"Heaven and Earth in Jest"
(excerpt)
Annie Dillard (1)
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A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water, and mainly to scare frogs. Frogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible positions on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy “Yike!” and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and incredibly, it amuses me still. As I walked along the grassy edge of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn’t jump.
He didn’t jump. I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island’s winterkilled grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on this shoulders ruck and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like a bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.
I had heard about the giant water bug, but never seen one. “Giant water bug” is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown beetle. It east insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. The one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs—all but the victim’s skin—and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice. This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn’t catch my breath.
Of course, many carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can’t flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs. People have seen frogs with wide jaws so full of live dragon flies they couldn’t close them. Ants don’t even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite.
That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. in the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?” It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? “God is subtle,” Einstein said, “but not malicious” Again, Einstein said that “nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.” It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?
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Nothing dies forever
Physical, spiritual, moral? This passage, and the book from which it springs, visits all realms of belief, as Annie Dillard shares her personal effort to see all realms, all things, whole. Whether she succeeds is a matter for your judgment, and you should read her book before you judge. One thing is certain: she will make you notice things you overlooked before. As you can tell from her detailed, loving description of water’s-edge frogs and their hazards, she notices. Much of her best work is about learning to see, a skill prized by writers, artists, and scientists (2).
In the physical realm, Dillard obviously appealed to her biology training, or did a little research, after her encounter with the giant water bug, so she knows that it injects enzymes into its prey and reduces the macroscopic and macromolecular organization of its victim to a mixture of building-block molecules. Proteins from prey become amino acids for building water-bug proteins; starches and membrane carbohydrates become sugars, rich sources of energy; membrane lipids and stored fats become fatty acids, which are also rich energy foods as well as building blocks for water-bug membranes; bone becomes salts that are essential to nerve action. Biochemists call the first stage of breaking down dietary substances, turning big molecules into a rich soup of building blocks, “stage-one catabolism.” Stage two reduces the building blocks to a very small number of small molecules, mostly two-carbon groups called acetyl units, joined to a vitamin-derived substance called coenzyme A, hence acetyl-CoA. Stage three extracts usable energy (ATP and NADH) by oxidizing these simple substances with our energetic friend oxygen, all the way to water and carbon dioxide—as far as oxidation of carbon can be carried.
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Catabolism: nutrients are broken stepwise in enzyme-promoted reactions, and the energy is conserved in the form of ATP and NADH. |
Because there is not much energy available from stage-one breakdown of molecules (hydrolysis of polymers to building blocks), there is no advantage, and considerable risk actually, to bringing all this stuff inside (that is, into the bloodstream, organs, or cells) for digestion. So nutrients are hydrolyzed (broken by water) to release a relatively small number of building blocks. These are then drawn into cells, where further oxidative, instead of hydrolytic, dismantling can occur in a compartment equipped to conserve the abundant energy released. The cell needs fewer transport systems this way, because the myriad complex molecules of the nutrients hydrolyze to only 30 or 40 building blocks. The reduction of perhaps 10,000 different proteins to 20 amino acids, which in turn can be absorbed by an even smaller number of transport proteins, strikingly exemplifies the typical converging nature of degradative pathways. The turning of all those carbons into the simplest fuels like acetyl-CoA is like converting all of petroleum to natural gas, gram for gram the most energetic hydrocarbon, before burning it.
Another advantage of tearing everything down to building blocks outside is that some of those froggy proteins might be toxic, but their released building blocks pose no dangers to our innards. This reduction of all fuels to simple units also points dramatically to our kinship with all of life. If the giant water bug latched onto you or me, the resulting mixture would be hard to distinguish from frog soup. In imagining the myriad forms life builds from this soup, we see an essential simplicity beneath the multitude of living forms on the earth. It is when my mind runs back and forth between such simplicity and such complexity that I feel something akin to Annie Dillard’s “fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.”
In the moral realm, Dillard makes plain the cruel—or so it seems—details of nature’s methods. External digestion by water bugs, snakes downing prey whole, tiny ants nibbling chicks to death. Later in the book, she mentions the preying mantis’s grotesque—to us humans—mating ceremony. From somewhere in the male’s body come hormones that get him raring to go at the reproductive act, but from his brain comes a hormone that seems to say, “Careful fella, this might not be such a good idea.” Sound familiar? The female has a simple solution: she nips off his head—no waste, she eats it—to tip the hormonal balance and turn him into an uninhibited lover. Again, sound familiar? Seeing strings of children behind dull-eyed mothers and fathers at a county fair yesterday, I sensed an eerie parallel.
Is it cruel the way that life lives on other life? Even vegetarians do it, not even bothering to put lettuce humanely out of its misery before they unceremoniously take those living, photosynthesizing leaves from under the life-giving kitchen light, and shove them into a corrosively acidic stomach. But all of those qualifications (“to us humans”) in the previous paragraph suggest that we are somehow different. Even if eating each other’s heads would assure some highly desirable goal, we would still convict in a minute for it. We are different, somehow. As least we hope so.
Finally, Dillard suddenly leaps unexpectedly to the spiritual realm.
But at the same time we are also created.
For all our knowledge of it, the force—call it life or nature or God or what you will—the extravagant force that puts something here rather than nothing, and that pours intricate living forms over the face of the earth, remains purest mystery. But more precisely, Dillard seems to find it hard to reconcile the grim bug-eat-frog details of life with the grandeur of the whole affair. She is keen on the details, even down to the biochemistry, but she is also trying to back away and see it whole, and trying to see if it makes sense to think of it as intentionally created. If created it were, was every little lovely or cruel detail planned exactly? Or did something just establish a few simple rules or principles and then set it running, then slip away to think about something else?
Great minds like Albert Einstein faced, talked about, and wrote about this question, and seemed to hope deeply that it all would make some kind of sense. Einstein was particularly troubled by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which implied that certain basic properties of atomic and smaller particles are essentially unpredictable. More famous than Einstein’s statement about God not being malicious is his expression of resistance to the notion of essential indeterminism in the quantum world of the atom, when he asserted that God does not play dice. (Niels Bohr is reported, perhaps not reliably, to have told Einstein to stop telling God what to do.) Indeterminism at the level of the atoms from which all is built makes it hard to argue that a world like ours could possibly unfold, unguided, according to anyone’s plan. So is there any plan? is anything predetermined? Do we make things slippery when we observe, as in quantum mechanics, or are they really slippery whether we look or not?
Even in the relatively prosaic—compared to the quantum world—realm of digestion and metabolism, beginning students feel overwhelmed by how much we know. Whether comforting or unsettling, it gradually becomes clearer how little of the whole endeavor we understand, how halting and partial our attempts to increase our knowledge. Even if there are, as Dillard puts it, "bars and doors" set against our knowing it all, it appears that we are nowhere near reaching them. The good news for the life-long learner is that the potential joy of learning still seems boundless. Perhaps the most difficult (and subtle) bar on our knowledge is the sheer complexity of life. If so, the limits of our knowledge are not solid barriers at all. Instead they are resilient but persistently entangling webs of ambiguity, indecision, and confusion in the face of nature's profusion.
As an example of the complexity of seemingly simple aspects of biochemistry, imagine trying to design a set of digestive enzymes for the water bug. Simple: you just want stage-one metabolism on everything in sight, right? No, it’s much more subtle than that. You want to digest, as Dillard says, “all but the victim’s skin.” Why waste the skin? Well, imagine how much of the meal would be lost in the waters of the creek if the enzymes even so much as perforated the skin. At first glance, the water bug's approach seems blunt and heavy handed. But those enzymes, bulls in the china shop of froggy proteins and carbohydrates, handle the skin’s lipids, proteins, and carbohydrates with kid gloves. Using the impressive specificity of enzyme action, the water bug wastes the skin to save the rest of the meal.
Of course, in the end, the skin is not wasted. It too will find its way into other life. It may dart away backwards in a crayfish or rise to the surface in the petals of a pond lily. Or if a hungry nymph munches the skin, what was once earthbound frog may fly far away in the delicate wing of a dragonfly.
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(1) from "Heaven and Earth in Jest", in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1974, pp. 5-7.
(2) My all-time favorite passage of Dillard’s is a short chapter in An American Childhood (pp. 50-51 of the Harper and Row 1987 edition). She recalls the importance, thoughtful discussions, and careful planning of jokes—a serious subject to her parents. But when you read it, watch out. She might just pull your leg.
