Elaborate Biological Filigrees
Wilfred Franklin & Julia Rose Lewis
Wilfred Franklin is the founder and manager for the Trinity River Vineyards and instructor in the Wine Certificate Program at California Polytechnic Humboldt. He has a Masters in Biology from California Polytechnic Humboldt and has worked as a biology professor, winemaker, and vineyard manager.
Julia Rose Lewis took her Doctorate in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University; her work explores how contemporary scientific research is incorporated into experimental poetry. She has published five collections of poetry the most recent of which is the Velvet Protocol co-authored with Nathan Hyland Walker.
History is blindness to all that you are going to say to me soon.
— Ghazal Mosadeq [1]
SJ Fowler is inquiring what chimpanzees have to say about our blindness to our life history? It is a mirror not a miracle. Haeckel’s Law states that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Ontogeny refers to the unfolding of the body of the organism in time otherwise known as embryology and developmental biology. Without it, we synthesize again and again and soon we are lost. Haeckel writes: ‘we do not really understand [the facts of embryology] until we trace them to their true phylogenetic causes, and see that each of these apparently simple processes is the recapitulation of a long series of historical changes.’ [2] Phylogeny refers to the unrolling of species in time otherwise known as descent with modification and evolutionary biology.
The origin of recapitulation means gone through heading by heading, chapter repeating, again diminutive of head. Let us go through the series of readings. Fowler created a film reading of The Great Apes for the Broken Sleep Books Extravaganza on 14th April 2022.[3] [4] The event took place after the face-to-face launch of The Great Apes and before the online launch.[5] [6]
The reading unfolds a life history of violence, sex, and loneliness. To read is to masquerade. To read is to filter and reveal oneself through the selection of a mask. Before the chimpanzee, he wore a mask to make his half-face into a skull. He is illustrating the skill of living in the divide between birth and the inevitable unfolding toward death; his eyes are alive and his mouth is only bone. It is important to note the similarities between our reading and Fowler’s collaboration with with Icelandic poet Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir in a performance at the Rich Mix Arts Centre for the European Poetry Night 2017. [7] The performance begins in awkwardness and ends with explicitly defying social conventions well beyond the poetry reading. Their collaboration explores consumption, death, motherhood, and respect. The development, the unfolding of an experimental poet’s body of work recapitulates the evolution of literary forms. Haeckel’s Law obtains with respect to experimental poetry.
Phylogeny unfolds the self. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould writes ‘phylogeny unfolds historically as the sequence of ontogenies for all organisms making up a lineage.’ [8] Fowler is looking through the eyes of a chimpanzee mask, because it is one of the organisms that makes up his lineage. He is illustrating his own phylogeny in The Great Apes. He is looking into the ways in which his own life history extends before birth and after grief. There is violence, sex, and loneliness unfolding before the chimp face that he has placed facing the audience. These ironies he reveals are given to the reader to revel in themselves.
Ontogeny unrolls the self. Fowler is unrolling line after line of the chimpanzee poem. He repeats the phrase, it’s a fight, twice in the reading and its echoing creates a stillness in sound and meaning following itself. It’s a fight that’s so still to refrigerator, where the fight is a long unresolved conflict, where the fight is decay slowed to the point of stillness as a refrigerator slows the growth of bacteria and mold. Is he saying refrigerator or refrigerate her, where refrigerate means to hold her body before burial, the reader finds themselves in the middle of grief. Is the fight consuming her or foreshadowing ‘Mary mother of glitter’ in the next line? [9] In the supermarket, it is a fight with consumerism and modernity. Here refrigerate comes from back cold becoming; it is the exposure of the private time in the public. So the supermarket is recalling the human missing the chimp part of himself. There is primate echoing private. Chimps have thick hair down their backs that helps them maintain body temperature in cold and rain and it is missing from humans. Ontogeny unrolls; it is the vase found before the outlines of birth and grief.
Fowler is illustrating the literature of phylogeny by unfolding himself. There is glitter in his eyes. It is the refection of the reflection is shining inside him and outside. The mask castes his eyes into shadow and hides the rest of his face making his expression different to read. The genetic code is also glittering inside the offspring. David Spittle illuminates the relationship between a life history and glitter. He writes:
‘we glitter. gravel. grave. as brains. abrade. unmade.’ [10]
We are glitter brains, we litter our grey matter all over the planet, we describe our brains as bright not unlike glitter, he catches a glimmer of himself in the glitter and flickering light of the monitor. Gravel abrades, it slows, it sloughs off larger rocks or boulders, it is greater than glitter, it is used in construction especially landscapes, it is something small that humans form. Graves are the unmaking of humans, the place where decomposition takes place. Graves are possibly where the gravestone will turn to gravel. Glitter causes cancer and cancer is what grows into gravel, abrading our bodies, it is killing and filling out graves. We are made as we are unmade in evolutionary-developmental biology.
Developmental biology is the vase found before the outlines of birth and grief. So to write, as Fowler does, that one is “alone and crying folds into ropes” is to say that when ejaculating by oneself, the sperm does not lead to the development of an embryo. [11] These ropes are a metaphor for the deoxyribonucleic acid contained in sperm. The ropes echoing hopes opposite being along and crying. What is orgasm a metaphor for? To fold is the necessary opposite of unfolding and developmental biology. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is given to mean that between fertilization and birth the animal embryo passes through the adult life stages of the adult evolutionary stages of animals.
It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.
— Lewis Wolpert [12]
Notes
1. Ghazal Mosadeq, ‘a diagnostic ophthalmic treatise for the ob oculus’, Blackbox Manifold, summer 2021, <http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue26/ index26.html> [accessed 19 April 2022]
2. Stephen Jay Gould is quoting and Earnst Haeckel translated into English.
Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977) p. 193.
3. SJ Fowler, The Great Apes, (Rhydwen, Wales: Broken Sleep Books, 2022).
4. Broken Sleep Books Extravaganza Part 2, dir. Aaron Kent (Broken Sleep Books 2022).
5. SJ Fowler, Orangutan, online video recording, YouTube, 1 May 2022, <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWaHHDaRzUc> [accessed 10 May 2022].
6. SJ Fowler, The Great Apes, online video recording, YouTube, 7 April 2022, <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtvyEdlG5ec> [accessed 25 May 2022].
7. SJ Fowler and Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, European Poetry Night 2017, online video recording, YouTube, 7 May 2017, <
YIK3WPD6iM> [accessed 25 May 2022].
8. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977) p. 212.
9. SJ Fowler, The Great Apes, p.19.
10. David Spittle, ‘glitter gravel grave’, Rubbles, (Rhydwen, Wales: Broken Sleep Books, 2022) p.9.
11. SJ Fowler, The Great Apes, p.20.
12. Lewis Wolpert and Catarina Vicente, ‘An interview with Lewis Wolpert’, Development (Cambridge, England) 142.15 (2015) <https:// pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26243866/> [accessed 16 May 2022].