On Being A Tube Worm

This is only going to involve a bit of light zoölogy.

That illustration above, of a polychæte worm called Chætopterus, looks quite fierce and jagged. In fact these animals are entirely innocuous to humans and we rarely encounter them, but I have at times become inordinately focussed on them. Although this is not really about them, they’re worth considering, so I’ll go into a bit of detail.

Any number of species of animal sit around all the time not doing very much, particularly in the sea and to a lesser extent in the much harsher environment of freshwater rivers, lakes and ponds. There’s no particular reason to single Chætopterus in this respect. It just happens to be one of those countless animals whose lifestyle involves doing very little other than filtering food out of water. The picture shows such a worm in a state it would rarely be in while alive, because in its burrow its chætæ would be lying flat against its sides, and they are by no means sharp or offensive weapons. It lives in a mucus-lined U-shaped burrow in mud or sand, although some of them live under rocks. The middle section has fans which draw sea water down towards them and the front makes a bag of mucus in which a bolus of food is formed, which it passes down its back towards its mouth. The current it creates also enables it to breathe, just as a fish’s gills exchange dissolved gases in a current. It’s completely blind, but oddly it also glows blue when disturbed. Any consciousness it has does not include the luminescence, so it can’t perceive that it does this and there’s no possibility of it being a signal between individuals of the same species. There are a couple of small species of crab who tend to share its burrow and they can’t live anywhere else.

Really, the point is not the animal itself, as it’s only one of many sessile organisms who do nothing but filter feed on the bottom of bodies of water. In some cases this is extreme, in the sense that they actually live kilometres down on the abyssal plains of the oceans, but on the whole their lives seem quite simple compared to our own. They just suck and eat. In the case of Chætopterus they also have separate sexes, but even simultaneous hermaphrodites generally benefit as a species from combining their gametes with other individuals. It is worth asking how a sexual animal that just lies there all day can reproduce and whether this contributes to the richness of their life experience. Females release a chemical which stimulates the males to release sperm, which in turn stimulates the females to release eggs. In both cases this is done by rupturing the body wall, so in a sense both sexes explode with pleasure, and we might imagine this as orgasmic. The gametes then combine in the water, becoming planktonic larvæ, most of whom are presumably eaten, possibly by adults of the same species. Being a tube worm is not like being human. The presumed death of the parent worms conveniently gets them out of the way for the next generation, preventing them from hogging resources such as food and substrate, and is pretty normal for thousands of animal species. It means that they are all absentee parents and orphans, and they substitute parental care with prodigious physical reproduction.

It seems to be an easy life. It also seems to be the kind of life which, if lived by a human being, would lead to our swift demise. There are trivial ways in which this is true: for instance, obviously no human is going to live very long buried in the seabed trying to breathe water. However, on the whole it’s a very inactive life, and although there are overuse injuries, often acquired by athletes, humans more often suffer as a result of physical inactivity or disuse: “use it or lose it”. In the richer parts of the planet, many health problems are associated with not doing very much physically, although the situation is very different in the global South, and has historically been elsewhere. Yet there are many animals who do best when left alone.

In a way, the life of a polychæte worm buried in silt all her adult life is idyllic. On the other hand, harnessing the probably instinctive taboos humans have about mucus, what she’s “actually” doing is very similar to picking her bogies and eating them, because the dust we inhale which gets trapped in our nostrils by the mucus and is then sometimes disposed of by people “picking their nose and chewing it” as the song has it, is how she keeps body and soul together. An odd thought in a way, and also a disgusting one. She also lives in a tube of congealed mucus. There’s another question here. Is this tube to be considered part of the animal’s body or is it just a container? Also, if it’s the latter, it could be considered to be clothing for worms in a way, so humans are not the only clothed species, although caddis fly larvæ cases are a lot closer to what we do.

The inevitable issue of consciousness arises. As a panpsychist, I am going to say that of course this species is conscious. There’s even a central nervous system including a brain. Some polychætes, notably peacock worms, react a hundred times faster than we can, which makes them superior in that one respect. I don’t know if this is true of parchment worms (which is what they’re called because of the texture of their tubes) as they don’t seem to need to respond so quickly to a stimulus. Their companion crabs use their burrows to hide from predators, so it’s probably quite a dull life from that perspective too. Nonetheless they can sense the pheromones in the water, seem to make some kind of decision as to when to release them, also choose when to move the lump of food and mucus towards their mouths and do something which results in them glowing blue when they’re threatened, although that could in theory be passive. There also seems to be some awareness of the passage of time, or of the right conditions coming about, in the female initiation of the reproductive sequence. However, thinking of our own puberty, although there is a correspondence between life events and hormonal changes, they aren’t, at least straightforwardly, under conscious control. The endocrine system has parallels to the nervous system and even uses some of the same compounds such as adrenalin, but only one appears to involve consciousness clearly. All that said, maybe there’s a shadowy, or not so shadowy, consciousness within our endocrine and immune systems, and maybe they’re even linked to what we think of as our nervous system-based consciousness. After all, almost nobody who remembers or experiences it would say puberty doesn’t pack an emotional punch, and this is just one example of a hormonal event, albeit a near-universal one.

The SF writer Philip K. Dick introduced the concept of “zebra”. Based on the idea that zebra stripes are a form of camouflage, which they probably aren’t, PKD conjectures that although we may be aware of camouflage which works well to fool other species into not noticing particular organisms, there could also be a successfully camouflaged entity which completely deceives all human beings. Although it’s almost impossible for this to be a scientific possibility, because the idea is that it is in principle impossible to observe this entity, nothing seems to rule it out, and there’s also an element of humility in the idea that we humans may be as subject to being deceived as any other animal. There are very clear examples where we know we’re being fooled some of the time, as with the likes of flatfish and cuttlefish who can change colour and hide themselves visually, and the way cricket chirps seem to come from a different direction than the actual cricket is a similar happenstance, but the rational possibility exists that there could be something we will never see or know about. Our sensory world is quite restricted in various ways, notably due to our practically non-existent sense of smell, and it seems feasible that a dog, for instance, would be able to smell our fear or a change in odour when we get certain types of cancer. We don’t know what tricks or senses are possible which are not available to us. Hence what are the chances that, just as Chætopterus glows blue when threatened, presumably scaring off some potential predators, we also have an adaptation which serves a function for us but of which we are completely unaware, even in principle? It needn’t be something particularly exotic. Maybe we emit an aversive odour when we’re afraid which deters predators, and dogs can smell it but are not averted.

Carefree lives are probably rare, and I’m thinking of all animal lives here, possibly more than that. I was clearing up some lumber earlier and a spider fled across one of the planks. I think it would be a failure of empathy to deny she was afraid. Whether that’s actually so is another matter, but the benefit of the doubt should be exercised on most occasions. If you see an animal of whatever size or phylum moving as fast as they can away from an obvious threat, it makes sense that that’s how they’re feeling. I could go on, but I won’t. The observation was once made to me that in the past, every human adult’s life involved being afraid, hungry and tired almost all the time, and the same still applies to the rest of the animal kingdom. I’m not entirely sure this is true of humans because they were on top of things, but it does occur to me that childbirth and parenting of small children at least seems to resemble that more closely than most of the rest of human life in an industrial or post-industrial society for most White able-bodied wealthy (etc) humans.

There used to be a pair of wood pigeons which nested in a sycamore tree outside our house. During discomfortable conversations with Sarada I used to look at them and imagine they had an easy, simple, happy relationship raising chicks and letting them free into the adult world. They came back at least once. Then it became clear that the sycamore was sending roots under the neighbours’ house and causing damage, and it was deemed that the tree be felled. This was not while they were nesting in it, but it occurred to me that they might return to their haunt the next year and find it gone, so their life wasn’t really as blissful as all that, thanks partly to us. Probably most of a wood pigeon’s life is nasty and miserable. The average lifespan of the species in the wild is three years, but they can live for more than seventeen in captivity, demonstrating the difference between potential and reality. A house mouse can be expected to live an average of eighteen weeks but could live to be a year and a half. I don’t know if these figures are skewed by infant mortality. This was probably never true of humans or their childhoods would have to have been a lot shorter than they generally are, but it shows how hard life generally is.

But the thing is, maybe life for humans is supposed to be hard. Not for us that nice cosy mucus-coated burrow in the mud. Something about our very existence might have to be difficult for us to live at all. When I consider our granddaughter, I’m acutely aware that she is happy and carefree much of the time, or so I imagine, but thinking back at my own childhood I can remember that at the age of ten I traced back what I worried about and found that worry had been my constant companion for as long as I could remember. That might be me of course, but I don’t think childhood is the happiest time of most people’s lives, or rather, I don’t think childhood is usually happy. It might be that adulthood has more potential for happiness but maybe it doesn’t get realised. Nor do I think poverty is the sole culprit here because many wealthy people are thoroughly miserable, not necessarily because of their wealth but because that’s what life is like. On the other hand, maybe that’s just what we’re supposed to believe because human life could be a whole lot better but it isn’t, though not because of non-human influences.

They shoot horses. I don’t honestly believe it’s kinder to do so because there are examples of horses who were able to recover from serious limb injury, but it is also true that to a considerable extent a horse is a running being, and not being able to do so is psychologically and physically injurious. Humans need to be good at being human, but it isn’t always clear what that involves. We don’t, then, benefit from living in slimy holes on the sea bed, but what do we benefit from?

I’m not totally clear what I’m getting at here. Maybe I should’ve thought about it a bit longer, or maybe you can tell me.

11A0 – 11B0

One of the drawbacks of the Unicode system is that it lacks proper duodecimal symbols. Hence rather than using unambiguous dozenal symbols, of which there are various forms, none of which I can type here, I’ve resorted to using A and B to represent ten and eleven. When I first thought about writing this post, it was going to be about the 1990s CE, but since I am fairly committed to duodecimal it’s instead about the years 1992 to 2004. At the start of this cycle (which is what I call the analogue to decades in duodecimal, after “A Cycle Of Cathay”), I was two dozen and obviously at the end I was three dozen, so it covers what might be regarded as the first cycle of my adult life. Almost equivalent to a Jovian year in fact. The brain is said to stop growing at the age of two dozen, so that could be said to mark the beginning of adulthood. It’s sometimes informative to shake up the way we measure space and time to see if it brings any new insights.

One insight this brings is the tendency for most of the world to think in terms of decades, centuries and millennia, because those bits of rhetoric and marketing, for example, and the psychological divisions created by nice, neat round numbers in our lives and history, will tend to be at odds with this method of reckoning ages and dates. There will appear to be a sudden flurry of activity around 11A8 which represents Y2K and the turn of the Millennium which looks quite distinct and perhaps a bit odd from a duodecimal perspective. Had we been working to a different base, and let’s face it it probably would’ve been octal or hexadecimal rather than duodecimal because of how digital computers represent integers, the year 2000 would’ve been 3720 or 7C0, both round numbers to be sure but not epoch-making ones.

While I’m on the subject of Y2K, this was one significant concern during the 11A0s. However, in some ways it was also a decidedly odd one. Whereas it made sense that various mainframes would be grinding through two-digit representations of the year in that way, programmers of yore having opted to save storage space back in the 1170s and 1180s because they expected the year 11A8 to be the realm of science fiction, hover cars and holidays on Cynthia, Microsoft didn’t have the same excuse because DOS had stored the year as a value starting from 4th January 1980₁₀ which would not have gone round the clock on 1st January 11A8 at all, and for some reason it was a problem they had actually introduced with Windows when it became an operating system rather than a front end quite a bit closer to the crucial date. I have no idea why they did this but it seems irrational.

There is an æsthetic based on this period, or the latter half of it at least, characterised by futurism, optimism and shiny, liquid and spherical 3-D CGI. It was the cycle the internet went mainstream, and up until 9/11 there seemed to be a distinct atmosphere of optimism about the future. It may have been ephemeral and vapid, but it was there. And this is where I have some sympathy, though not agreement, with the conspiracy theories built up around the Twin Towers. I can’t remember the minutiæ of their content and it may have been rather dissimilar to my view, but the parsimonious, Ockham’s Razor-style approach to be taken to this is to assert that building up the War On Terror around the incident made it very convenient for the military-industrial complex. It would be going too far to assert anything else, or to insert “suspiciously” into that, and in fact to do so would distract from the situation we need to confront: that it led to the situation where the idea of making life better for people was discarded for a fatuous agenda of protecting the public from violence committed by non-state actors, without regard for the cause of these acts or how to prevent them by changing social conditions, or comparing the number of people killed with the number killed in the countries concerned by the NATO powers. Subjectively, it was like they just couldn’t let us be hopeful or look forward to a better future. Oh no. They had to crap on our dreams instead.

But the dreams were in any case nebulous. In this country they were, for me, associated with the fairly mournful and small expectation that New Labour had been lying about being right wing extremists. That government also entered into an illegal war on the back of 9/11. Even so, on the day after the election in May 11A5 people were smiling at each other in the street because we thought the dozen and a half year long nightmare was finally over. For me, much of the time was very positive, because in that period we got married and had our two children, but this isn’t meant to be personal. In contradiction to that, it was also when I got heavily involved in home ed, trained, qualified and started to practice as a herbalist.

This was also the cycle when the internet became the Web. This actually started with the World Wide Web browser in 119A, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of course, but even when I started using it at home in 11A7 there was still quite a presence in the form of the likes of Usenet, FTP sites and so on. At the time, this seemed like an entirely positive resource although I had reservations about inequality of access in the global South which led me to doubt the wisdom of allowing myself the privilege. It was also very expensive in terms of bytes per pound compared to today. What was definitely absent at the time was the strong influence of social media. There’s a sense in which social media have existed since the 1170s in the form of PLATO at the University of Illinois, and behaviour on bulletin boards was quite like that, but the scale on which it happened was very small compared to the world’s population. Classmates is a possible instance of the earliest social media website although there are various contenders: this one dates from 11A3. In another area of IT telecommunications, mobile ‘phones started to take off and as an afterthought, texting was included. This became very significant during the 11A0s and mobiles moved from being yuppie devices to must-haves. I actually still haven’t adjusted to this, to the annoyance of my immediate family, so in a sense to me the revolution afforded by mobile devices hasn’t happened in the same way. On the whole, I don’t think this is a bad thing.

Things were a lot more analogue back then. Video cassettes and laser discs, the latter very obscure to most people, were the only way to watch things on TV other than actual live-broadcast television itself. However, digital optical discs had existed since before the beginning of the cycle. This is a pattern, not particularly distinctive of the ‘A0s, that the technologies which were later to transform society already existed but had not been widely adopted. However, I don’t want this to turn into a mere consumerist survey of high-tech products, so I’ll go all the way back to the “End Of History”.

In 11A0, Francis Fukuyama claimed in his book of the same name that history had ended. What he meant by this was not that events would cease to occur but that liberal democracy had proved itself to be the best form of government and that it would in the long term become increasingly prevalent. This is an overwhelmingly depressing and perhaps smug position, and in fact I don’t think it even makes sense. The problem with the idea that liberal democracy will triumph is that the parties involved in such governments would ideally aim for something other than liberal democracy, such as fascism or socialism or something less extreme, and proper politics without those aims is impossible. Fukuyama’s view of “democracy” would be anything but, because it would involve bland, practically identical political parties which did nothing to change the status quo, and that isn’t democracy, whether you’re right wing, left wing or something else. It’s also proved not to be so since in any case, since nationalism, conservative religion and various forms of authoritarianism have become more influential since then. Now I have to admit that I haven’t read his book, but the ideas are around in public discourse. This is related to the blandification of the Labour Party during this period. People didn’t seem to want to vote for something which was actually good.

One of the most shocking things for British progressives over this period was the Conservative victory in 11A0. It was widely believed that Labour would win the election that year, and even exit polls strongly suggested a Labour majority. Instead, the Tories received a record-breaking number of votes. Following on my experience in the previous year where I became utterly disgusted with popular support for the first Gulf War, I just got really angry with English people in general at their dishonesty and cowardice. They hadn’t admitted that they were voting for the “nasty party” because they were ashamed, so on some level they either recognised it was wrong or that they wouldn’t be able to convince people that it was the right thing to do. This was probably the first time I experienced the peculiar nightmarish quality of a traumatically negative electoral or referendum result coming in on the radio overnight, which was to be repeated several times until the Trump and Brexit results. It also made the relatively progressive years between 1161 and 118B look like a blip in history when things were getting better for the common people, but the idea of doing that was now consigned to history.

All of that sounds quite depressing. However, it isn’t the whole story. The beginning of the cycle had been a time of awakening consciousness for many people, with Acid House and Ecstasy becoming important. I didn’t partake myself although the end of the previous cycle had involved a lot of dancing and clubbing. It felt like there was going to be some kind of conceptual breakthrough, although it had also been observed that the use of psychedelic drugs like LSD at that time was more like wanting a picture show than a fundamental shift in consciousness. I can’t comment from an informed position on that, but it seems to me that they have such a profound influence on the mind that even if people went into it with that in mind, they would still come out profoundly changed. Of course, the government either didn’t like this or decided to capitalise on some mythical “Middle England” by introducing the Criminal Justice Bill with its notorious “succession of repetitive beats” clause, and a number of other measures such as the end to the right to silence. This was in 11A2. It also clamped down on squatters, hunt sabbers and anti-roads protests. Another quote from the government at about this time was something like “we don’t want to go down in history as the government which allowed any kind of alternative society to survive”, which had a flavour of genocide about it. Also, in order for that to work, society as it was would need to have some kind of appeal to it and not be bent on the destruction of the planet.

In many ways, then, this period was one of contradictions. The establishment was heavily asserting itself in academia, which made me wonder about complacency in that area. This was just after I’d dropped out of an academic career in disgust at Nick Land’s and other people’s response to neoliberalism as almost something to be enjoyed, and feminist hostility to animal liberation. It occurs to me now that I might have stayed to defend progressive opinion and movements, and after that disillusionment I became rather aimless and cynical. But on the other hand, it was also a cycle of hope and optimism, with the expectation that progress could be made in other ways. And it wasn’t all negative. Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, Germany reunified (this is a mixed bag of course but it meant the reunification of communities too), there was the Good Friday Agreement (again a mix because it seemed to mean giving up hope of a reunified Ireland), the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the establishment of the Welsh Assembly, and on reflection the real flavour of that period was a strange mix of hope and despair. Hope seemed to be sustained through lack of political analysis and despair emerged on close examination of events, but that doesn’t invalidate the more positive side. I suppose the real question is, how can we extend the principle of hope, as Ernst Bloch put it, from this superficial shiny façade into something more profound which transmutes political action into something valuable?