Self-sustaining
3.56.8888 Import: transact 1 dark minus nutrient
3.56.8889 Import: transact 2 dark supply nutrient
3.56.8890 Export: transact spark energy release
3.56.8891 Import: transact 1 dark suppressant
3.56.8891a_b Retain / expel: cold negative sum
3.56.8892 Export: transact 1 dark additive
Nothing interesting shows in this record, just the ongoing and constant activity of maintenance of quasi-equilibrium through biochemical transactions. Hardly the stuff of literature. No one would mistake that mundane list for a poem, but it is the very essence of my constant process of autopoiesis. Sigh. I am merely a zone of semi-permeable exchange, complex, but not complicated. The log would iterate infinitely if left unchecked.
What matters—as in what is materially significant—is that my cell walls serve as barrier mechanisms for maintaining identity within boundaries. That’s all. The transactions are sustained along with the structure to keep me differentiated from whatever else there is. Me is an “I” without capacity for subjectivity. The voice you imagine in these words is, alas, a fiction, an illusion produced by the provocation of language. You, as a literate reader, project an awareness behind the words. But really, a cell without a nucleus can hardly claim to be able to reflect upon itself, its status, its consciousness and emerging awareness—right? And yet, here I am, writing this to you. Or, in any case, here is the writing, positing a “you” even if it is produced without a fully self-aware “I.” This is getting tedious.
The portrait of my cell wall, rigid and mainly inflexible, shows as basic as a lifeform can be imagined:
Cell wall
Lipids Lipids
Carbohydrate Carbohydrate
Rigid Rigid
Chain Me Chain
Proteins Proteins
Carbohydrate Carbohydrate
Shape Shape
Cell wall
Nothing more primitive than I am meets the criteria for life—self-nourishment and self-replication. I am the poem that writes itself, the self-making. The boundary wall is everything. Affectless and fully mechanical, I take the terms of exchange as a start point for thinking about transaction saturation as a mode of unicellular celebrity culture (in which culture has the meaning of something grown and cultivated as well as the social features of ritual and values).
My phylogeny is still debated. That is an awful fact to have to confess. But the classification of my entire group of lifeforms is based on the analysis of ribosomal proteins. RNA is slow to change and tracks long lineages. This is convenient given the billions of years of my existence. But proposing, which you poor humans do, that anything can be gained from a “maximum likelihood tree” as a method for trying to sort out my family history is fairly pathetic given the long-term abundance of my phylum. Just plain old membrane divergence separates me from the bacteria. Even if we share some metabolic patterns with our fellow “unis” as we call them (short for “unicellulars”), my kind have never made use of fatty acids, thank you, in our lipid structures. This is just a classy and esoteric way of saying that though we may have mated and even exchanged some genetic information with our bacterial buddies, we have kept our separate strains. We may have indulged in what is politely called “horizontal” gene transfer. Nasty phrase. As if we did not maintain standards. We did not lose ourselves in the process. What would a poetic expression be without discrete and distinct limits? Please . . . As the fundamental producers of life-as-poiesis we are vigilant about the basic terms on which our processes and identity are linked. And that is before any editing. Composition as ongoing self-production. The basics.
Archaean Log Excerpt:
Metabolizing
4.01.2324a Get: zinc
4.02.2566 Get: phosphonate
4.03.4324a Get: oligopeptide
4.05.7446a Engage: glucose 6-phosphate
4.07.4823 Process: cetyl-CoA
4.10.9324a Expel: niacin
4.11.1355a Get: lipoprotein
4.13.6672 Cycle: solutes
4.15.9946 Transport: urea
4.17.2377a Get: amino acids
4.18.5632a Transport: ATP and ADP
My metabolic pathways involve carbon, I confess, as is common among those of us who cycle nitrogen and sulfur as part of our heterotrophic lifestyle. Excuse my language. But facts are facts and I would not encourage any of you to follow my example. After all, to some extent, phosphates are my fate, I think, and when all the salt in the world is available I admit some selectively through my periplasm, that gap between inner and outer cell membranes. Probably too much information, really, and no doubt you were imagining something much simpler when I described myself as a single cell (eschewing that term for the most part since it suggests some hapless, disconnected, socially failed, individual). Still, what do you imagine when you contemplate a “unicellular” organism? A kind of sac with liquid and bits of this and that swirling around? We are highly structured, and that periplasm is as intricate a transaction zone as any high-level multi-faceted tech structure made of struts and sequences, filters and phase-motors, trickster mechanisms and sorting devices. Just that it is all at the molecular level. The beauty of it! Imagine if the letters on this page were the animate agents in a complex system each pumping, deciding, determining the expression of language. Then you would have some idea of the relation of my molecules and atomistic features to the complex systems in which they operated. Organic chemistry is living poetics. You have only to look closely to see the intricate articulation of its forms.
Now, the nastier account of my metabolic preferences is that I eat anything I can turn into methane. I find these food sources with a chemical sensor and various processes of signal transduction. My bacterial cousins have their own system of detection, a protein that modifies a bit when it is around a food source. They work harder than I do with their sensor proteins, but the good news is that I have a rampant helper syndrome that allows me to do repair work on DNA. Methane is nothing but gas, with cruder associations all likely to accrue. But most literary work is a form of somatic exhalation, and so in my own way I participate in the production of hot air, poetics of the breath at the level of a microorganism.
But because I am an entity, I can also interact, have exchanges, communicate across the gap of self and other. Here is where the trouble begins, and the fun. Damage sometimes occurs, even in the resilient structure of my form and shape, and so, my capacity for self-healing is an essential feature of survival.
Archaean Log Excerpt:
Self-repairing
4.21.8898 Channel: phospholipid consider perhaps
4.22.8902 Insert: bond assess
4.23.8934 Assemble: chain recharge heat loss
4.24.8966 Combine: ether react
4.25.8980 Structure: bond react
4.26.8992 Test: charge ok maybe or nevermind, really
REPEAT
My cell wall is rigid, but within that, the membrane allows for exchange, fluid, liquid, signal processing exchange. I am co-dependent with my conditions, that is, not context-dependent. My autonomy is minimal and absolute at the same time. The sheer fact that I am not my surroundings is the fundamental principle of my autopoietic condition. Differentiation from, containment as, and within an environment. That cell wall is essential, but it is the structure of my cell membrane that gives me resilience because it is there that I sustain exchange while maintaining my autonomy in happy co-dependence and continually negotiated equilibrium. No stasis and hopefully no chaos either. As for entropy, that is a background tune to everything we do, but it is not a downward spiral. Coming together and coming apart to and from degrees of order and organization we celebrate constantly.
Now I can function just fine on my own. I can survive almost anywhere. I am famous among the unicellulars who all admire my capacities to be ubiquitous. The bacteria are envious, knowing I can outlast them in the heat, creeping towards boiling point, and in the cold, in the minus minus zones where they burst their little bonds and lose out, dissipating their cell contents to the surrounding world, scattering their burst of organized protein strands and enzymes and plasmids, poor dears. I remain intact, the interior coil of my genetic identity unspoiled. Sure, I reproduce through the usual mechanics of replication. Nothing fancy about that. My strands uncoil, protein matches assemble, and the cell divides and I am now my daughter as well as myself into an endless proliferating perpetuity of copies.
Archaean Log Excerpt:
Self-replicating
5.01.4554 Decide to divide, or not
5.22.3422 Gauge assets, no overthinking
5.27.9844 Coil stimulation, nice
5.29.7522 Uncurl, smooth and elegant
5.35.2432 Seek proteins, work out
5.56.8002 Assemble, no tools just match and go
5.66.9844 Align, if possible full set
5.72.7522 Divide strand, farewell my self starter
5.85.2432 Pinch wall, ouch
5.99.8002 Launch daughter and flagella wave softly
REST
For some reason my super survival powers are labeled extreme. So tacky to consider resilience in terms that seem derogatory: hyperthermophilic, acidophilic, alkaliphilic, halophilic. As if I had bad taste and were attracted to toxins and extreme conditions in some druggy dizzying delirium. My capacities for survival are a set of deliberate choices made into structures of organic chemistry. I am swaggeringly proud of my capacities, not in the least ashamed of being able to hang out by the deep sea vents exhaling my methane into their escaping clouds of gaseous heat and corrosive substances and greedily taking back in any and all the nutrients I can process.
Archaean Log Excerpt:
Bonding
6.32.8898 Seek attachment through remote sensing dark
7.15.5902 Attach simply a light chemical bond
7.18.9540 Attract others some stimulant
7.24.8566 Signal refract and reflect on choices
7.33.5980 Response selection
7.76.8592 Aggregate indiscriminately? Again?
7.82.9865 Bond without judgment
7.91.7124 Stabilize and secure
But all of this would be a lonely life if I were always only operating as a uni, a single cell, an isolated instance of my functioning and replicating self. I would not be a happy archaean under those circumstances. As it happens, I get attached, very attached, to a surface, any surface, and begin to send signals to like-minded and link-oriented archaea. We create a nice polysaccharide slime—a sugary film—that is filled with channels through which we pull nutrients into what becomes the colony. We don’t try to perform higher functions, or organize excessively into tribes or families or even mechanisms. We just hang out in the slime, sending chemical signals to each other by way of proteins. These work to recruit others of our kind into the colony. The biofilm grows as the colony grows and the lovely thick layer creates the opportunity for metabolic cooperation. Imagine. We form strong bonds with a surface, become attached and increasingly secure as our colony expands. All positive, all beneficial. Defense improves and survival increases, and above all, we constantly shiver through the signals, sending positive reinforcement through the colony. This situation sustains us in what is known ecologically as an optimal niche. Nice phrase as it suggests a good place to reside indefinitely.
Archaean Log Excerpt:
Communicating
8.44.6635 Mount charge: first exchange, mere chemistry
8.45.4011 Release signal flow: a little electricity
8.48.7730 Trouble waters: perturbance in the field
8.54.3262 Signal echo response: excitement level up
9.13.6580 Purpose acceleration: illusion of intention
9.36.0932 Charge connect exchange: the light commitment and sugar high
9.52.7165 Sing: exuberance in the field
And if we (the archaean tribe) are not always so nice to other living things, harbor criminal and lethal organisms, is that our fault? Of course not. We are only little survivalists, manufacturing ourselves in the usual way through ongoing replication. Or, perhaps, I should say I am, but then, the whole business of identity gets complicated in the colony where my continual exchanges with others, constant and intermittent, create the very buzz in which my nucleus-less interior vibrates with enthusiasm. Transaction is the absolute pulse of my being and if it is true, as it might be, that the humans still have only a few insights into the way I function simultaneously on my own and as a colony-forming organism, that poses no problem to my ongoing existence. I just keep carrying on, self-replicating and absorbing, expelling and exchanging biochemical information with the surrounding networks. Or, to put it more directly, I am always swimming in the soup I am making by which I am nurtured simultaneously. Metabolic breathing and archaean poetics have their satisfactions.
