions so
ingenious
in their modes of locomotion one is struck by the absence of the wheel; some of the busiest of these untiring searchers are single-celled algae, photosynthesists, therefore members of the plant kingdom. In Connemara, Dog’s Bay has a white beach mainly composed of the shells of Foraminifera, single-celled
animals
that draw calcium carbonate out of seawater and use it to
make themselves external skeletons. Each sort – and about 200 species have been recorded here to date – builds to its own design, and these tend to the fantastic, the obsessive and the absurd, at least to our eyes accustomed to reading human purposes into
artefacts
: I see among them cakes from confectionery competitions, fretted globes of Chinese ivory-work, spiky hot-water bottles. Praeger, in whose books I first read about this beach and saw Foraminifera shells illustrated, wondered how each of these minute blobs of jelly knows what sort of shell it is supposed to produce. Nowadays at least parts of the answer are known in
outline
, in terms of instructions encoded in DNA, interference
patterns
of chemicals flowing across cell surfaces, and so on.

I will also mention the fossil pollen grains preserved at various levels in bogs and lake sediments, from which palaeoecologists can reconstruct the plantlife of landscapes long gone under the ground. Pollen, that aerial silk, epitome of what is dispersed as
irrecoverably
as breath, is one of nature’s toughest products; long after root and bark have rotted, pollen remains and keeps every detail of its species characteristics. Hazel pollen is a plump triangular cushion with a pore like a porthole at each corner; pine has two reticulated airbags to help it drift far and wide, that give it the appearance of a fly’s head; elm is almost spherical, with five pores evenly spaced around a circumference, and a brain-like surface pattern. So we know that in about 3800
BC
when Neolithic settlers first cleared the forest around Lough Sheeauns in north-west Connemara, the ribwort plantain sprang up, a wildflower reinventing itself as a weed of cultivation. But it is not the specifics of such knowledge that astound me, it is its quality of specificity, the fineness of detail with which the world records itself and in which its records can be read, through the optics and insights of the various sciences.

Looking outwards, perhaps the order of planetary movements, insofar as we see them inscribed upon the sphere of night, answers to that of fernseed in the inward perspective. And that is why astrology arises here, at the apparent limits of
naturally
comprehensible
space, making our inner selves visible as fernseed makes our outer selves invisible. The theory of the direct influence on our characters and careers of the planets’ ‘aspects’ at the moment of our births, the whole creaking medieval apparatus of
oppositions
, conjunctions, sextiles, squares and trines, is inconsistent with both the findings of science and its selfcritical procedures; as a phenomenon of contemporary culture it lies on dodgy ground between counselling and bingo. However, when I say this to an astrologer friend she replies, weakly but indefeasibly, ‘But it works!’ If so, that is because astrological lore – the never-
quite-repetitious
starry cycles and all that has been piled up in writing on them since Sumeria – is a rich enough archive of patterns to suit any interpretation; we project onto it hopes and fears that we cannot face directly, and then can recognize them, like Leonardo’s faces of all humanity read into the stains on a wall.

Far beyond this delusive order, and the related one of the
constellations
, that index to world mythology, is the reality of the solar system. Eight steps up in the scale of powers of ten from the human body bring us only halfway to the moon; the orbits of the inner planets including Earth lie around the eleventh step; and the outer orbits of the giant planets from Saturn to Neptune, the twelfth. But it would be an equal and opposite mistake to that of astrology, to imagine that the planets pursue their tremendous courses indifferent to our fates; indifference is a human failing, possible only where there is potentiality for caring, and we indulge ourselves in imputing it to the inanimate. In fact we could come
to feel affection for these close-to-home features of the solar
system
, learn to recognize them after a long journey through the comparative emptiness beyond, because they are composed of the same materials as we are, originating probably in a star that once partnered the sun and that ripened and burst and spread its heavy elements about, to be swept together and moulded by gravity and electromagnetism into dust-clouds, asteroids, comets and the
planets
with their rings, moons, atmospheres, seas and living things. This is not the infinitude of silence that frightened Pascal; this is a space as garrulous, teeming with news and fertile in invention, in its slower tempo, as the air above our lawn on a summer’s day.

Such arenas of fruitful interaction are only now beginning to be understood in their general laws; a hierarchy of sciences – chaos theory, complexity theory, new mathematical flesh on the vague old concept of ‘emergence’ – has recently arisen, itself emerging by the very processes it formalizes out of a chaos and complexity of ideas. The essence of these theories is this, that if a collection of entities is sufficiently numerous and richly
interactive
, and if it is continually fed with energies that disturb it from sluggish equilibria, eventually parts of it will fall by chance into patterns or cycles that have some capacity for persistence; and if such persistences are continually forthcoming, eventually some will arise that have the property of seeding the development of their like, of replicating themselves; and once there are relatively stable dynamic systems all calling on the same resources of
material
and energy, they will evolve, be co-opted into systems of higher order. All this is a consequence of a law of large numbers; that if enough things happen, then it is certain that something extremely improbable will happen. Life, intelligence and love are not aliens marooned in a hostile world of iron determinism,
doomed to be chilled to death by the dreadful second law of
thermodynamics
if left unredeemed by the transcendental, as they must have seemed to thinkers of the last century. The furthest developments of these processes, so far as we know and as of today, occur on Earth. A rich enough mix of chemicals,
interreacting
and fed with heat to keep it far from equilibrium, may spontaneously produce a substance that catalyses other reactions, and then develop more elaborate networks of mutually catalysing processes; hence arises life, hence breeding populations and
evolution,
hence networks of neurones, thoughts and dreams, social systems that can reflect upon themselves, books that are written to find out what they are about. This is the Eden of autopoiesis, of self-creation; some social-systems theorists claim that
Spencer-Brown’s
Laws
of
Form
is its Book of Genesis, and at least one can agree that endlessly reiterated discrimination of one form from another is its dynamics
in
abstracto.