(Now out in Berfrois: The Book. Buy it and read it!)
I know it is impossible, but I remember everything. We were just acids, really, intermingled with the rocks, and no one would have said then that the planet's destiny belonged to us. What I remember most vividly is the great cleavage, in the earliest time, when the moon was torn away from us. I feel I lost a part of myself. I feel I lost so many loved ones. I wonder how they fare out there now. Sometimes I detect their presence in the beams of the moon at night. I know strictly speaking I cannot remember any of this. I was not there. But there is a memory that runs through all of us unbidden, and that can be brought to the surface with a little effort. In this effort, we stop being I and thou, which seems implausible, but I have always felt that coming to see oneself as an I in the first place was the far more remarkable way of apprehending the world, while conjuring our shared memory with all the other I's is by far the less remarkable.
I am strictly speaking a heterotroph-- I can only extract nourishment from other living beings, or from parts of them. I nonetheless experience my life as continuous with the being of the rockscape on which I emerged, and I have long suspected that the most elementary form of life, the life that long precedes the formation of the planet I call home, is the one that is sustained by minerals alone. In any case I make no firm distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and this, I think, is how I can remember the earliest times, the breaking off of the moon and even the first whirlings of our protoplanetary disc. Or so it seems to me anyhow. I would attempt to tell you how much time has gone by since all this started, but the difficulty in this is that, you see, I cannot see, and have very few opportunities for getting what you might call my bearings. My only sensation is chemical, and I have nothing to mark the passage of time except singular events, new developments in the field of my feeding that signal a new era has begun, yet with no indication of how long the previous one had gone on-- a new overabundance of hydrous minerals, a sudden famine of nickel.
I don't know where I get my words from; I live in a silent world. I suppose I get them from the things themselves, and my speech is really more a matter of translation. The sour metallic deposits announce themselves as 'iron', the body that pulls from far away, where my loved ones went, calls itself 'moon'. And so this shared being I have with all the others is also what has given me a share of speech. I don’t know how it works. I am really so, so simple. Just a membrane around some modest organelles, and near the center some bundled mitochondrion that I like to call 'the family jewels'. And all I do is sit on the surface of a rock, together with a colony of uncountably many others of my sort, and together we make the rock slick. If a passing giant were to slip on us, he woud only blame the slickness of the rock, and not the beings that make it so, as if we were only a property of the surface we inhabit, rather than substances in our own right. But I don't complain. Passing unnoticed can be advantageous in this cruel world.
Anyways that's a bit about me. I try to keep a low profile, but sometimes it's hard. What I wanted to talk about now is this new problem that has crept up on us, and that many of my kind are still loathe to acknowledge. You probably already know what I mean. I mean oxygen-- the single greatest threat to our existence since we first emerged from the primordial swamp. We were long uncertain of this ugly new pollutant's cause, but by now there can be no doubt. It is the cyanobacteria that are producing it. They claim it is only a by-product of their ordinary metabolic functioning, and that they can do no differently. Some of our kind are no longer so certain however, and have come to see it rather as a weapon of mass destruction, which the enemies have unleashed into the world with the specific purpose of a total takeover, pushing us older and, if I may say, more noble organisms down into the deep cracks of the earth. They have begun to call us 'anaerobes', as if this distinction would have made any sense for the first few billion years of our history. Now please do not get me wrong. This is how some others have begun to talk, a radicalized and intemperate minority, but the cyanobacteria are no enemies of mine. Nonetheless, if it is in fact their plan to clear the world of anaerobes and to give it over to a new breed of creatures, who thrive on oxygen rather than being poisoned by it, then, I assure you, I am prepared to fight.
Who am I kidding? When I say I am prepared to fight, this of course presupposes a number of capacities that I quite manifestly lack. I suppose I ony mean I am frightened, and I wish to share this with you guys. You know, to let off some lactic acid.
I'm no fighter. I'm really more of a reconciler. I don't really have any other choice. So what I thought I'd do is introduce you to a real, live cyanobacterium, and see if we can't enter into some sort of agreement with his kind, a sort of demarcation of our respective territories. You will see that, while his mass is likely no greater than my own, he is long and greenish. His colour is a sign that there is photosynthesis going on within him. This is the heart of the problem. Now, it's a messy process, and it's never pleasant to talk about our waste excretions. I would not venture upon such a subject if it were not a matter of such great importance. You see, for the cyanobacteria, oxygen is basically their shit. That's what I mean. They're total autotrophs. They eat light, and they shit out oxygen. That's all they do. That's what makes them green. I don't quite understand the details, but that's how it is.
Really, I don't mean to be crude, but this is a matter of great urgency. You see, there are other creatures entering on the scene too, for whom nothing is more delicious than the waste products of our green fellow beings, and so the two new sorts of creature, the bacteria that synthesize light and give off oxygen, and the so called 'aerobic' organisms that cannot get enough of this oxygen, are caught in a loop with one another. No, it is not quite like that: they are swept up in a dirty dance with one another, and in the ecstatic twirling, which neither has any inclination or incentive to stop, they are generating ever more members of each of their respective kinds. I estimate there are by now at least one octillion cyanobacteria floating around, and there are ever more aerobes coming onto the scene to eat their waste. Who does this bestial orgy leave out? That is right: creatures like us.
So what I would like to ask this cyanobacterium who I believe has agreed to join me, though may in fact just be lying alongside me as a result of some small quiver of the necessary order of things --after all, even if photosynthesis is on the up and up, that does not mean that each individual photosynthesizer gets to feel as though it is being smiled upon by the gods-- what I would like to ask this cyanobacterium, I say, is whether members of his kind might consider just taking it easy a bit, you know, not necessarily ceasing to photosynthesize altogether, but at least showing some consideration for those of us who have always been here. Well, not always. As I say we were not here when the moon broke off from the earth. And yet I feel as though I was there, whereas I suspect no cyanobacterium has ever dwelt much at all on things that reach so far back into the dark abyss of time. Do you, cyanobacterium, feel as though you were there when the moon broke off from the earth?
... No response. Figures. He probably doesn't even know he exists. I don't know how I know I exist, but I do. Damn. I had been hoping to make some real headway in this interview, and here I am next to a microscopic stringlet of green slime. It is not as though my fellow anaerobes exhibit much more in the way of natural aptitude or concern for their own plight. They do not exhibit any sort of behaviour at all, truth be told. As I have said, we could all easily be mistaken, ourselves, for the smooth coating of a rock. Hardly the sort of group that might hope to form what is called a community. If we could only move more effectively, as by the motion of flagella, perhaps we would thereby discover the small portion of will with which each of us has been endowed by our creator, or at least this is what I believe. Moving about by force of will in this way, we might join together in a great body that acts as one. So transformed, we might then find a way to manage this impending cataclysm. But instead we just sit and suck at our rocks, as the atmosphere around us corrodes our membranes ever more unrelentingly. Soon this will no longer be our world. The inheritors of the world are as stupid as we are, as unable to exercise their will as we are, as this cyanobacterium next to me quite plainly demonstrates. But they shall inherit the world nonetheless.
There is no justice in this, nor even any attempt at an argument for justice. Perhaps, I venture, this is just the way things happen. There are periodically such cataclysms, like this Great Oxygenation Event currently unfolding as my fellow anaerobes sit about and do nothing. These events change everything, and it is only natural for those of the ancien régime to feel shut out. Perhaps someday the photosynthesizers will grow into great and wonderful creatures, in all different colours and shapes, and the beings that live on their oxygen waste will become great too, though this is currently hard to imagine, and they will build up strange colonies for themselves out of transformed minerals, and then decorate them with prettily assembled clusters of photosynthesizers. And then they too in turn will be swept away, perhaps as their own waste products become too much for them, and they get squeezed out, say, by all the nitrogen they have generated, or some crazy thing like that that we can't even imagine today.
Except that I can imagine it. I don't know how, but it is as if I contain it all within me... just as I contain the moon too, and everything that has ever happened or will happen. Anyways, thank you for coming, cyanobacterium. The world is yours now. Relish it, as we anaerobes say, or at least as I say. Relish it like the ferrous core of a distant star.
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(Did you enjoy this? Then go buy Berfrois: The Book!)
