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Cellmates

As I remember it, Vole was already up and running when Lewis Thomas arose in our midst like some ecological genie, a combination of gentle evangelist and stand-up comedian. It was 1977, and Richard Boston, founder of the magazine, arrived at an early editorial gathering bearing a copy of Thomas’s book The Lives of a Cell, with the clear message that it was required reading. It had recently been awarded, unprecedentedly, two US National Book Awards, one in the Arts category, the other in Science, and been described in The New Yorker as a ‘shimmering vision’.

Thomas was something of a vision himself, as improbable as a tortoise with wings. He was a scientist who was not only literate but also poetic. He was a polymath, as learned about etymology as entomology. He had written a meditation on listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the subtext of which was a troubled attack on his country’s nuclear weaponry. And somehow he found time from his day job shaping policy for medical education in America to contribute a left-field column called ‘Notes of a Biology Watcher’ to the New England Journal of Medicine, on subjects that seemed as bizarrely disconnected as moth pheromones and Bach’s St Matthew Passion. But these ‘Notes’ weren’t disconnected, except in the most literal sense, and it was Thomas’s genius to conjure some thirty of them into a coherent treatise full of astonishing, reverberating knowledge and sublime prose. Against the grain of the times, The Lives of a Cell shunned environmental doom and New Age waffle, and celebrated instead the tenacity of life and the way, specifically and allegorically, it all joined up. And greatly to our point, it was wickedly, surreally funny. We fell on it as if we’d been handed down a house-style bible from on high.

Vole had been established to explore, in a necessarily more lowly, quotidian fashion, the same themes as Thomas. It wa

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As I remember it, Vole was already up and running when Lewis Thomas arose in our midst like some ecological genie, a combination of gentle evangelist and stand-up comedian. It was 1977, and Richard Boston, founder of the magazine, arrived at an early editorial gathering bearing a copy of Thomas’s book The Lives of a Cell, with the clear message that it was required reading. It had recently been awarded, unprecedentedly, two US National Book Awards, one in the Arts category, the other in Science, and been described in The New Yorker as a ‘shimmering vision’.

Thomas was something of a vision himself, as improbable as a tortoise with wings. He was a scientist who was not only literate but also poetic. He was a polymath, as learned about etymology as entomology. He had written a meditation on listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the subtext of which was a troubled attack on his country’s nuclear weaponry. And somehow he found time from his day job shaping policy for medical education in America to contribute a left-field column called ‘Notes of a Biology Watcher’ to the New England Journal of Medicine, on subjects that seemed as bizarrely disconnected as moth pheromones and Bach’s St Matthew Passion. But these ‘Notes’ weren’t disconnected, except in the most literal sense, and it was Thomas’s genius to conjure some thirty of them into a coherent treatise full of astonishing, reverberating knowledge and sublime prose. Against the grain of the times, The Lives of a Cell shunned environmental doom and New Age waffle, and celebrated instead the tenacity of life and the way, specifically and allegorically, it all joined up. And greatly to our point, it was wickedly, surreally funny. We fell on it as if we’d been handed down a house-style bible from on high. Vole had been established to explore, in a necessarily more lowly, quotidian fashion, the same themes as Thomas. It was to be an ecoliterary monthly, radical, satirical, iconoclastic – especially of environmental piety on the one hand and forelock-touching, ‘country’ writing on the other. The title had been inspired by the famously gloopy phrase Evelyn Waugh attributes to his nature columnist hero in Scoop: ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ The result was a barely classifiable hybrid, something between Private Eye, The Whole Earth Catalog and the lighter sections of the New Statesman. Under its banner Boston assembled a starry and eclectic class of contributors: Richard Ingrams, Terry Jones (who provided the startup money), Miles Kington, Gillian Darley, Paul Foot, Jeremy Bugler, cartoonists Posy Simmonds and Ralph Steadman, and even Richard D. North, who before his mysterious metamorphosis into the intellectual voice of environmental contrarianism, was the cheerfully anarchic contributor of a bicycling column entitled ‘Volocipede’. Vole was full of excruciating puns like this, which I like to think the Master, in his etymologist’s robes, would have applauded as examples of the frequently dodgy evolution of language. His own language was anything but dodgy. It was exact, idiosyncratic and often heart-stoppingly beautiful – never more so than in the book’s key passage, where he re-imagines that step-changing first photograph of earth from space:
Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos . . . it has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvellously skilled in handling the sun.

‘Has the look of ’ is Thomas’s signature phrase. Bees building a  hive ‘have the look of embryonic cells organizing a developing tissue’. Language itself has the look of an evolving organism. This is his favourite trope for introducing startling insights (or maybe foresights) into the patterns of life.

In an essay entitled ‘The Music of this Sphere’ he imagines the combined sounds of all the world’s organisms as symphonic, as a ‘grand canonical ensemble’. If we were able to hear them all together – the proboscal flutings of death’s-head hawk moths, the rhythmic drumming of schools of molluscs, the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun – ‘the combined sound might lift us off our feet’. And then he drops in the possibility that whales may hear their own convoluted melodies again after they have circumnavigated the globe, and work critically on new variations . . .

He explores an analogous connectivity in ‘Vibes’, about communication by smell (or at least by vaporous chemical messaging) and has a delicious vision of the earth – again seen as a kind of giant cell – kept up to speed by a worldwide web of scent:

In this immense organism, chemical signals might serve the function of global hormones, keeping balance and symmetry in the operation of various interrelated working parts, informing tissues in the vegetation of the Alps about the state of eels in the Sargasso Sea, by long, interminable relays of interconnected messages between all kinds of other creatures.

This was another what-if metaphor, not a scientific theory – but only to the extent that Thomas was extrapolating known phenomena on to a much larger stage. And sometimes metaphors do have literal counterparts. The chimeras of mythology – centaurs, griffons, phoenixes – have real-world analogues, not least in our own cells, which are pacific communities of small animals and plants living independently in these minute bags of fluid.

I don’t think we explored many of Thomas’s themes directly in Vole, but his constant emphasis on symbiosis, repeating patterns, weird synergies and improbable connectivities seeped into our poorer – but porous – imaginations. We devoted most of an issue to an elaborate spoof that satirized two targets – New Mysticism and new mega-companies – with one shot. British Leyland, we exclusively revealed, was a latter-day Druidic cult, and the motorway system one of modernist ley-lines. The map which showed them linking the sacred sites of oil-culture, such as Luton Airport and the BL plant at Coventry, via the holy wells of service stations, was alarmingly convincing. The vintage Slow Issue, which had features on snails, steam trains, the ‘slow egg’ (cooked by being wrapped in black paper and left out in the sun), the virtues of procrastination, and, of course, on sloes, predated the Slow Food movement by nearly a decade.

Some of this teetered on sixth-form japery, but looking back I can see that a lot of it echoed Thomas’s impish habit of shaking the living world like a kaleidoscope and seeing what persuasive constellations revealed themselves. The most glorious chapters in his book are on human language, which, needless to say, has the look of an evolving ecosystem. His application of a biologist’s thought processes to this system, which may be the defining characteristic of our species, is revelatory. ‘We have DNA for grammar, neurons for syntax. We can never let up; we scramble our way through one civilization after another, metamorphosing, sprouting tools and cities everywhere, and all the time new words keep tumbling out . . .’ And when they ‘unfold out of old ones, the original meaning usually hangs around like an unrecognizable scent, a sort of secret’.

He traces the family tree which emerged from the ancient root gene, meaning beginning, giving birth. It morphed into, for example, gecynd (Old English) meaning kin or kind. ‘Kind was at first a family connection, later an elevated social rank, and finally came to rest meaning kindly or gentle. Meanwhile, a branch of gene became the Latin gens, then gentle itself; it also emerged as genus, genius [and genie, see above], genital and generous; then, still holding on to its inner significance, it became “nature” (out of gnasci ).’ What a beautiful arabesque, and how wonderfully it catches Thomas’s unfashionable and inclusive optimism. Vole thrived mightily for a couple of years, then declined and finally became extinct in 1982. If Thomas had been describing its collapse he might say that it had the look of a colony of social bees where the workers had lost track of how to find nectar. Basically, we hadn’t a clue about balancing the books. But most of the colony members evolved to do other related types of honey-making (though Richard Boston died, too early, in 2006). Even Richard North’s transmutation would I think have been seen by Thomas (who died in 2003) as benign, by providing developmentally useful provocations for those who disagreed with him. For myself, I still have my original copy of The Lives of a Cell. It is the most frequently reread, quoted, probably plagiarized book in my possession, and it remains an inspiring reminder that the course of life on earth is not a predestined tragedy, but a continually unfolding, improvised, extravagantly inventive comedy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 41 © Richard Mabey 2014


About the contributor

Richard Mabey is a ‘nature writer’ (though hates the term), has written some 40 books and contributes regularly to outlets as various as the Mail and Granta, but he still yearns for the resurrection of a New Vole.

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