"Life Between the Tides"

[fiefoe]

Apparently I almost read this a year ago. One of my favorite lessons in 3L was about tide pools (whence the word 'limpet' entered into my English vocabulary), and Adam Nicolson's descriptions give a much much more detailed tour of those wonders.

• The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes.
• In the 1850s, when Victorian Britain fell in love with the seaside, the rock pool became the heart of a kind of nature- worship which saw in its riches and calm a reassuring vision of creation.
• But there are ironies in choosing the shore as a theatre for reassurance. Even if its changes are dependable and rhythmic, it is thick with variability. A tidal coast is filled with that paradoxical quality: reliable unreliability, both closed and open-ended, both familiar and strange.
• ‘The soul wants to be wet,’ Heraclitus said in Ephesus 2,500 years ago.
• A little juvenile dab, three inches from nose to tail, slides along the sea floor beside me, a ripple in every pore, moulding its body to the contours of the sand as if wedded to them, as close as possible to that miniature landscape, a creature as liquid as the sea itself, a film of life, but which, as it pauses, turns invisible, mottled like its surroundings, its greyness speckled with white, banking on a principle opposite to the hermit crab beside it: one almost stupidly visible but dressed in borrowed armour; the other soft, subtle and discreet, the diplomat of this half-world,
• zoomorphism, recognising the continuities between animal and human consciousness, the continuousness of the spectrum that runs from bacterium and virus to scientist and poet. All can exist only within the overarching embrace of the world-as-it-is,
• to know something, a person or an animal or a place, to become intimate with it, is not to know in any very conscious way but to dissolve the boundaries. To be with anything, life must overflow its brim.
• It is March, a cold dampish day with spits of rain hanging in the wind.
• If you sit and watch them in flight, the impression is that each small animal is in one place at one moment and another a second later, with no catchable transition between the two, animal-quarks living in a strange quantum-crustacean universe.
• Be amazed. It is the fizz of life itself, the sand-jumpers and weed-dancers springing into spectacular rocket-fuelled survival. The wax will keep the Orchestias damp inside. It has a melting point of about 37°C, which means the sandhoppers cannot go wandering about with any safety in full summer sunshine... Orchestia must groom to stay alive, in particular picking anything out of the joints in their legs where a speck of dust or sand could damage the connecting membranes and allow the precious wetness of what biologists call ‘the internal milieu’ to escape. To sit and watch them about their business, their multiple limbs flickering and pausing over their own bodies, keeping house, keeping themselves proper, ensuring their own continuity, is a challenge to any pre-existing idea of animal consciousness.
• see them jumping at me as an example and epitome of everything this book is about, a fragmentary illumination of the layers of understanding, skill and volition in the most unconsidered corners of life. These half-soft, semi-elastic, glossy-shelled bodies shelter a decision-making, life-perpetuating, ingenious set of selves that has evolved over the aeons.
• The prawns are just longer than the top joint of my thumb but as intricate as a space station, a machine for processing life, a micro-engineer’s fantasy of applied brilliance, as indifferent to sleekness as the most inner part of an engine or computer, all purpose, no appearance, articulated, tooled up, strange.
• In a well-developed pool you see it: beside the relatively rare and handsome queens, often tucked into the best hiding places, little male courtiers flit to and fro, shadows looking for shadows.
• Fossat’s discovery introduces a complexity into the character of the crustacean which implies a vivid and layered self: to behave like this, it must have a memory of past fearful events; be capable of a carefulness which involves projecting its existence into the future. If an animal can be anxious, it must know about the passage of time.
• A ‘metazoan’ is the word a professor of biology will use to mean anything that has lived since the great extinctions at the end of the Permian 252 million years ago. With the formal modesty usual in scientific papers, Fossat was making the great and beautiful claim that virtually all animal life on earth knows what it feels like to be alive.
• This unmeasurability means that the Mandelbrot world is a set of dizzying spirals. The closer you look, the deeper it dives.
• Any examination of anything becomes an ever-growing, ever-inward plunge into the indefinable. The slower you go, the more there is to your journey. Pause for a moment and a place will pool out around you, not as an illusion but as a fact, in details it would not have had if you had not stopped to look.
• That is true of the shore itself: it is its own book, the only full account of itself, its own luminosity. Its existence is the only true light it has.
• That clogging tooth-film on waking up is the foundation of rock-pool life. The wet surface of your teeth, as of these blades of kelp, attracts bacteria which within minutes begin to secrete sugary chemicals, the polysaccharides, that start to pullulate and fold over on themselves, making a matrix of layers that soon, in Cremona’s words, ‘becomes a complex 3D structure of holes and tunnels’.
• You can see this, and watch this and observe the relationship of gastropod to its algal and bacterial food, but the sense of vertigo, of the layers of life disappearing away from sight down into the tunnels of the microscopic, is inescapable. Every part of the world is an otherworld.
• But in attacking medium-sized winkles, the crab buys the other winkles time to escape and find a refuge. The shells of those medium-sized winkles, in other words, do not protect those individuals but, through the chemical signals their lacerated flesh sends out, the shells do protect the others.
• This biological community structure, which is entirely consistent with Darwinian principles, looks oddly like the roots of something else: the clan civilisation of the Highlands... there is a curious continuity with this winkle world. In all of them, young adults suffer so that others do not. Their death guarantees the safety of most. Their resistance is both a communal good and a mere prelude to their own dying. Can it be that a population of winkles, here in this pool, as in all others, has, merely through the forces of natural selection, developed a means of survival that relies on the death of young heroes? Does it mean that Achilles, or Oscar, Ossian’s son who in the tales was brought back here to Morvern dead from battle in Ireland, carried on his shield, are nothing but members of a biological category, which any population of any animal subject to predation will also have among them?
• the arrival of a new predator distorting the forms of the biological field around it, in the way that a heavenly body bends and tests the gravitational field through which it passes. The European crab had, in effect, changed its prey into the shape it has in European waters.
• The destruction of the cod and the collapse of their position as an apex predator in the Atlantic has led to a growth in the abundance of shrimps, lobsters, and crabs throughout this ocean. It is now a sea of claws.
• have responded as shell-dwellers and shell-wearers must: by thickening their defences and toughening their lives. But modern life has provided them with one more hurdle: the acidification of the world ocean... One-third of all the carbon dioxide that has been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been absorbed by seawater, turning it acid.
• An acid sea will make winkles vulnerable to crab predation, with all kinds of ripple effects spreading from that: more crabs, fewer winkles, denser algae and a disruption of the entire coastal ecosystem.
• The light was bouncing up into the wood off the sea. In a place which is so often grey and wet, mornings like this overbrim with colour. Even a distant sail, tipped like a feather on the Firth of Lorne, looked washed and perfect. The trees were like lettuces, every leaf with the light in it.
• Iris Murdoch’s early philosophy. ‘One might start from the assertion that goodness is a form of realism,’ she wrote, and repeated what Rilke had said of Cézanne: he did not paint ‘I like it’; he painted ‘There it is.’
• And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.
• One might imagine that the most economic of crab strategies is to find the biggest mussels and crack them open for food. That is largely the human approach to eating other animals but it turns out that in common with other shell-focused predators – such as oystercatchers, which usually choose to open the smaller-than-average cockles, wanting to protect their bills from harm – that is not the case. Nature is not red in tooth and claw, but a constant and careful evaluation of the risk-reward ratios in every transaction. The greedy die young; accountants get rich.
• There seems to be a universal rule of thumb which shore crabs follow: if the width of the mussel is more than a quarter the length of the crab’s crushing claw, the crab will be forced to cut its edges rather than crush the whole animal... ‘It would seem,’ Smallegange and Van Der Meer wrote, ‘that crabs prefer to crush in the safe zone, to prevent damage and wear to the claws.’ Instinctive calculation, a capacity to measure, a sense of proportion, in the relationship of mussel width to claw length, and the understanding that life needs to continue beyond the attractions of the immediate moment: all of this is in the mind of Carcinus maenas.
• But armour makes sex difficult if not impossible and female crabs are receptive to the male only after they have moulted their old shell and for the day or two until it hardens again. They must be soft to have sex. In the crab-eat-crab world of the pool, that moment of procreation is filled with danger and so the male gathers her up, even before she has moulted, into what is called ‘a pre-copulatory embrace’.
• Some biologists have seen, very occasionally, at this tender moment, the male crab eating the outstretched claw of the female, to which she responded by continuing to stroke and touch him with her other, single remaining claw. It was thought, maybe, by the Floridian scientist who observed this horror, that the male crab was immature and did not understand the offer the female was making to him.
• As the larval, swimming form of the barnacle metamorphosed into its fixed and sessile state, it lost its eyes and began to build around it the calcareous plates that would protect it for the rest of its life. Thompson had made a second discovery as amazing as the realisation that the zoeae were young crabs. Until then, everyone had assumed that barnacles were relatives of limpets. Thompson had seen they were closer to prawns. ‘Thus then an animal originally natatory and locomotive, and provided with a distinct organ of sight, becomes permanently and immoveably fixed, and its optic apparatus obliterated
• Dr Zeng their Thomas Henry Huxley Award for original contributions to zoology, revealed something that had never been shown before: the crab larvae swam up and down the tank at completely predictable intervals of twelve hours and twenty-five minutes. These vertical journeys were timed so that the larvae were at the top just after high tide and at the bottom just after low tide.
• contorting its blue attack cells into a tiara of violence towards Bluefoot,
• All these are evolved dimensions of the anemone ‘self’. Each polyp may be genetically identical to every other, but each ‘caste’ within the clone is different in form. Different local conditions – life on the free outer edge where there are no enemies, the battlefront, the safe centre – summon different body forms from the same genetic source. Even here, in the very simplest of animals, the interplay of inheritance and environment defines the experience of life.
• Anemones, it seems, are logical polyps, capable of deference in front of the strong and assertion in front of the weak, and able in the light of those perceptions to conduct limited war. No one knows how, nor what kind of consciousness is alive in these animals. Perhaps anemones drive on to this far-reaching conclusion: there is no distinction between life and mind. Life is mind and there is no boundary in the continuum of life at which you can draw a line to say ‘Here is mind’ and ‘Here is none’. Life-and-mind is a single condition in which the living share. We are mind. We live in mind. To live is to be mind. Mind is the distinction between what lives and what doesn’t, so that thought, that stream of consciousnesses that ebbs and flows in us, is the medium of being.
• The received idea of Heraclitus is simple: πάντα ῥεī. Everything flows. All is flux. Nothing is fixed and nothing certain. Nothing can be known. There is no identity. Tides run through everything and there is no ‘still-stand’. We are afloat in a liquid world.
• when Heraclitus says that opposites are ‘the same’, he does not mean ‘identical’ but that they are deeply linked. Opposites are two parts of one substance that undergoes change according to the measure of the logos. The tide is a model of existence. High tide and low tide are not separate things. It is the same sea that ebbs and floods so that high tide is inconceivable without low tide.
• The Michigan insight was to globalise that understanding: if predators thrived, herbivores suffered and the vegetation grew. Resources did not dictate the pattern of life; competition did. Tigers made forests.
• Removal of predators leads to local extinctions. Where predators capable of preventing monopolies are missing, the system becomes less diverse. If ‘justice’, or order, in the Heraclitean sense, is the balanced coexistence of multiple forms of life, with different demands and different ways of being, Paine had shown that kind of order to be dependent on a condition of mutual strife in which no one power source could dominate all others. In a ripple of papers emerging over the following years from Tatoosh, he gave the name of ‘keystone species’ to a top predator in such a system.
• Truly to see a shoreline now is to recognise that its strife is its order, that a balanced community is dependent on power-centres in tension, the frame pulling against the strings of Heraclitus’s bow or lyre, and that the injustice and diminution of a dominant monoculture represents the absence of strife. It is a paradigm of nature opposite to the idea that living things hang happily and stably together in a set of mutually accommodated niches. It substitutes tension for stillness, flux for calm. Heraclitus is now the spirit that presides over life between the tides.
• The best butter was churned when the tide had just paused at low slack water and was beginning, in that most expressive and beautiful of sea expressions, to ‘make’, as if the tide were self-creating.
• ‘Do you think,’ he said to her, ‘that if, from the day of creation, tin plates, lettuce leaves, grains of salt, drops of oil and vinegar, and pieces of hard-boiled egg were floating in space in all directions and without order, chance could assemble them to-day to make a salad?’ ‘Certainly not such a good a one,’ Mrs Kepler said, ‘nor so well seasoned.’
• Every twenty-four hours, that rocky earth makes a full revolution within its ill-fitting sea-envelope so that each point on the coast comes in turn to luxuriate in deep sea and be exposed in the shallows, a rhythmic coming and going of the tide as if this were some teasing, planetary game of I-love-you, I love-you-not. The presence of the moon makes the water-bulge but the turning of the earth makes the tides. In the Newtonian picture, it is not the water that moves when the tide rises or falls but the rocks of the planet rotating within the skin of sea.
• In all, a single repetition of the rock sequence records the passing of about 38,000 years of the early Jurassic sea. Half of it is the limestone, about a fifth the clay and the rest the dark shales. Again and again, for millions of years, the pattern repeated, the sea came and went, deepened and shallowed, not arbitrarily but metronomically, pulsing and fluxing as a tide, one of the slowest of all the earth’s many songs.
• Gosse was the fundamentalist king of the Victorian shore. Almost alone, he had invented the view of it as a place in which to see God’s world in miniature... He recognised that the beauties of God’s nature were ‘never more great than when minutely great’,
• ‘Sacrificial killing is the basic experience of the sacred,’ the great mythographer, anthropologist and Greek scholar Walter Burkert wrote. It is one of humanity’s most powerful and paradoxical acts of connection with the natural world, dependent on a recognition of the reciprocal nature of existence. We must live in the frame of mutuality. To give is to expect to receive. To receive is to expect to give in return. ‘Sacrifice is an act of killing that simultaneously guarantees the perpetuation of life and food,’ a ‘two-sided act’ compressing into one highly charged moment ‘the encounter with death and the will to live’.
• especially in young children, largely because in children the competition between the maintenance of physical health and the growth of their bodies is at its fiercest. The stress of malnutrition shuts down the immune response to infection and it is from infectious diseases that children in a famine usually die. This connection of hunger and disease remains today the leading cause of child death worldwide.
• Starvation, near-starvation and ‘the prevalence of destitution’ returned to the West Highlands in 1806–7, 1811, 1816–17, 1837–8, the mid-1840s and the six terrible years of 1847–53. It would have been no different in all the unrecorded centuries and these are the foundational realities, the Malthusian assaults on people’s lives. As soon as visitors from the south came to see what life was like in the Highlands, the poverty horrified them.
• This enormous and violent energy of clansmen on a raid can be seen in a Malthusian light. The clan was itself an instrument of survival, an essentially warlike structure of chief, tacksmen and subtenants. The women did most of the farming, the men the fighting and cattle raiding. The clan’s lifeblood was in raiding. Stealing food in the form of cattle and destroying the lives of rivals by burning their crops was an integral part of the system. Feuding, loyalty, punishment for disloyalty, feasting, the summoning to war, the use of violence as a habitual and even theatrical tool of community cohesion – all were part of an ecology whose essential condition was the poverty of the land.
• Dùthchas is the gathering of your instincts but it is also your native place, your habitat and how you think. It is both homeland and innermost being, your right to what is yours. It is what you inevitably are. If in the hierarchical structure of a clan there are echoes of prawn life, in dùthchas there are suggestions of a kind of clonal arrangement like the anemones’. Dùthchas is what the English words ‘tradition’ and ‘place’ and ‘heritage’ all try to say. The dependence of pre-modern human life here on the products of the land and the need to resist the exigencies of the environment mean that self, family, world, survival, memory and song are moulded to each other more intimately than could be imagined in a modern, commercial and urbanised world.
• What is the answer to the question? Is human history here a branch of natural history? Is our own story merely another dimension of its ecology? In part it is:
• I can tell you, calf of my heart,
• All the stories now are as neglected as the sea-tangle itself. Neither they nor the weed are needed for the fertility they might once have brought to life here. The goddesses and the fairies are pushed away into the inert category called ‘folklore’.
• A cultural world in which meaning could cross the tideline and where the connections between sea and land, animal and human, human and fairy were vivid and continuous, has gone. The word ‘fairy’ has itself become both sweet and toxic; not the embodiment of a potent and unaccommodated spirit abroad in the world but a sentimentalised, sugar-drop version of it; not an enlargement of understanding but a retreat from it.
• Both fairy and fear banish naivety and create a balance in the mental universe of a person – or animal. Take advantage of the world, it says, and eat its fruits, but recognise the danger that lurks in strange places.
• It was a tragic clash: a modernising, globalising and eventually industrialising world at its most expansive met an essentially pre-modern society whose ways of being and thinking, its dùthchas, were subtle, evolved, rich and sustaining, but fragile in front of these demands.
• Some conducted the whole service under heavy rain; others in snow, ‘the fall being so heavy that at the close’, one minister said, ‘I could hardly distinguish the congregation from the ground on which they sat, except by their faces.’
• ‘Lament at its most extreme will always have to encounter water,’ Alice Oswald has said recently and these desperate and touching stories mark the moment when the people of this place were driven into the sea.
• This is not metaphysical, not about any other world than this. Heidegger–Steiner’s description is of this world, the world as it is, full as it is of ‘contradictory simultaneities’ and repeated chances of ecstatic encounter. Neither Plato, thinking reality is elsewhere, nor Aristotle, attached to the atomised physical, could know about it. Nor is it any form of balm, relieving one of the anxiety and difficulty of being, as the Platonic dream or the Aristotelian forgetting of wider significance, might have done.
• Here now, beside the pools, Heidegger–Steiner approached the core of the idea. The way to be in the world is ‘being-with’. To understand the presentness of all others is to exist. Being with others makes us who we are and the acceptance of others enlarges us. The co-presence of others, both given and received, becomes the frame in which knowledge is possible.
• This central concern is for more than humanity; it is care for all that is and as such is the opposite of Descartes’s idea that he is because he thinks. The world exists beyond any knowing you might have of it. ‘Knowing is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the “cabinet” of consciousness. It is on the contrary a form of being-with, a concern, a lingering alongside.’ That for Heidegger is the paradoxical condition of true liberty: knowing your life is limited, with ‘a bracing awareness of one’s finitude’ you will care for all others, coming alongside them and being-with the world in ‘a freedom which is both certain of itself and anxious’.
• Confronted with the grand crisis of nature, Heidegger provides the most powerful set of ideas: an all-pervading consciousness of the autonomy of other life; a recognition, at this most enveloping of philosophical levels, that we cannot exist unless embedded in it; the need to remain anxious at its unsettlingness, not as a failure to resolve problems but as a recognition of their reality; and our own finitude beside it.
• Making the pools was not the point. Being there while making them, what Heidegger calls ‘lingering with being’ was what was valuable, an inadvertent and marginal benefit that strikingly bears the same relationship to making something useful as the shore does to the sea itself: a revelatory edge that by definition is no good for shipping.
• These oscillations are patches in time, just as the patches on the rock are oscillations in space. Micro-tides flood and ebb across every dimension of their world. Their micro-catastrophes and micro-blooming are the guarantee of calm. Life is unsealed. There is no distinction between flux and stillness; they are one. The core of being is interplay, and its give-and-take of quick and still is the animation of life.