Life and Spacetime - more Lynn Margulis

"So what is life?
Life is the representation, the "presencing" of past chemistries, a past environment of the early Earth that, because of life, remains on the modern Earth.  It is the watery, membrane-bound encapsulation of spacetime.  Death is part of life because even dying matter, once it reproduces, rescues complex chemical systems and budding dissipative structures from thermodynamic equilibrium.  Life is a nexus of increasing sensitivity and complexity in a universe of parent matter that seems stupid and unfeeling in comparison.  Life must maintain itself against the universal tendency of heat to dissipate with time.  This thermodynamic view explains, in a way, the determination, the purposefulness of life - for billions years it has been stuck in a pattern which, even if it wanted to, it can't get out of, of upping the stakes as it goes.  For life itself is - are - these patterns of chemical conservation in a universe tending towards heat loss and disintegration.  Preserving the past, making a difference between past and present, life binds time, expanding complexity and creating new problems for itself."

-from What is Life, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Eve and the Tree of Life

When Eve looked at the Tree of Life what did she see?  Did she see its roots deep in the earth, and its branches among the stars? Did she see its cellular structure, its layers of living tissue, its pores that breathe out oxygen?  Did she see her equal among beings?  

Or did she see a thing, a green thing with a grey-brown bark, with fruit that was her right to pick and wood that was her right to take? Did she see a natural resource, a product, so many board-feet?

But Eve is a mythical figure.  No one knows what she saw. She said to Adam, “Eat!” and Adam did,  and God became afraid, and sent them away from the Garden to make a living on their own, which they did.  

If Eve was a smart girl, and I think she was, she took the Garden with her, however, and God could not stop her, because he has never understood Eve. The Tree of Life was already planted in her mind.  And she will share it with Adam, just as she did the apple of knowledge, whenever Adam stops worshipping God.  Which is to say whenever he stops provoking wars, building monuments to himself and God, and generally idolizing power.  So it might be a while. 

The Tree of Life is everywhere, if you can see it with the eyes of Eve.

Elm Hill Farm, continued

Live must have been very “real” and very “earnest” to those growing children in a time when the land had to be cleared and the stumps of trees disposed of, many of them in that section were used to make fences and more still in existence in my young womanhood, picturesque, but using a lot of land.  The barns were built on the knoll, their present site, where Grandfather planned to build his frame house.  This meant crossing the creek, on a log at first or fording it, every time they went to the barn.  

One of Father’s early memories is of falling off the log into the creek at time of spring flood.  Grandmother had said, “Jimmy, don’t cross the log, the water is too high for you, and you are a little boy.”

Probably being a “little boy” didn’t set very well, and he wanted to go across to the barn.  He would show them he was bigger than they thought he was.  he started bravely over, but the water rushed and the roared right around his feet and he didn't feel big at all, and suddenly he fell.  The water rushed him down the stream near enough to the bank so he could grasp some willow branches.  He yelled lustily and Jote rushed down and pulled him to shore and up the bank.  Of course they all were scared and glad that he was safe, but little papa got a switching.

Grandmother had the endless task that falls to the home-maker in a new country.  Her flax wheel, and spinning wheel and swift, I can remember upstairs in what was the carriage house when I was home.  There was plenty to do both in doors and out.  But I’ve no doubt the children were happy; fun and play meant something and were the sweeter for being earned.

Father said he could remember how his mother used to put her work basket away and have everything ready to begin the Sabbath on Saturday at sundown - and on Sunday at sundown the Sabbath was over.  When they went to church they had to go to York. 

I wonder if on Jotham, the oldest son, the heaviest work fell.  I gather from remarks and vague impressions that Jotham was not as keen mentally as the others.  I wonder.  He never married and was only fifty-one when he died. 

District school of pioneer times was where school education began, and for Jotham and James was all they had.  The school house stood at the top of “Teed Hill” on the right side and was red.  Father told terrible tales of how discipline was maintained.  The teacher seemed always to be a man.  Perhaps it was necessary to have a man to deal with the pupils, for some of them were young men and women.  

Poor James! why didn’t someone teach him how to spell.  He never mastered the trick, nor have some of his children and grandchildren.  It just doesn’t seem to come to some of us, and even with a college education there is room for vast improvement.  I shed tears over misspelled words in my childhood  — and my son should have.  Brother Bob got through the Regents exam in spelling after trying many times, because his principal wrote on his 74 paper: “For Heaven’s sake let this fellow pass!” They did. 

Up the creek and back of the house was “The Gulf”, a beautiful deep ravine, a lovely place for anyone to wander through, and a most fascinating place for each generation of children as they came along.  In Father’s day, as in mine, the school children often came home down the “Gulf”.  Father told me that one day as he was coming home, barefoot of course, probably dreaming with this head in the clouds, he stepped squarely on a dead rattle snake, which a boy going before him had killed and, in retaliation for some quarrel, had stretched across the rocks, hoping that Jim Dodge would step on it.  Jim did, and leaped high, bringing his head back to earth.

Indians were still about.  The remnant of the Seneca tribe, who had remained in the loved valley after the terrible raid of Sullivan’s army.  “Friendly” they were called, but poor things, they couldn’t have felt very friendly.  They must have felt subdued and, I fancy, sullen when they thought of their lost lands and homes, and their scattered tribes.  However, they became attached to certain individuals and families.

The Memoirs of my Great Grandmother, Bertha Dodge Nellis (in installments)

I got to re-read this memoir at my Aunt Nancy's house this summer, and asked her to send me a copy of the mimeographed type-script, which she was kind enough to do.  The document is getting faded and a little difficult to read, so I thought I would transcribe it, so that hopefully it will continue on.  Bertha, as you will see, was not without literary style...

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Elm Hill Farm As I Knew It

Bertha Dodge Nellis

1935

Introduction

The day that I finished reading Louis Bromfield’s The Farm, I remarked to my daughter Eleanor, “Why I could write a story of our family that to the family would be as interesting as The Farm . (That was written primarily for some members of the Bromfield family.) On the instant Eleanor was fired with enthusiasm and exclaimed - “You should, O do, do”. And she has never forgotten, but has constantly reminded me and urged me to make the attempt; So because I love to think of Elm Hill Farm as I knew it and the people who have lived on it, and rather expect to get real pleasure from the reminiscence: I rush in where angels perhaps might fear to tread.

It is to be a simple account of some of the important or interesting incidents told me by older members of the family and of my own memories and viewpoint.  It is written for the next generation, for I realize that there are some things that I am the only one of my generation left in the family to recall.  But it is due to Eleanor’s enthusiasm and encouragement, that I have been mulling over in my mind things to tell about, and that I am making the attempt to pass them on.

Part I.

There are certain people greatly interested in just about anybody’s genealogy, who find a real pleasure in tracing back ancestry.  Such an one was our dear friend, Mrs Moxley.  For our sister Minnie, Mrs Moxley, who had at her command the material of the  Boston libraries, looked up the beginnings of the Dodge family in America.  

Mrs Moxley wrote out the information she acquired and gave it to Minnie, but through some inadvertence, Minnie lost the paper.  I have seen the same statement made in an obituary of one Daniel Dodge of Rockland, Sullivan County, New York and I understand they have been published in books concerning the early history of the Dodge family.

This is the beginning of the Dodge family in America.  In 1646, one Tristram Dodge and his three sons came from England to Block Island in a sloop “with their women, their servants, and their cattle.” There they settled.  Later some members of the family moved to New London, Connecticut.  From New London I suppose the families scattered through parts of New England. 

The first member of our family whom I can speak of with certainty is Silas Dodge, my great grandfather.  He owned a farm in or near Henly, Massachusetts.  When I was a little girl of five Father and Mother “took a trip” to New York City and New England visiting relatives.  They took me with them, and I vividly remember being lifted up onto the top of a great granite boulder that was in the brick yard of the house where great-grandfather Silas used to live - he was long dead then - and being told that Grandfather used to play on this rock when he was a little boy.  The house was unpainted, I very dimly remember it.  It did not seem large, even to my child’s eyes.  I fancy a living was hard to wrest from the stony fields and steep hillsides. 

If great grandfather had any daughters I do not remember hearing them mentioned nor do I know whom he married.  He had four sons: Eben, Thomas, Charles, and Luther.  There were descendants of Eben living in Syracuse by the name of Diefendorf.  Charles and Luther “went west” - one to Detroit, I think Luther, and one to Ohio.

What a pity that when there are with us who might tell of a day gone by and the people who lived in it, we are so absorbed in the present, or so full of dreams of the future that the past is “over and gone”, and we do not think to “remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask thy father and he will show thee; thy elders and they will tell thee.”  I have information about Silas’ family from my Father’s lips, but even he did not seem to know much about his father’s family.  If now I could ask him, I might find he know more than I can remember his telling us.

When one is clearing land, and building a shelter, and marrying a wife, and rearing a family, it is pretty absorbing business.  So I fancy Grandfather Thomas who did all these things may not have told a great deal of his old home and family in Hawley, and Father was like many for the rest of us - eager about his own life and busy in its duties and pleasures. 

In 1816 young Thomas Dodge settled in what was then the town of York, Livingston Co. by the side of Wolf Creek.  He had served in the war of 1812.  I can see in my mind’s eye the blue army coat with big round silver, at least silver-colored, buttons which Mother, at house cleaning time, took out of the chest in the kitchen chamber, shook and aired against the depredations of moths, and put back.  I suppose as the years went by the moths conquered , and Mother didn’t see why anyone would be interested in an old moth-eaten coat, or even the buttons.  How I wish she had saved the buttons!

When young Thomas came home from the war he must have reached man’s estate - he was born in 1792.  The family was large and it was time for him to look out for himself.  What lead him to the beautiful Genesee Valley?  Was it even then “Young man go west”? Some one must have told him about it, or did he see it as he served in the war?  Where he served I do not know; I wonder.

After the Revolution, and following the Clinton-Sullivan expedition, the Genesee Valley become a promised land to many.  When Thomas made his claim or bought the land, the great flats of the river were owned by the Eadsworths, and he settled just over the first rise of ground, about 10 miles north of Moscow, now called Leicester. 

He build his log house on the north side of the Creek, about opposite the barn of the McKercher-McLean-Dodge-place.  Until recent years the great maple tree which stood in the brick yard was still standing.  Father told me many times how they used to play in its shade.  The creek has changed its course somewhat, and the floods and erosion of many years have washed away the back yard, the tree, and, I fancy, even the site of Grandfather’s log house.  What a pity!

Soon after Grandfather established himself, he must have become interested in Phoebe Forbes, for Dec. 11th 1817 they were married. 

Phoebe Forbes was the daughter of Jotham Forbes, one time fifer in the Revolution (see the pension record I have in my possession.)  I do not know when the family came from Upton, Mass. to New York State.  I have been told that Phoebe rode on a pillion behind her father.  The home they lived in was about three miles from where Grandfather settled, up the Teed Hill road and beyond the Ira Whelk place across the rod.  The house was still shading the last I knew, but in sad disrepair.

What heavy and almost endless tasks must have been the lot of young Thomas and Phoebe - I hope the log house was completed.  However I'm sure they were full of courage and ambition - they had to be to accomplish what they did, they were young and well, and love was there.

The next year, 1818, Nov. 4, the first baby came, and died the day it was born.  A family record in a Bible is a cold thing.  The November fourth must have been a tragic day.  It was a real pioneer life they had to live, not much medical or surgical skill at hand.

Those were the days of large families.  Om May 31, 1820 Jotham Forbes Dodge was born.  He had such an odd nickname, "Jote." He died before I was born, but I heard others int eh family talk about 'Uncle Jote, and I never could see how "Jote" came from Jotham.

Then there was Amelia Louise, born March 17, 1823 - more about her later - and Father, who was James Lloyd, born July 25, 1825, and Thomas Augustus born October 27, 1827, and Catherine Lydia born Dec. 25, 1829.  So to Thomas and Phoebe cam six children.

They had good taste in names, for all have both beauty and dignity with is something to be desired when conferring on a baby a thing he must carry with him through life.  

(TBC)

Quotes from Lynn Margulis' "What is Life?"

"Bacterial tenacity should not be underestimated.  This entire planet is bacterial. Human technologies and philosophies are permutations of the bacteria.  Eating, infecting, and irreversibly merging with one another, bacteria spun off powerful new prodigies: the protoctists, fungi, plants and animals - all of which keep alive the metabolism and movement of the bacteria from which they derived."

"Death is illusory in quite a real sense.  As sheer persistence of biochemistry, "we" have never died during the passage of three thousand million years.  Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone, but we have persisted."

"In the normal waking state, human bodies burn sugars aerobically, using oxygen atoms drawn from the air.  But in strenuous activity the body reverts to a distinct metabolism; muscles ferment sugars in the same anaerobic way invented by early bacteria.  Such physiological flashbacks re-present past environmental conditions and the bodies that evolved to live in them.   In a very real sense, all beings today retain traces of Earth's earliest biosphere."

"Life cannot be understood ignoring the sentient observer.  If not for mind, no one would care that life is a certain kind of sunlight-energized cosmic debris.  But it is, and we do."

It's refreshing to think of us all as just a bunch of bacteria, dreaming our bacterial dreams...

iPhone

So I finally got an iPhone - well, 2 iPhones actually, because I killed the first one within a week, further blackening my name with Asurion, the cell phone insurance company - and I've decided that the iPhone (and by extension all smartphones) are complicated little boxes that are designed to retard and distract from actually having thought processes and experiences.  You're just supposed to just exchange photos and emoji messages.  Perhaps someday the usefulness of a smartphone will become apparent to me ("you have to download more apps, Mom" is my daughter's advice), but for now my position is that the whole phenom is extremely over-rated, and causes brain function erosion even before you get actual brain cancer from the actual micro-waves.  And I'm not even all that grouchy this morning...