Intermission: Barrie's story.
In which chronology goes out the window and I talk about Oxford and its traps.
Something a little different this week, though I am still following my plan.
I said last week that my planned book, as I’ve imagined it, is about a struggle between ‘right brain’ and ‘left brain’. I’m not sure those are the right terms but they seem somehow the most neutral of the available ways of describing this duality. At the end of Part 1, left brain wins after I’m told that ‘the spirits have been pushed back to the stream sources by the power of the Revolution.’ By this week, I had planned to have already revisited that moment and re-written what I’ve done. I haven’t managed to get quite that far; instead I’ll refer you - if anyone’s actually following the story - back to this post.
The one thing you need to know for context is that, at the time, I was reading Moby Dick and that became very important to how I was thinking about conservation. Moby Dick is, on the one hand a wild unfinished thing, and on the other, a carefully constructed snare that is built up chapter by chapter, month by scrimshaw month until it whips tight in an instant. I believe that a snare has to be good to catch anyone who already lost a leg last time.
And, I have to pull the same trick, which is a tall order. There are all sorts of different lines that have to run through the text with just the right degree of tension, and the right amount of camouflage, until it snaps shut with ‘the power of the revolution’, and that’s just part 1. It’s a bit daunting; I wonder how well I’ll pull it off.
In between parts one and two I imagined an intermediate chapter which would show how the snare was actually anchored a lot further back than it might have appeared. Maybe, maybe it’s possible to grope all the way back up those lines and untie them from the roots that they’re hooked on to. And some of those roots are in Oxford.
So my plan had been to write about Oxford this week, but I had reason to give up on that plan. And then,
wrote, in a commentary on the story ‘Fenist, bright falcon’ that, when some people get to college “or some other ground of peril” they, “get eviscerated by too many dry theories, whispery skepticism and a general distrust of beauty.” He says that “the shredding of what we most love is a catastrophic event.” And then also mentioned how university, especially reading too much post-structuralism, wiped out her childhood sense of the sacred in landscape, until around 2015. And there was also the conclusion of Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘Machine series’ at, though I am not sure I am even going to get to say what I want to say about that.I started writing this Substack after speaking on a session held by
as part of one of his online forums/courses called The Climate Sessions. I wasn’t talking about the saola or anything I had actually done or seen; I was talking about a story that I heard in an Oxford Lecture Theatre from my tutor, Professor Barrie Juniper, who discovered the Garden of Eden in the east. Talking about Barrie’s story was how I got talking with Dougald. He went ahead and spoke about it in an introduction to what eventually became this Substack, and this plan for a book. Reading over Dougald’s post now, I find it simultaneously affirming, humbling and annoying that he neatly summarizes the story I’m trying to tell before I understood myself what it really was. In fact, I bridled somewhat at Dougald’s summary at the time, but that summary was in fact correct. Dougald was at Oxford too, in the year above me at a different college.Let me tell you, once more and briefly, about Barrie’s story:
Once all humans were hunter gatherers; they ate a diversity of foods and had, probably on average, a fair amount of leisure time. Then some bright spark develops agriculture. After that it’s a war -hot or cold - between the neoliths - that is the agriculturalists - and the palaeoliths - that is, the hunter-gatherers. The palaeoliths, at least for many millennia have better lives than the neoliths, except for when the palaeoliths meet the neoliths. Because when they meet the neoliths, sooner or later there is war and the neoliths always win.
The palaeoliths may win battles - Sitting Bull was the last to do so - but they will not win the war. The neoliths always win. This isn’t a story of progress and a justification of empire; it’s a tragedy. The neoliths always win. It isn’t anything to do with race or genetics; the distinction between neoliths and palaeoliths is purely cultural. A palaeolith can join neolith society and do as well as anyone else can within it, better perhaps - but their culture will die or be transformed to a neolith culture. No judgement in that; it just will.
I’m very aware that this story is contested. It’s contested especially by James Scott in Against the Grain and by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything. I’m well aware that Barrie didn’t invent the story either. It’s possible that Jared Diamond invented it and, if so, Yuval Noah Harari has taken it up. These authors open the ancient world out far wider than Barrie was able to; so much more has been learned. The complexity is staggering and that fact in itself is central to Graeber and Wengrow’s point. And yet, once all the dance is done, the reagents exhausted and the actors ushered out, it seems to me that the core of Barrie’s story still shines dully, stubbornly in the middle of it all.
Graeber and Wengrow will not step beyond Homo sapiens, and indeed they rather scorn Harari for being so foolish as to thread stories across that line. Humans have always been humans and before that we don’t need to think. Which means Graeber and Wengrow are painting on a far, far smaller canvas than Barrie was. It was a long time before we got to that lecture; way back in our first year tutorials we’d already heard from Barrie about the anaerobic world before multicellular life ever emerged, ticking along nicely in hydrothermal vents perhaps until “some bright spark invents photosynthesis.” We are of the same world as that lost, gassed biosphere. Maybe we have a different kind of spark - maybe. Even if so, understanding the spark is really not that important for understanding the fire.
But I haven’t explained yet about the Garden of Eden. I’m getting ahead of myself.
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Oxford
01/07/23
I pass the roundabout called the Plain with its dry fountain under which, as the hippy shop lady told me, King Lud had caught the dragons long ago. This city has a long and proud history of making traps. That particular one was complex, baited, non-lethal and it bought peace for a while. That might be the Oxford style. I go on over the bridge, and under the cliff of Magdalen where the shortbread-yellow monsters sit like puffins and stare down. This time I see the orc-headed, angel-winged creature with the strutting, jutting boobs. Is she pissing through her hitched-up skirt on us? I can’t be sure.
I think I read once that gargoyles and grotesques like these could be explained away as spirits of the air, stuck and petrified on the outside of these holy buildings. Imagine the churches and colleges rushing through the world, unstoppable as gorgons, gathering a sample of the old aerial diversity on their broad windscreens. Of course, it’s all fumigated now. There’s an angry little pagan story. Do I believe it?
If I look at it - that story - try and pin down what it is, it flips between significance and insignificance, decoration and structure, figure and ground, just like the gargoyles do themselves. And if I look at the most famous story from out of the Oxford department where I heard Barrie’s lecture, then it’s the same thing: Richard Dawkins was frustrated, bewildered and furious at people who thought he was saying that a gene was really ‘selfish.’ It was just a snappy title; genes don’t have a ‘self’. Sure people can hunt metaphors in scientific writing, just as people can hunt moths in a library but it’s weird to call a library a moth-house for that reason.
In my own story, the one I’m trying to tell in these posts now, I can feel the tension that makes the curve buck, the tension between the phases where dreams have meaning and those where dreams mean nothing. I can’t tell you with absolute honesty when the stories flip exactly, or why or how often, but I can tell you that they flip and that’s the truth. The truth is that, since Oxford, all stories do that for me. It can be fast or slow; looping out of meaning over decades, or strobing as fast as I grab them like Thetis and Tam Lin. It can even be as fast as Schrödinger’s cat; though perhaps then they stop being stories and become something else. And if you change the resolution, from hours to days to months to decades, then it changes also. Sometimes - like the leaf vein and the river system - the same patterns emerge at different scales, but sometimes they don’t. I need to tell a story that unfolds over a couple of decades but I’m working mostly at the temporal resolution of days which I’m not sure is going to work. I worry that it’s dishonest to suggest that something really flipped when Barrie told his story, when I was told about the ‘Power of the Revolution’ in Nam Đông, when I had that dream beneath the headman’s house in Kati or the other one on Fraser’s hill. I’m not sure these are even inflection points on the curve, really. They might just be illustrations. It does seem, though, that I might find myself looking back in future and placing another of these points exactly here; in this weekend.
A group of pale people, mostly elderly and American I think, go past in red baseball caps that identify them as members of the CS Lewis society. I envy them their days spent in good conversation and travel. I wonder if they are going to Addison’s Walk. I turn right up Longwall Street under the long wall, past where the deadly nightshade reaches out through the churchyard railings, past the Holywell Centre where the holy well is a brick-built garden water feature under twin dawn-redwoods that burn in the Van Gogh red of their long standing death. On, over the bridge where the river is low, over the lily moat and down through the contested gardens and into the long horizontals of a home I once had, where I push open a still-heavy door and go into the Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre for the memorial service of Barrie Juniper.
I see Tim’s round face in the back row, with its familiar - its dearly familiar - expression of just having sniffed in a savoury thought. He sees me and waves; all the others are older, I creep up the steps to sit next to him. The faces around us are quite like those under the red CS Lewis hats in the streets. Maybe they are less fine of feature, on average, maybe wilder of hair. Botanists, I assume, most of them, and members of the SCR, gathered here today, under the only Oxford belltower which stands over no chapel. Tim and I were in the last year of students he taught before he retired. Although, as we’re reminded the moment the service starts, he never really did.
We hear stories about Barrie; about his legendary fight over the planting scheme in the college gardens against its architect, Arne Jacobsen; of his hanging his robe in the gardener’s shed as a defence against academic larceny; of his lifting a waterlily from the moat for a student’s pond (where it’s still spreading today), and of his placing a bluebottle - relieved of its wings - on the slit-open stomach of a pitcher plant so that he could electron-micrograph its feet.
And, of course, there are stories about apples; because Barrie was famous for finding the wild origins of the domestic apple where the ancient Silk Road passed through the Mountains of Heaven. Horses were pressed in trade or conquest through the passes with the black seeds in their bellies to re-apple down the road. “Give an apple to a horse,” he says in the video, “and it will take your hand off.” In tutorials and, more notoriously, interviews he would hand (or throw) apples to students as an opening move. I can see him holding them out to me now, the images in my own mind, surprisingly sharp and integral: “Have you met the liverwort?” he pops up to enquire, gesturing to the pot in the lab sink in his study. It is almost as sharp as my memories of birds are and, indeed, there was something very birdlike about Barrie; with his long hooked nose and the twinkle ever in his eye. It’s hard for me to imagine his head fully thatched or his eyebrows lying flat; I described him, to the Climate Sessions crowd, as “Patrick Stewart illustrated by Arthur Rackham” and - to those in the right place on the Venn Diagram, I stand by that description. However, I want to qualify that he was actually quite a slight man, not spindly at all. He lampshades this, in fact, when he appears on the screen at the beginning of the film, the camera moving through the orchard and finding him reaching up for an apple: “not tall enough,” he says.
Of course the film is on YouTube and you can see it here. Something about Barrie which I hadn’t remembered is his odd habit of looking away as he spoke to you. It didn’t fit with the rest of him really - you imagine him fixing you with a gimlet stare. His voice moves like a confident hiker, placing weight in the strong places, forging upwards through the landscape he knows so well now. His body moves well enough for an old man through the orchard; he kept active. Yet his gaze seems strangely nervous before the camera; and it wasn’t just the camera either. Ceri, who was in the year above us and who we meet afterwards, reminds me that Barrie would never look at her in tutorials which she found quite hard to cope with.
About six minutes in to the film, you can see Barrie talking about his findings on the history of apples. Where he was expecting the DNA to reveal hybrid origins, as is normal for foodcrops, he found a surprising concordance in the code. The apple, it seems has a single ancestor, an Adam-and-Eve apple, if you like, still growing big beautiful and beloved of bears in the Tien Shan. Nonetheless, he says, there are:
“Still plenty of people who insist on trying to prove that other crabs from different parts of the world - and after all there are twenty-five - at least twenty-five - other species of apple - and even though efforts have been made to hybridize in the past, they have all been totally unsuccessful, which is very odd. It's almost as if this apple here, this sweet apple, which we so revere, is a sexual snob.”
Scientists telling stories.
And I want to pause the film at this point and draw attention to the use of pluralization in this story. Because Barrie is standing in an orchard when he says ‘this apple,’ so which apple does he mean? Barrie is standing in the orchard he planted at Wytham, his ‘DNA library,’ with laden trees representing the cultivars of America, France, Holland and Germany, as well as English Pearmains and Sourings and Costards and Finger apples, eating and cooking and cider apples named for Shakespeare, Churchill and Tom Pott. There is Ashmead’s kernel before whose name, he tells us, those in the know will fall on their knees and sob. Barrie has already twisted one of the tree’s fruits from its twig and told the camera it’s a good one. One good one of the various dappled and coddled, sunwise and leeward, golden and fallen and shattered and red fruit, each holding their own dark tears of babies in their star-shaped wombs, crazy with genetic rebellion. Barrie is standing in an orchard when he says ‘this apple,’ so which apple does he mean?
Of course there’s no real confusion: he means no apple but Apple: Malus domestica, or M. sieversii or M. pumila, depending on how you read the rules of priority in botanical nomenclature. Barrie is talking about a twig of the Tree of Life and no merely three-dimensional tree; he’s talking about a species being a sexual snob. And its snobbery, he says, inheres in the fact that it won’t have sex with other species; it will only have sex with… itself. But he says ‘sexual snobbery,’ not masturbation. Of course, for a plant, sex with oneself doesn’t mean masturbation anyway; individual plants - individual flowers even - routinely conceive with themselves. But Barrie isn’t talking about a plant which might, or might not self-pollinate; he’s talking about a species that might, or might not hybridize. He has made a species a character in his story.
How would Barrie feel about my drawing attention to such a thing, I wonder? The same as Richard Dawkins felt about people who obsessed over ‘selfish’? It was just a fun little thing to say.
Now, speaking of Dawkins, his own storytelling move was to shift the frame in the other direction: to tell stories in which the characters were not species, but genes. There was a big, and philosophically slippery, debate running through our undergraduate lecture course about the ‘units of selection.’ Essentially, this could be stated as whether genes were the only appropriate characters for evolutionary stories or, more precisely, whether there were any such stories which couldn’t be told from the perspective of genes. And yet to put it that way would have been risky because calling them ‘stories’ would have been an insult to their tellers; as if your account of a weird thing that befell you was met with “great story,” and an eyebrow raised. Barrie was a great storyteller but, back in the day, I would never have been rude enough to say that to his face. Specifically, though, regarding genes as characters was dangerous because, as I said earlier, it meant people took ‘selfish’ literally and assumed genes had selves. Genes don’t actually have characters and personalities like people do.
There was another kind of attack on storytelling coming from the other direction; from Deep Time. The question here was not ‘who are the real characters in evolution’s story?’ but ‘can evolution really be stories at all?’ At the same time in the press, we saw facial reconstruction techniques used on a man’s skull from Roman-era Palestine with the headline: “is this the face of Christ?” It was obvious to everyone that the answer was ‘no’ but far less obvious that a feather from a Jurassic lagoon found in a German quarry didn’t actually fall from ‘the ancestor of all birds.’ It’s the feather story that is crazier, though.
1980s-style evolutionary stories (and you still hear them) didn’t just identify the ancestor of the birds but told us how it learned to fly. Compare that with the story of a boy who is learning to swim. There’s a moment, perhaps, for the boy, where he wants to twist his heel a touch too far in the screw-kick but he forces himself not to do it. In the flight story, the smallest possible equivalent of that restrained impulse is that one dinosaur dies. That’s if we’re lucky; a forest may have burned there. How many deaths would it take just to get once across the pool?
There is grandeur in this view of life. In fact there is rather too much.
That’s the case against telling stories of the kind that Barrie is telling in the video, where something as vast and polyphonic as a species can blunder on stage in curled wig and sensible shoes and be a sexual snob. Heraclitus thought Homer deserved a good flogging for showing the gods in that way; but how else can you show them? Our minds are only so big. Perhaps a nice graph?
And, from the other side, the smaller-scale, can you really say that it’s wrong to call genes selfish because they don’t have a self? What actually does? I said ‘an individual plant’ earlier but really there is no such thing. Humans can appear as individuals because they tend to stop working if you cut bits off them, and they mostly only have one set of reproductive organs, unlike plants. But humans, too, are made up of other things and stories used to describe human lives are woefully inadequate. I mean look how many words I’m using right now just to try and get to grips with a few hours in my life, two weeks ago Saturday.
Genes are made up of other things also, materially and causally, and they have no boundaries round them, only deflectors, as do we. I might be missing something here but it seems it must always be possible to express a story from a gene’s point of view if you want to but why not go smaller and choose a codon? Or an individual gene in an individual cell; a physical object rather than ‘the copy’ of ‘a gene’ which we can speak of ‘a person’ as ‘having?’
If I go too far down this road I’ll put inverted commas around bloody everything and then I’ll probably end up in continental philosophy and wouldn’t it be more fun just to tell the stories? Stories aren’t a problem - stories are a predicament as Dougald Hine might say - the problem is trying to hold on to them, that’s what I think.
But why am I talking about this?
The part where it becomes about us
Well, it isn’t only biologists who affirm that stories can only be told on the human scale, even that they only apply to humans. In fact it isn’t biologists who affirm it most avidly. If I look at the attacks - sometimes very bitchy ones - against Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, as well as Garrett Harding and E.O. Wilson, it seems to me that, beyond a simple academic turf war, I’m seeing a battle to defend a ground in which politics makes sense, in which humans make choices, in which we have agency and responsibility. That space must be defended at all costs.
On pages 229-233 of The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow address the same topic that was at the core of Barrie’s lecture: the domestication of wheat. They note that Yuval Harari waxes lyrical about the idea that the story of domestication might be seen from the point of view of the wheat and not that of the humans. “This ape,” Harari has written “had been living a fairly comfortable life, hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago” until wheat began to manipulate it to its advantage. When presented in these terms, the outcome appears ineluctable, Graeber and Wengrow note; but only if we accept the strange premise that big-brained primates have been manipulated by a kind of grass. Why should we be expected to accept such a strange story? Not because of any evidence, they argue, but because it is similar to the familiar story of the Garden of Eden; except, instead of a snake, it’s the fruit itself that’s tempting us.
But then why did we accept that story?
The story I heard from Barrie wasn’t just the story of the apple but the story of the garden. Because Barrie Juniper really did believe that the fruit forests of the Tien Shan might be the biblical garden of Eden in the East. He didn’t think it was a metaphor. Although, in a way, yes I suppose he did think those particular forests were a metaphor for the abundant Forest where Homo sapiens the hunter gatherer could live. The Forest was Eden and agriculture was the Fall. He didn’t think that we’d perverted the story of agriculture in line with an ancient myth; he thought that is what the myth was actually about in the first place. I’m not sure how fervently he’d have defended the belief, but he was prepared to say so in an undergraduate lecture.
Going to say a hugely simplistic thing here: I think that, all else being equal, a biologist is more likely to suggest that the chain goes reality→stories→society, whereas a social scientist is more likely to suggest that it goes stories→society→reality. Both those things definitely happen, and there may be other arrangements also. I think those are our respective biases, though.
No, I think that Graeber and Wengrow are being misled by their desire to make stories on a human scale. Really the clue to why Harari’s story makes sense lies - once again - in the pluralization: “this ape.” What ape? No, a wheat plant cannot manipulate a human being but it’s just as valid to talk about Triticum sp.1 manipulating Homo sapiens as it is the other way around. I’m not sure it’s necessarily more valid, but it’s an equally valid way of looking at it. Humans are intelligent but H. sapiens isn’t, particularly. Ask Garrett Harding why not. It can simply do things but it can’t simply not do things because if one individual, group, company or nation exercises restraint, another one won’t. That’s why, as
put it recently, it is more like a wildfire than a foolish man.Is it wrong to talk about species doing things, and making decisions? Well maybe, but then maybe it’s wrong to talk about individuals doing so. Maybe we should be talking about tides of hormones, releases of neurotransmitters and all that.
But still, human scale is the scale that stories were made for, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be better to use the tool for the purpose it’s intended? Well I’m not really sure that is the purpose for which stories were intended at all. Even if it is, though, I don’t think it works if you try and do it over too big a timescale. I think Graeber and Wengrow’s attempted rebuttal of the ‘serpent-wheat’ story shows exactly this. They say that, if wheat were setting the pace, that pace would have been faster. As it actually took over 3000 years between the first cultivation of cereals and the ‘completion’ (whatever that means) of the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent, there can’t really have been a “Faustian pact” between humans and wheat. “While some modern historians may allow themselves the luxury of disposing with ‘a few short millennia’ here or there, we can hardly extend this attitude to the prehistoric actors whose lives we are trying to understand.” But is that what we are trying to understand really? A Faustian pact is a business deal and deals don’t necessarily just happen at the first meeting; they emerge out of long relationships, a slow gaining of trust which could well happen over generations. “It took a long time for each ‘stage’ to happen, and a lot of creative things were happening in that time,” is pretty much Graeber and Wengrow’s argument all the way through the book. They use it to argue that therefore there aren’t really any ‘stages’ at all, just choices. Human flexibility, human creativity, is the good news at the human scale.
But they are precisely why humans are bad news at the species scale. A Faustian pact is a temptation, and temptation, as everyone knows, can be there for a very long time before one succumbs. A very long time on the human scale, that is, like three thousand years. At species scale, that’s the difference between going straight out the door or grabbing a coffee first. As
might say; myth time is not the same as our time. A fairy-tale character’s quick dither at the crossroads might be, for us, the whole of our middle age. It could even be a lot longer than that, I would suggest.Now I want to tell a story - just quickly - about Tiktaalik. Tiktaalik is a fossil animal that it pleases us to call a ‘fish,’ though the term has no meaning in modern systematics. Also, in modern systematics, as I’ve already mentioned, we do not know our ancestors except from their cousins. There is only a vanishingly small chance that any of our ancestors was actually a Tiktaalik, but it’s currently believed that probably all Tiktaaliks were relatively close cousins of an ancestor of ours; though still billions of times removed.
While the individual Tiktaalik were sculling through the shallow rivers, the species Tiktaalik was swimming through the n-dimensional morphospace and it was swimming very close to something that you might see as a portal or a pass into a vast new region which you might call ‘the land.’ It wasn’t simply the three-dimensional land - Tiktaalik and its cousins couldn’t just clamber out of the water - but ‘life on land’ and all the possibilities therein entailed. If the species was making choices, it was making choices about what to grow and what to wither and all these choices were made up of deaths and all the deaths were made up of choices at the smaller scale, where the fish were pursuing, fleeing and exploring. At no point was a Tiktaalik, or anything like a Tiktaalik saying ‘let us commence with the conquest of the land!’ For oceans of time that would swallow a thousand Sumerias, the land did nothing at all in any Tiktaalik’s life. And yet nothing that any Tiktaalik or Tiktaalik itself could do affected the fact that the land was there.
And so were the cities and so were the kings.
Tiktaalik, every Tiktaalik, stayed in the shallows but at some point before or after, some creature, probably as similar to a Tiktaalik as - say - a cat is to a dog, ventured out. Every Tiktaalik stayed in the shallows and, for oceans of time that would swallow a thousand Sumerias, every Tiktaalik worked. There was nothing whatever wrong with Tiktaalik and the vastness of Tiktaalik, the abundance of the lives it was is not just unreachable to our sight but ungraspable to our minds, which are only so big. No human culture has rested on foundations as stable as Tiktaalik, has been half reliable or worked half as well. What is more, it is pretty much certain that ‘fish like Tiktaalik’ were a diverse crew in the time that they survived. All kinds of sizes and patterns and habits and habitats among them, all of them working just as well as they needed to work in the streams, rivers, lagoons, pools that they lived in for life upon life upon life as the rivers flickered like lightning between the mountains and the seas and the mountains themselves rose and fell and the forests moved for the first time up their slopes and changed forever what rivers were and…
And yet where are they now?
Darwin’s insight came from turning attention away from the creative process, from mutation, and into what happened afterwards. As Huxley noticed, it was a horrifically simple idea so I think it’s worth asking why it took so long to think of it. I think it might be because the creative process is where our attention naturally lies.
Behind the college.
OK enough. I started by talking about King Lud’s legendary dragon-trap under the plain. It occurs to me that the other corner of the city is the site of a still more famous trap: the original rabbit hole. I may have just gone down it.
In the Bernard Sunley lecture theatre, Barrie’s daughter Sarah is singing a song that Barrie sang as a child and was the last song he sang in the care home. Barrie was almost a chorister instead of a botanist, we hear. Then there is a poem about Heraclitus, which Barrie read at Roger Deakin’s funeral. I’d known that they knew each other, but not that they were close, and then we file out to look at the new bust of Barrie, which turns out to be a ceramic likeness set into an alcove in the yew hedge. I really like the idea, the yew hedges form narrow galleries which are slowly filling up with the faces of ancestors, though it seems unlikely that they will be able to survive that long, being ceramic. Opposite Barrie is the old master and a part of his glasses frame has already broken away. Tim and Ruth do not approve of the bust.
We go, as if on rails, to the Hall, to the JCR and the bar. The floor is not sticky any more but there are still bits of tape and blue-tack on the concrete ceiling struts. “That chair is where I met my wife,” I say. “At a gaudy?” asks Ceri. “No, in Fresher’s week.” Emily points out that the chair itself is new, so I mean the position, presumably. Presumably. I mean we’re really just placemarkers ourselves.
Tim and Ruth are talking to the botanists. I was more of an animal man, and also bad at treating the faculty like humans, back in the day. Anyway, Tim went on to do a DPhil here s he got more chance to see them as humans. I take a fruit kebab and a piece of apple cake out to sit outside the JCR and look down the shadowed galleries. A young magpie swoops down and follows his long nose through the garden, walking as his people walk but making me think, for a second, of reincarnation, not phylogeny.
And then Tim, Ruth and I go to see the Ur-apple, planted in Barrie’s memory, and the apricots and peach trees in the walk. We lean over the bridge, delaying, talking about damselflies, windscreen-spatter, and the stories we were told here. I say that perhaps it was hinted that climate change, while serious, was not something to cry apocalypse over. That stories like that were just too dangerously melodramatic; that they could carry a scientist away. I’m not sure if my friends agree. I think I talk too much.
Eventually they go one way, back to the city and I head the other way, into the woods, with my grey suit and grey suitcase seeking - just across from Mesopotamia - a bench with an inscription that left Hannah frustrated and then infuriated, back in the day: Ore stabit fortis arare placet ore stat. Across the other channel is Addison’s Walk.
Just behind here is where we parted company, me and my other self. He walking the woods with his big hat and stick and his long green coat while I went off with Hannah. I know this. When I heard Martin Shaw talk about the Wild Twin, I saw this place. I heave the little wheelie suitcase on my shoulders - there’s a bivvy bag inside - and stride through the nettles which sting through my trousers, brown mozzies rise from the Earth. I am exhausted. I will sleep well.
One last thing:
There is another danger for a scientist telling stories; our stories have to be vulnerable. It seems the people who insisted on searching for hybridization in ancient apples had their work pay off.
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002703
Extensive two-way gene flow between M. sieversii and M. sylvestris in particular. It isn’t a sexual snob after all. And yet Barrie’s story is still pouring forth its life, though that life has changed completely, into our tree of stories.
I think I might have to finish this next week.
it’s complicated.