THE AGE OF WONDER
I suppose it was the dead frog and the reminder of Luigi Galvani that prompted me to revisit my research from a few years ago about science and philosophy around the time of the Enlightenment and the writing of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Experiments with corpses, both animal and human, and the development of the knowledge of anatomy and electricity were prompting theories of a “Life Force” and raising questions about what distinguished dead from living, and vegetable from animal.
Friedrich Schelling’s theory of Naturophilosophie speculated that “all physical objects “aspired” to become something higher.”… “All nature had a tendency to move towards a higher state. So carbon for example “aspired” to become diamond; plants aspired to become animals; animals aspired to become men…”*
John Thelwall’s theory of “Animal Vitality” proposed that “no spark of life was divinely conferred, and that no soul was implanted by some external source but that neither could a “life principle be simply explained by blood passing through the lungs”.
It was in Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein that questions were clearly articulated about what it was that would make a creature “human”: “would it have language, would it have a moral conscience, would it have human feelings and sympathies, would it have a soul?”**
So I suppose, the questions beginning to form in my mind are not so far removed from those of 300 years ago but must be applied to a modern-day context where scientists can now create life. What must we think of this new life? How can we categorise it? What respect must it be given? What status should it have? When does it begin to have a soul?
Perhaps a most pertinent question for me, what sort of work can I make that will help me think about these questions?
*Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder.
TWO CONVERSATIONS AND STUDIES WITH A STONE
Two valued conversations have happened in the last week as a result of my Re:View bursary. The first was with fellow Re:View recipient Susan Diab. We met in Brighton in a French coffee shop with THE best macaroons to talk (amongst other things) about our hopes and plans for our Re:View mentoring. Although approaching it with different aims and agendas we found we had a number of questions about our practices in common and it was good to talk.
The second conversation was a phone call from my mentor. It was great to chat about how we might set about the mentoring process, and already her wide experience and knowledge meant that valuable information came out of the conversation. We agreed to meet soon in London.
Meanwhile… in the studio, I am reading, reading, reading… very slowly. Richard Dawkins, talking about “the unlikely accident” of the formation of a molecule that could create copies of itself which might result in a living organism says “In the lifetime of a man, things that are that improbable can be treated for practical purposes as impossible… But in our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are not used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years.” Interesting then to explore some things which although improbable may not be as impossible as they seem.
GALVANI’S FROGS LEGS
Today I found a dead frog in the pond. It was quite peculiarly hanging on for dear life to a piece of pond weed. I wondered if it had done this for comfort or support because it wasn’t feeling very well. It looked alive except it was very still and its back legs seemed peculiarly straight for a frog – as if frozen in mid jump.
Of course I had to fish it out and examine it quite closely, photographing it in its most abject moment. On closer inspection there was no doubt that there was no life left here.
This chance encounter with the frog reminded me of that connection between electricity and life and the work of Luigi Galvani who experimented with the effects of electricity on dead tissue, famously making dead frogs’ legs kick in response to electrical charge.
Experiments with electricity throughout the Age of Enlightenment led to the suggestions which Mary Shelley pondered on in her rendering of Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus): that electricity might be the vital source of “life”, separating living from dead and raising questions about whether a collection of no longer living parts of an organism could somehow be reassembled and re-animated and if so, what sort of creature this might create.
Now of course we are blessed with the technological miracle of defibrillators which shock arrested hearts back into action thus saving many lives.
SEED OR STONE? DEAD OR ALIVE? and ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS.
It has often been an issue for me that I’ve not been able to pinpoint the “right” questions – the questions which might lead me to some sort of clarity in my work.
A little while back I went to Crafting Life, a symposium accompanying Melanie Jackson and Revital Cohen’s exhibition, Transformism, at the John Hansard Gallery. This was an important day for me; a moment when some of the right questions began to form in my mind.
I began to understand some time ago that it’s good to squirrel away knowledge and information, thoughts and ideas, which may seem quite haphazard but which somehow relate to an unidentified “something” which seems important, because one day this not-so-random hoarding habit might provide clues to the answers when the right questions are found. Sorry. It’s complicated.
So a little bit of my current collecting of thoughts and ideas involves seeds and stones. Why should some of those chance agglomerations of atoms in the primordial soup (yes, that’s still on my mind) become “life” and others remain “not life”; some to produce seed, the others to become stones. I’m drawing some stones while I think about this. They are surprisingly hard to draw.
THE PARADOX.
I’m sort of simultaneously reading Schrodinger’s What Is Life, Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, and for a little light relief, Prof Brian Cox’ Wonders of Life. Ha!
This choice of research material stemmed from my desire to get back to basics with the whole “what is life?” thing – to start at the very beginning of thoughts about what “life” has meant in the past, before I begin to think about what “life” might mean now.
I had a momentary and short-lived flash of clarity when, after reading Richard Dawkins’ proposition about the origins of life in the “primordial soup” where random atoms randomly blobbed together to form not so random structures, indeed forming actually rather stable structures, some of which randomly became “life”, I remembered for some reason The Second Law of Thermodynamics. In my mind, this law is about entropy and how everything tends to chaos (I may be oversimplifying here and quite possibly mis-remembering… but this is the version going on in my mind – if anyone wants to put me straight I would welcome it!)
So the thought arose in my overcrowded little brain that Dawkins description of the origins of life was rather in opposition to The Second Law of Thermodynamics, because surely, in that primordial soup, Dawkins is telling me that chaos was somehow tending to order, not the other way round? He even goes so far as to say “If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way” – well that’s not what The Second Law of Thermodynamics says! And Schrodinger seems very certain that for “life” to exist, “life” really does have to maintain some sort of order because otherwise a living thing could not function – it would simply randomly float apart. This was bothering me. Then, ureka! Whilst flicking through Prof Cox’s nice book, there it was – I flicked onto a page headed “LIFE AND THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS: SCHRODINGER’S PARADOX”. Wow! So he spotted it too did he? I am inspired to keep reading. It’s slow progress though and I might need a lie down now.
