LUCA

     Before Adam & Eve, or Tom & Jerry, there was LUCA.  Not the Pixar cartoon but the originator of life, the survivor or toxic seas and atmospheres, the creation which would soon lead to entirely new species, ones destined to face hostile worlds of both fire and ice.  LUCA would be the last (or first) ancestor of life, as in life 6,000,000,000 years ahead of our meager 200,000 years of human beginnings.  LUCA was the Last Universal Common Ancestor...or so begins the new series Life on Our Planet, which is the only "life" we know so far.  Way back when, volcanoes erupted for millions of years (yes, millions) and Earth was far from being a blue planet but rather a yellow one, its atmosphere tinged with methane.  As gases and heat and ice became dominant features, life faded away and had to rebuild.  This would happen five times, five mass extinctions where most of life --plant, ocean, animal-- would disappear, unable to cope.  But as the show points out, had any of this NOT happened, we humans would not be here.  In fact, little of the world we know now would be here...not elephants, not whales, not us.  The animal and plant and sea life we have today represents just 1% of what remained after each earthly change.  Which means...99% of earlier life has vanished.

     The dinosaurs themselves ruled for nearly 150,000,000 years...or put another way, 75 times longer than our species has been in existence.  So where did it all begin?   Here's one fascinating depiction that Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong put in his book: For roughly the first 2.5 billion years of life on Earth, bacteria and archaea charted largely separate evolutionary courses.  Then, on one fateful occasion, a bacterium somehow merged with an archaeon, losing its free-living existence and becoming entrapped forever within its new host.  That is how many scientists believe eukaryotes came to be.  It's our creation story: two great domains of life merging to create a third, in the greatest symbiosis of all time.  The archaeon provided the chassis of the eukaryotic cell while the bacterium eventually transformed into mitochondria.  All eukaryotes descend from that fateful union.  It's why our genomes contain many genes that still have an archaeal character and others that more resemble those of bacteria.  It also is why all of us contain mitochondria in our cells.  These domesticated bacteria changed everything.  By providing an extra source of energy, they allowed eukaryote cells to get bigger, to accumulate more genes, and to becomes more complex.  This explains what biochemist Nick Lane calls "the black hole at the heart of biology."  There's a huge void between the simpler cells of bacteria and archaea and the more complex ones of eukaryotes, and life has managed to cross that void exactly once in four billion years...That's because, as Lane and others argue, the merger that created it --the one between an archaeon and a bacterium-- was so breathtakingly improbable that it has never been duplicated, or at least never with success.  By forging a union, those two microbes defied the odds and enabled the existence of all plants, animals, and anything visible to the naked eye...The bottom line, life on our planet has survived and adapted countless times...but dominant species, not so much.

  

     So let's jump to the planets, specifically those depicted by composer Gustav Holst, a composer who challenged orchestras that often didn't stock the many instruments needed for his compositions (what other composer writes a piece that requires 6 timpani drums?).  The "language" of music, as with the language of math or emotions or schizophrenia, is a difficult one to penetrate.  How does one know what a composer is thinking or wanting to emote, and in the end, did that meaning come across (many filmmakers try to do the same).  But for the first time, I read some of the liner notes that tried to "explain" Holst's famous work, The Planets.*  Here's what those notes said about his work on one section, Mars, "the bringer of war": Three musical takes are used to create this martial piece: (1) a brutally rhythmic figure of five beats relentlessly hammered out; (2) a principal theme in triads moving by chromatic steps with no true harmonic purpose; (3) a second theme consisting of a tattoo in the tenor tuba answered by a flourish of trumpets.  There is no glory, no heroism, no tragedy in this music.  It is entirely inhuman.  Not even death is in it, for Mars is as insensitive to death as to life.  War is a senseless, mechanized horror is Holtz's real subject here.  And then there was this on his following movement, that of Venus, "the bringer of peace": She is announced by four ascending notes in the solo horn and a sequence of converging chords in the flutes and oboes.  Most of her music lies, symbolically, in the middle and upper registers of the instruments; and harps, Celeste, and glockenspiel further characterize her heavenly nature.  In addition there are beautiful melodies for her in the solo violin and oboe.  Though this is music of surpassing serenity it is not simple in harmony, texture or orchestral sonority.  One cannot help but observe how fitting it is that the state of peace be described in complex terms, in contrast to the simplicity of the depiction of war.

     Even with a tiny bit of musical understanding, reading such interpretations can be both confusing and enlightening.  But at least what that critic wrote about the intentions of Holst opened a door into letting the rest of us hear Holst's music in a different way, just as when Kenny Loggins wrote: There've been times in my life; I've been wonderin' why.  Still, somehow I believed we'd always survive.  Now, I'm not so sure...Are you gonna wait for a sign, your miracle?  Stand up and fight.  Read those words one way and it becomes a popular song (Loggins won a Grammy for it); but discover that the song was aimed at his dad who was hospitalized and about to give up on life, and it becomes an entirely new version.  As he told American Songwriter: ...one review said it was your average boy-girl song and the writer didn't understand why people were making such a big deal out of it.  The fact of the matter was, he didn't understand the song and it didn't move him because he wasn't in a situation to be moved.  But immediately after that, I got a letter from a girl who had just recently gotten out of the hospital from a life-and-death situation and that was her anthem.  She was holding onto it.  That means so much more to me.  She hadn't read the press about my father or anything.  All she knew was that the song was on the nose for her, exactly what Michael [co-writer, Michael McDonald] and I intended.  How we see or interpret anything, not just music, may be based only on what we see on the surface, especially in times of war and peace, as when Yitzhak Rabin** yelled out, "enough" and signed the Oslo Accords.

     In a similar vein, I recently gave away a book on understanding art, The Annotated Mona Lisa by Carol Strickland (it begins with having you notice the differing landscapes on each side of the Mona Lisa, and that all of the lines zero in to the center of her face...what??).  The book nicely summed up everything from Renaissance painters to the architecture of early Greece and Rome; but despite peeking at it over the years, I realized that somehow I wasn't retaining much or any of it: the distinction between eras, the old vs. new techniques, the change in posed positions, and more.  As the old saying goes, art is like wine: you like what you like and that's it.   Such has been the attitude of Magareta Magnusson, now 89 and one who wrote about her love of chocolate.  The lively author relates everything to a chapter she refers to as vad i helvete or loosely translated, "what the hell."  She wrote that while reports come and go about what is or isn't good for you (be it food or what you read), something will eventually "get her" in the end, and that at her age she would rather it be something she enjoyed...vad i helvete.  In her books, her better known best-seller being The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, she gives practical advice about the task of doing your own decluttering while alive, this apparently being a regular practice in Sweden: Sometimes you realize that you can hardly close your drawers or barely shut your closet door.  When that happens, it is definitely time to do something, even if you are only in your thirties.  You could call that kind of cleaning döstädning too, even if you may be many, many years away from dying...Some people can't wrap their heads around death.  And these people leave a mess after them.  Did they think they were immortal?  That would be me, still clearing out things and yet finding it a bit like being lost in a dense forest.  Maybe this was made more plain with the notes about Holst's movement on SATURN, the bringer of old age: Unlike the previous movements, which are static in the sense that each depicts various aspects of a single trait, this one moves through a series of 'events' that bring the music to conclusions not envisioned at the beginning.  There is a profound hollowness and sense of defeat in the harmony of the opening chords, and an even deeper despair in the motif sounded beneath them by the double basses.  But the elderly voice of wisdom is soon heard in the B-minor theme for the trombones, and at the end the mood is one of acceptance, reconciliation and consequent serenity.  Vad i helvete?

     I had also been reading, or noticing, many more articles on becoming homeless.  One such piece was in the New Yorker on how difficult it was to get off of the street once you find yourself in that position.  The homeless man my wife helped voiced that same thought, saying that being in a shelter was often worse than being outdoors, even if the weather was biting cold; things were stolen from you in shelters, and often you were spit on or accosted while asleep.  Imagine the memories that must stay with you once you enter that life.  Take this story by Daniel Donaghy in The Sun: It’s like you’re engulfed in flames until you become not on fire but fire itself, burning deep in your gut, breathed into life by something akin to wind.  A chair flies through your window and someone’s screaming for you to come out and you’re fourteen and he’s twenty and there’s nowhere to go and no cops coming and no one to make this any better, and you become a flame that can’t be extinguished...I wasn’t built for fighting, either, inside or out...Each time, on my way out the door, I wanted someone (especially my dad, who was long gone) to put a hand on my shoulder and tell me it was all right, to come back inside, I didn’t have to do this, that whole “man of the house” thing was garbage and certainly nothing a kid who couldn’t yet shave should have to take on.  But that hand never came...There’s too much for me to be grateful for in my life to let postindustrial Philadelphia have a say in what’s possible.  It’s still there, though.  Memory is going to have its way.  I used to fight it, believing I could block it out.  When it speaks now, though, I listen.  Sometimes the swirling ghosts of friends who died young want to come back to remind me where they fell and crashed and hung and bled and slumped inside the arms of other friends.  I let the ghosts come because I know they will soon be gone again.  Even when the full weight of those hard days returns, there’s something oddly comforting about it for precisely that reason: the memories won’t stay.  So I welcome the pieces of that past life, and I acknowledge their weight.  I can breathe through them now and know that I will remain breathing at the end, which was no sure thing when they were happening.  I let them bring me back to my family’s tiny kitchen, where my dad’s voice rises, and my mom shouts his name, which is also my name, and I run across all these years to pull his hands from her neck.  I let that memory run its course because turning from it feels like abandoning that little kid who didn’t know what would happen next.  Who didn’t know he wouldn’t always feel so sick and scared.  Who didn’t know he’d one day have a wife and two daughters who will never see a hint in their house of what he saw in his.

     The New Yorker piece also brought up the realm of drugs on the street, something that is present in nearly every major city in the world (drug related deaths in Scotland last year were three times higher than any other country in Europe).  Said a short piece in the London Review on the drug scene in Vancouver, Canada: Vancouver is one of the cities worst hit by the opioid crisis – almost seven people die here every day from overdoses.  Across British Columbia –a province of five million people– there were 1629 deaths between January and August this year.  Almost 13,000 have died since the local health authorities declared a state of emergency in April 2016, as the use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, started to spread.  Toxic drugs are the main cause of death in the province for people aged between 10 and 59, according to the BC Coroners Service, ‘accounting for more deaths than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural diseases combined’.  Fentanyl, which is fifty times stronger than heroin, is present in the bodies of 85 per cent of these people.  So here's what jumped out for me in that report..."Toxic drugs are the main cause of death in the province for people aged between 10 and 59."  Age 10?  Somehow, those articles brought to light how so much of this "life" is happening to younger people...violence, drugs, becoming homeless.  Age 10?  Sang Bob Dylan: Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street and now you're gonna have to get used to it.  How does it feel?  To be on your own?  With no direction home.  A complete unknown...You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal.  

      In contrast, there was this piece from Bloomberg: If your refrigerator is now stuffed with Thanksgiving leftovers, think about this:  Roughly 30% of all food produced for human consumption is wasted, a number that climbs as high as 40% in the US.  Almost half of American food waste is generated by households, not restaurants or grocery stores.  A staggering 58% of methane emissions escaping from US landfills come from food waste, scientists say.  But really, what a blessing to have that, isn't it?  To have overflowing closets and refrigerators and yet spend ever more on marketed sale days: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, White Wednesday (okay, I made the last one up, but I do think it may be coming).  Still, I continue to be puzzled that Giving Tuesday, where donations are matched or even increased for charitable causes, comes after everyone has pushed their credit to the limit because of buying yet another gadget or piece of clothing.  Capitalism at its best.  Americans now owe $1.3 trillion on their credit cards, reported CNN.  And yet, I can let my dog out the back, feel the cold, and still know that within a few minutes we'll both be back inside warming up.  Comfortable, but for how much longer?  You've likely read about the lack, yes lack, of fresh water New Orleans faced due to drought (barges were dumping a million gallons of fresh water daily into the Mississippi just to hold back the salt water making it way up due to the low flow of the river caused by the drought -- the ocean water came within 30 miles of the city).  And where I live the great Salt Lake got a brief reprieve with last year's snowfall but little of that snowmelt actually made it back into the lake, wrote PBS (much of that snowmelt water is diverted south for crops such as alfalfa and hay, much of which is shipped overseas to places such as Saudi Arabia...wait, where?).  But now it's the Amazon, drying up so much that many river communities are stranded or choked with smoke from illegal logging (Bloomberg's piece showed how bad the situation has become).  Said an article in The Conversation: The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that all human activity (mainly fossil fuels and deforestation) releases 12 billion tons of carbon per year.  This means that global warming would escape human control if more than 12 billion tons of additional carbon were emitted per year by unintentional changes, such as forests burning, tundra melting, the world’s soils warming and the oceans warming and reducing their absorption of CO2.  The Amazon is at the center of this problem.  Based on estimates in the Brazilian Amazon, the Pan-Amazon region as a whole has approximately 80 billion tons of carbon in vegetation and 90 billion in the first meter of soil, plus roughly 250 billion in soil between one and eight meters deep that would be released more slowly.  Just a fraction of this carbon being released over the space of a few years, say, as forests die from droughts and fires, would be the last straw in pushing the global climate past a tipping point.

     When I was just entering high school, I heard the song Colour My World by Chicago.  And despite its romantic arpeggios and lyrical sound (it was often played at prom dances and weddings), I couldn't escape the image the music brought to me, that of a barely-conscious heart attack victim being wheeled down a hospital corridor, his panicked wife by his side, the overhead ceiling lights flickering past as if on an upside down runway, and the person wondering if his life was now, unexpectedly near its end.  And while the emergency people whisked him away at great speed, I imagined his view of things as happening slowly as if in pace with the music, the heartbeats going up and down, the sweetness of its sound perhaps a preview of his finality.  I again thought of all this when my wife and I listened to the Jupiter section of Holst's The Planets.  Once words were later added by Cecil Rice to the music, it became a patriotic anthem for Britain, even Princess Diana saying that it was one of her favorite songs from school, as it was for my wife.  Diana had it sung at her wedding.  The moving song, I Vow to Thee My Country, was also sung at Diana's funeral.     

     Sometimes it's odd how music and films and pictures and memories can transport you through life, and can often remain with you for life.  But while the chance of another asteroid our planet and wiping out 3/4 of all life (that asteroid was the size of Mt. Everest, traveling at six times the speed of a bullet and hit with the force of a billion atomic bombs, vaporizing everything within a thousand kilometers of its impact), the next cause of extinction may be far smaller, perhaps no larger than a microbe.  Already the parasite cutaneous leishmaniasis is attaching itself to mites and small insects that easily slip through our screens (the bites turn into skin sores that can last for days --or years-- and cases have already appeared in both Texas and Oklahoma).  Add to that another mite, one that reproduces without mating, and has the potential to devastate the cattle industry, wrote Smithsonian.  Or the fungus that continues it march across the world and threatens the popular Cavendish banana world (99% of the bananas we eat are the Cavendish variety).  And then there is dengue, a virus for which there is virtually no defense and which affects some 400 million people each year, wrote WedMD (it too, has now been reported in Texas).

     Perhaps we can't conceptualize the idea of an asteroid wiping out life, just as we likely can't picture that rain fell or volcanoes erupted for a million years; or that at one time moss was the major life form...for 40 million years.  And while certain types of dinosaurs roamed the planet in packs of hundreds or even thousands, what's equally difficult to understand is why we find so few bones of them...or of us, for that matter.  As the review of the Netflix series in The New Yorker  said, "You need to die in a shallow sea and be buried quickly if you want to have a chance of being fossilized..."  The review then added, "By one estimate, a new extinct species is discovered nearly every week."  Basically, life disappears and, as if by magic, reappears in a different form.  As the series pointed out, we may feel that we are the dominant species of today, but there are ten times more flowering plants than ALL other species, and one in five of all mammal species (which includes us) is a...bat.  The difference, said the narration, is that we are the first species to know what is happening...or do we?  Time has a way of dissolving things, from our memories to our bones.  Where are those legions of Romans, and those Inca, and those millions who helped build the pyramids?  And that is just what we know of on land.  Perhaps we're coming to realize that nature may have its own form of "death cleaning."  The microbes and oceans and atmospheres now arriving in changed form may be just a preview of something even larger.  But the lesson seems to be that life --whether we respect and acknowledge and appreciate it or not-- will go on.  With or without us...

*Leonard Berstein (now the subject of the Bradley Cooper movie, Maestro) explained Holst's work in much finer detail, even showing you the variety of instruments needed to play the piece.  This was all part of his series on explaining music to young people, a series which began in 1958 and ended (for Bernstein, at least, in 1972; the NY Philharmonic continues to do the broadcasts).  You can view the program featuring Holst's The Planets on You Tube.

**Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli citizen angry at him for signing the peace accord with Palestine; the assassin was part of a far-right group, similar to the parties Netanyahu now sides with.  In Rabin's last speech, he said: I have always believed that the majority of the people want peace and are ready to take risks for peace.  In coming here today, you demonstrate, together with many others who did not come, that the people truly desire peace and oppose violence.  Violence erodes the basis of Israeli democracy.  It must be condemned and isolated.  This is not the way of the State of Israel...the path of peace is preferable to the path of war.  Once again, Netanyahu once again did not attend the annual tribute Israel celebrates to honor the passing of Rabin.  To date, 15,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 225 in the West Bank where 200 incidents of fighting among settlers have occurred since the attack on Gaza, wrote a piece in The Conversation.