Original Soup Of Life Poem by Denis Mair

Tell me, how can six feet of DNA get wound up inside a nucleus that is measured in microns?

How can so much thread get unspooled without tangling? And how does it get wound up again like a hawser?

How does DNA in a chromosome get so packed into coils and supercoils that it becomes like a big biocrystal?

When the cell needs a certain segment of coding, how does the double helix unzip to the right place?

Before the cell divides, the DNA must be copied. How can the helix possibly unwind at 100 rpm during the duplication?

When the cell is ready to divide, what are those filaments that pull the chromosomes toward the middle and line them up in pairs?

How can the paired chromosomes engage in spontaneous slice-and-exchange between corresponding segments? This shuffles the deck and breaks up gene clusters that might behave toxicly toward their analogues.

Don't believe the common saying that "DNA is an intelligent molecule, " or that it has higher information density than any other matter.

DNA is a totally passive medium for code; it is just a layabout stretched out in the nucleus of a cell!

But there is a matrix that sustains all cellular structures; it breaks them down as needed on the way to other stages.

Behind the rigid fact there is a dance which is never confined to this moment.

The lineup of nucleotides only makes sense in a whirlpool of chain reactions. The template needs an enzyme cascade to make a protein.

There is a matrix, at once MATER and MAGISTER, capable of reading DNA, transcribing DNA, and utilizing DNA.

In a prearranged reaction sequence she releases droplets of lactic acid at just the right places,

So contractile fibers will tighten and march chromosomes into paired formation.

And this ability to pull with actin fibers is an invention which is writ large in a muscle cell.

All this is performed by protoplasm, in a state which is basically fluid,

So the fluidity of this matrix is more complex than fixed coding could ever be.

The breadth of its complexity lies in its feedback cycles interlocking in all directions out to the horizons of its possibility space;

The depth of its complexity is the irreversible direction of its energy-state conversions going down through time.

The living soup has tiers of relationality on which the segments of structural coding depend;

Only living, liquid stuff knows the nesting levels by which code can be applied to code.

Here in the world of human concerns, we also feel that purely abstract information is of little use.

A library is not intelligent; only scholars who read books are intelligent.

Scholars who read books are not intelligent; only someone who sends others spinning in circles is intelligent,

For instance, people who wield power: they don't set much store by pure information.

And what about a woman? Her way of sending a person spinning seems to come from far away,

And she herself may be mystified.


Here in the human world we have another kind of person: on one hand he likes to dig out a little pure information;

On the other hand, he likes to send people spinning in circles, but as for which of these he will choose,

His mental workings are often in a fluid state.

He's trying to get a handle on just how complex his own mind could be,

So he can't help staging collisions with other people,

Which makes it hard for a contemplative person to focus while digging out pure information.

So along comes this trouble-stirrer, and he brings a little fluidity to the social mix,

But that could be for the good, because if we can ever really focus our minds while peering through all the turmoil,

As if "viewing flowers through mist"...we can dig up even deeper information.

The problem is, where can we go to let ourselves focus our minds?

If our single corner is too small, the context for understanding life will be insufficiently complex.


I wonder if we can dig out some kind of insight from the substrate of life?

Cascading cycles pour into interlock; fragile combinations are tenacious in their nooks; homeostatic states whirl in a fluid succession.

Relational space is a ferment of currents; everything is a precursor to something else; bonding agents leaven the staff of life; Time-the-Ruminant will have plenty to chew on.

Inward-blooming flowers make the mesh ever deeper; momentary states only serve to fertilize the process;

The outer bloom is just an epiphyte, only possible because of inner congelation.

Qian the Creative can only arise from Kun the Receptive;

Growth is a symphony written out of sight, a creation of micro-ecology!

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