from THE KENYON REVIEW
i. Eldrit
ii. Kessel
iii. Principles of Observation
iv. Halifite
v. Kirklin
vi. Role of Creativity in Science
vii. Emoth
viii. Lasar
ix. Fear of Error
x. Paglum
xi. Adornus
xii. Perigite
THE ELDRIT
When observed, the eldrit changes. Once its characteristics and tendencies are documented, it adopts new characteristics, new tendencies. A researcher observes through a microscope that the eldrit propels itself by means of long, translucent flagella. The researcher writes:
Flagella, translucent, means of locomotion
But as soon as he returns his attention to the eldrit, he finds that it now propels itself by means of a slight undulation of its belly. The flagella, now bright orange, are being used to expel waste. The researcher makes a note of this and then finds that the eldrit in question is suddenly stationary. Its flagella have disappeared altogether.
It will most likely be surprising to you that the scientific community has no idea how the eldrit is able to accomplish such dramatic mutations. However, keep in mind that the mechanics of an ant walking along the vein of a leaf is enough to make all'the technological advancements of the last three centuries look like the output of an eighth grade woodshop: wobbling tables, misspelled signs, precarious rocking horses unevenly stained. Human achievement and understanding are constantly being dwarfed by the complexity of the natural world.
So how do scientists address this question of the eldrit’s ability to alter itself? We step around it, nodding politely as we pass. As a scientist, it is often the only acceptable method to ignore an impossible question, which, if history selves, will most likely be answered on accident by someone setting out to answer something else.
Rather, most research regarding the eldrit is concerned not with how it changes itself, but why. Because if one accepts the assertion that the first priority of all living organisms is self-preservation, then one must conclude that the eldrit’s very existence serves as an argument that there is something caustic in being identified, in having the boundaries of one’s physical and behavioral make-up established.
In fact, this seems almost intuitive. Once characteristics of a creature are fixed, it is given a role to fill as a result of those characteristics. Through the act of being itself, a creature becomes either the one forced to attach itself as a parasite to a lower intestine, where it will depend on that organ for the most foul sustenance imaginable, or else it becomes the one whose lower intestine is thus infested. Certainly, neither position could be said to inspire envy. But because each creature allows itself to be itself, both positions are unavoidable.
The evolutionary adaptations that creatures undergo in order to alleviate their circumstances are—at best—only half-solutions and—at worst—further provocations of hardship. The haunch muscles that aid the antelope in its flight from predators are also an excellent source of protein. The bear’s massive strength also betrays its equally massive capacity to starve to death.
But while other creatures change themselves in response to the en
vironmental pressures that affect their various roles, the eldrit seems to change in order to shun the notion that it has a role to fill in the first place. Furthermore, the eldrit does not depend on a Punnett square in order to cany out these changes. Instead, it changes instantly. So in the exact moment that one creature is just beginning to realize, after hundreds of thousands of years of genetic alterations, that an elongated snout is not nearly as useful as perhaps its ancestors had supposed—the eldrit is growing two dozen snouts per minute, stretching them out farther and farther. Just as quickly, the eldrit allows its snouts to fall off and desiccate.
Though, before we regard the eldrit s position as being totally advantageous, it should also be mentioned that, on account of its compulsive tendency to change, the eldrit misses out on one of the most pleasing aspects of being a creature, which is, simply put, being a creature.
Among all living things, there is a certain joy in being recognizable as oneself. Even those of us whose bodies are a constant source of apprehension and awkwardness take comfort in seeing our faces in the minor at the end of the day. As young scientists, you are all no doubt veiy unattractive. Yet, there is something reassuring in knowing that you have taken a shape, however unfortunate. It is something that is utterly yours, and no matter how miserable you might look while standing in your underwear or how ill at ease you might be in a bathing suit, when you are being honest with yourself, you enjoy your shape; you take solace in it. Think: when people feel dejected and forlorn, they often hold their own heads in their hands. Why do they do this, if not to take consolation in the fact that they have a definite form, that they are in the possession of something entirely their own.
This notion that all creatures possess inalienable qualities, which represent an incorruptible sense of self, exists on an evolutionary scale as well. Just look at the transformation of dinosaurs into birds. The dinosaur might not mind diminishing in size or growing wings, but to stop laying eggs? To begin shaping its skeleton differently or its heart? To give up the beautifully vacant eyes of a reptile? The savage waggle of its neck? Unthinkable. That is why researchers are now attempting to determine if, in all the eldrit’s responses to the observations directed at it, there are any qualities that refuse to change and are quintessentially itself.
A common approach is to have a live video feed of an eldrit s magnified image broadcast onto a large monitor where it is then viewed by a
room filled with observers, all of whom stare intently at the image and direct as many observations at it as possible. The manic and prolonged ripple of changes that this exercise produces in the eldrit is recorded for posterity and then viewed repeatedly by researchers attempting to establish some sort of constant in the eldrit. The hope is that if a great enough number of observations is directed at a single eldrit for a long enough period of time, the creature will eventually become overwhelmed and begin to falter, inadvertently revealing its secret consistencies.
No such breakthrough has occurred.
As the number of observations directed at an eldrit increase, so does the eldrit s ambiguity. On a monitor in an observation room, an eldrit takes on a series of indescribable shapes, splits itself in two, reabsorbs itself, becomes bright pink. It trembles slightly, and then explodes. It reassembles itself. Explodes. Reassembles itself. Explodes.
One must admit that even the meekest creature ends up seeming bold in comparison. Consider the gazelle. There is an unmistakable bravery in its implicit admission that, through being a gazelle, it is a gazelle. And even though one can hardly look at its long, delicate neck without immediately thinking of the powerful jaws that will inevitably snap it in two, the gazelle does not shirk its post. It manages to take responsibility for what it is, while the eldrit can only change unconditionally, a slave to its wild, untouchable freedom.
THE KESSEL
The lifespan of an average kessel is four one-hundred-millionths of a second. To put this figure into perspective: If you were to fire a .30 caliber rifle at an opposing target fifty feet away, 462,963 generations of kessel would pass by the time the bullet reached the target. If you were to hold a handkerchief six inches from your nose and sneeze into it, 8,522,727 generations of kessel would pass in the time it took for the mucus to reach the handkerchief. But numbers do little to convey the extreme brevity of a kessel’s life. Rather, imagine a newborn infant flashing from its mother’s womb like a lightning bolt and arriving in the doctor’s arms as a full-grown skeleton already crumbling to dust.
Naturally, observing the kessel is rather difficult. Its death follows its birth so closely that it is impossible to distinguish one process from the other. In fact, the three major acts of a living creature (birth, procre
ation, and death) are so compressed in time that the kessel seems to accomplish all three by means of a single exertion.
Even the experienced observer, aided by recent technological developments in high-speed photography, will find it impossible to differentiate the characteristics of a dying kessel from one that’s just been bom or a sexually mature kessel from one not yet fully developed, because it is all these things at once. In the kessel, each stage of life informs the other simultaneously.
Though strange, this quality of simultaneity should not be considered altogether remote from human experience. Who has not occasionally seen death as a weaiy nod toward birth and vice versa? Who has not occasionally recognized the link between sex and death? Young lovers, as they embrace, are often already able to sense the coming of a private apocalypse in the thumping of their lovers’ hearts. Ailing men and women, as they lie on their deathbeds, are often said to feel as if they are being slowly undressed, as if they are expecting a release, which, as it first approaches, is at once frightening, painful, and secretly exhilarating.
Throughout the ages, human beings have viewed the transition from birth to sexual maturity to death as a necessary progression. The notion that these things are distinct from one another, that they form a grand narrative, is a social construction that many people have internalized as an indisputable fact. So it is understandable that the existence of the kessel happens to make many people uncomfortable. What kind of parents would want to be told that their newborn child is an aspect of death? Or, worse, that their child has sexual implications beyond the gentle copulation that produced it.
The manner in which the kessel’s existence informs our own can be incredibly disheartening. Its cells begin to form and break down at the same time, and so, when successfully recorded and played back on video streams slowed to infinitesimal proportions, these cells produce a tesseractic movement, folding down into themselves continuously without altering their shape. This motion would be hypnotic if it weren’t so brief. Even with the video slowed, the cells disappear in an instant. This sight is, in a word, depressing. It is so abrupt and senseless that it makes the sight of a suicide jumping off a bridge festive in comparison. The amount of time it takes for the suicide to hit the water ends up seeming generous, more than any one person could deserve. It makes us—who are fond of saying to one another under
various circumstances that life is, in fact, too short—seem like the worst sort of gluttons.
On the other hand, the smallness and brevity of a kessels existence begins to remind one of how small and brief our existence is on a universal scale. Stars die. Galaxies collide. And everything in the universe that is human, the sum of all our ambitions, histories, fears, achievements, and failures exists on the head of a needle.
In consideration of the kessel, human nature seems to be open to two conflicting criticisms. The first is that we see our average lifespan as being insufficient, despite the fact that the time afforded to a stillborn seems decadent when compared to the life of a kessel, and despite the fact that we still find time enough to be bored and to wish for time to move faster. While the second criticism is that we see our average lifespan as sufficient and that the actions contained therein are significant. We flatter ourselves with the assumption that anything of importance can be accomplished in our seventy to eighty years when the earth has been around for billions of years and has been known to change dominant species as if they were hats. Our pity for the kessel is revealed as naive in that, if you judge a kessels existence by the amount of time that elapses in the human world and judge a human s existence by the amount of time that elapses in the universe, then we disappear from our surroundings even faster than the kessel disappears from its own.
This is particularly disconcerting because, though at odds, both arguments seem valid. And so, along with the already grim content of these criticisms, comes the hurtful reminder that human beings are riddled with absurdities and contradictions even with respect to something as simple as our faults.
The whole issue of the kessel as it relates to our existence is ultimately filled with so much unmitigated glumness that many consider it to be an inappropriate topic for polite conversation. Details regarding the kessel are among the type of cold-hearted facts that are inevitably mentioned at parties by angry young men, who wish to impress upon anyone who seems to be having more fun than themselves that the world is, in fact, little more than a brutal joke. Most researchers who specialize in the kessel end up adopting this air of arrogance and scorn. They are typically unkempt, wild-looking. Their faces are ravaged by distrust, and they are always ready with a discouraging remark.
It makes sense that researchers who watch that sad footage again and again—the kessel fluttering briefly and then vanishing—would eventu
ally give in to despair. Further, it makes sense that those who are confronted on a daily basis by those criticisms of our nature mentioned above would eventually begin to despise our nature. But based on their studies of the kessel, these people are ready to conclude that everything we hold dear is futile and amounts to nothing. However, the fact remains that such a view of the kessel and of human nature is incomplete.
For example, the kessel mates for life. At first, this might seem unimpressive, owing to the fact that life for a kessel is a brisk four onehundred-millionths of a second. But because it is sexually mature even before it is bom, the average kessel spends a greater percentage of its lifetime with its mate than any other creature on earth, a relationship which is strictly monogamous and, again more than any other creature on earth, most resembles our understanding of romantic love.
Granted, some researchers argue that it maintains one mate because it simply does not have the time to take on another. Dr. Bichard Koch— unkempt and wild-looking, Koch is a preeminent figure among the kessel specialists mentioned briefly above—is a strong proponent of this theoiy. In a recent study, Koch examined the mating practices of the kessel, focusing on the kessel’s speed and urgency in an attempt to establish its promiscuity.
But Koch s own study contains evidence to the contrary. Buried in indexes and supplemental figures are instances of kessel who chose somewhat older mates, outlived them, and then spent the rest of their short lives in mourning. In fact, this is rather common. A kessel that is two one-hundred-billionths of a second old might select a mate that is one one-hundred-millionths of a second old. When the latter dies, the former does not seek a replacement but spends the rest of its life in solitude. There are also instances of kessel, which, seeking an ideal mate, have waited in absolute celibacy a staggering three one-hundredmillionths of a second.
These instances of self-imposed isolation are remarkable, especially when one considers the fact that the kessel tends to crave desperately the company of its own kind. Experiments have been conducted in which a single specimen has been separated from a larger group by a tenth of a millimeter. These experiments show that the lone kessel will spend its entire life moving back toward its fellows despite the fact that a tenth of a millimeter—for a creature, which, in addition to being so small and short-lived, is not particularly fast—is like the distance between two stars. In some primal fashion, the kessel must understand that that is an impossible distance. And yet, it persists.
So, yes, it’s true: the universe is massive, whereas we are small and quickly fading. But things are never as hopeless as people like Koch would have you believe. There are still opportunities for happiness for those willing to accept existence for what it is. Even a creature like the kessel seems to understand the transformative capabilities of something as simple as affection. It fixates on companionship in what seems like deliberate ignorance of the fact that it is surrounded by larger and larger worlds. When it finally finds its matq, the kessel exhausts its life in that purest intimacy, without a care, as its one moment goes rushing past.
THE PRINCIPLES OF OBSERVATION
In the same way that it is difficult to think of a distant planet as being an actual place—as real as the ground beneath your feet—it is often difficult to think of most animalcula as being actual creatures. Like a planet viewed through a telescope, one tends to recognize an animalculum viewed through a microscope not as a thing, but as an image of a thing. Though both instruments manipulate reality in only the most rudimentary fashion, bringing objects closer or making them larger, we still understand that what we are seeing is a deception. Our minds take in what is seen by means of those instruments with the same reflexive disbelief with which we have learned to greet the computer-generated monsters in the summer blockbuster, the map of Texas behind the meteorologist, the digitally altered photograph in a magazine of JFK drinking a Pepsi.
At this point in history, a healthy sense of skepticism with respect to images is increasingly necessary. Otherwise, every single soap commercial would break our hearts. Every advertisement featuring a beautiful woman lying on a white-sanded beach in the ecstasy of whatever product would corrupt us not only with a desire for that product but also with the belief that our life is pale and undesirable, something that needs desperately to be fixed. And so we lean on our skepticism as if for balance. We roll our eyes at that woman on the beach. We hold at arm’s length all the deliberately phony images of the every day, the pervasiveness of which so harasses us that we are no longer able to differentiate false images from true ones.
Likewise, when students first observe the characteristics of an animalculum through a microscope, it is as if they are only taking note of
the ridiculous assurances in yet another commercial or parsing a news broadcast for its biases and inconsistencies. Even those few students who do feel a connection with their subject [SEE DAWSON] will readily admit to the limitations and frustrations that are involved in dedicating oneself to what is, for all practical purposes, little more than a moving picture.
However, before you allow this skepticism to taint your research, keep in mind that your own vision manipulates reality more than any microscope ever could. Far less distortion takes place between the objective lens and eye piece of a microscope than takes place in your own mind when you stare at your feet in the bath. This is by no means an exaggeration: your mind interprets the retinal input of your feet soaking in the tub by means of a complex system of inference, using its accumulated knowledge of how far away from your eyes your feet tend to be, of where the source of light in your bathroom tends to come from, of how light tends to move through soapy water. In short, your mind cross-checks all the combinations that could create this retinal input against the input’s given context, so that what you experience as the image of your own feet has less to do with the reality of your feet at that moment than it does with your brain’s efforts to provide you with an image that makes sense.
So if the era in which you live has made you skeptical with respect to manipulated images, then you must accept that this skepticism applies to the visual world as a whole, and that there is no real difference between a computer-animated dinosaur and your own hand held out in front of your face.
After embracing this, you have two options: 1.) You can reject everything and regard the world as a baseless fiction, or 2.) You can take the information that your senses give you, albeit incomplete and interpretive, and attempt to derive from it rules and principles. You can accept the fact that science is an operation of faith, and that in order to participate in it you must first reject the fear that a false image could make you foolish.