Genetics
Genetics is a discipline of biology. It is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms. Genetics deals with the molecular structure and function of genes, with gene behavior in the context of a cell or organism (e.g. dominance and epigenetics), with patterns of inheritance from parent to offspring, and with gene distribution, variation and change in populations. Given that genes are universal to living organisms, genetics can be applied to the study of all living systems, from viruses and bacteria, through plants (especially crops), to humans, as in medical genetics.
The fact that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding. However, the modern science of genetics, which seeks to understand the process of inheritance, only began with the work of Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century.(1) Although he did not know the physical basis for heredity, Mendel observed that organisms inherit traits via discrete units of inheritance, which are now called genes.
Genes correspond to regions within DNA, a molecule composed of a chain of four different types of nucleotides—the sequence of these nucleotides is the genetic information organisms inherit. DNA naturally occurs in a double stranded form, with nucleotides on each strand complementary to each other. Each strand can act as a template for creating a new partner strand. This is the physical method for making copies of genes that can be inherited.
The sequence of nucleotides in a gene is translated by cells to produce a chain of amino acids, creating proteins—the order of amino acids in a protein corresponds to the order of nucleotides in the gene. This relationship between nucleotide sequence and amino acid sequence is known as the genetic code. The amino acids in a protein determine how it folds into a three-dimensional shape; this structure is, in turn, responsible for the protein's function. Proteins carry out almost all the functions needed for cells to live. A change to the DNA in a gene can change a protein's amino acids, changing its shape and function: this can have a dramatic effect in the cell and on the organism as a whole.
Although genetics plays a large role in the appearance and behavior of organisms, it is the combination of genetics with what an organism experiences that determines the ultimate outcome. For example, while genes play a role in determining an organism's size, the nutrition and health it experiences after inception also have a large effect.
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(1) F. Weiling, (1991). "Historical study: Johann Gregor Mendel 1822–1884." American journal of medical genetics, 1991, V40, N.1, pp. 1–25.
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SOME OF THE GENETICS OF POETRY
Appreciation of poetry can be, and mostly is, quite independent of theory and criticism, but there are several features of the literary theory I draw on for my own personal literary architecture. First, mine is an individual synthesis, drawing as it does on many literary theorists. Daniel T. O'Hara says that literary theory and criticism are aimed at creating "the critical language in which men will speak for a thousand years." I like to think, although one can never know for sure, that my work will fit into this futuristic perspective. I call the literary theory underpinning White's poetry and my analysis of it Baha'i literary theory and criticism. It stands in contrast to Marxist literary theory and the other major literary theories with their associated disciplinary support systems that have arisen in the last half century, although it shares with them various specific features. It really requires, as I indicated above, a separate essay and it is not my intention to deal with it fully here, but I will sketch its outline briefly because it seems to me that the future of the White industry will be involved in an elaboration of this theory in different directions.
It is teleological; it is based on a belief in progress through Providential control of the historical process. It views human beings as essentially historically and socially determined in a complex interaction of genetics and environment. It sees man as a composite being whose nature is basically spiritual and capable of change. Primacy is given to becoming over being, to relationships, to process, to diversity, to the relativity of truth as the basis for and essence of any unity and harmony in human life.
Baha'i literary theory possesses a vital and dynamic theoretical structure with a deep historical consciousness which assumes that all of reality is in a continuous state of flux. It is based, too, on an explicit and unequivocal dialectical method in which "a concept passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite." Finally, the philosophical principle of unity, a "structure of mutual and reciprocal interdependence of diverse elements within a system," which transcends both simplicity and diversity, "implies the dynamic movement of history in the direction of increasing complexity and integration." These concepts are the domain where the ontological and normative principles at the base of the philosophy of history that this literary theory draws on or is based on. These are some of the coordinating principles behind my critical evaluation of White's poetry. As I indicated above, it is not my purpose here to explicate a detailed outline of Baha'i literary theory and some of the other literary theories behind which White's work and my interpretation of it is based. The art of poetry is greater, I believe, than its interpreters; not even the greatest critics can pin down all its kinds of significance and value. In the end, all criticism is tentative, partial and oblique.
"A work of literature-a poem, for example," writes David Daiches, "is an immense complex of meaning which is nevertheless often simple and immediate in its impact, and it is impossible to account for its impact." Criticism and theory can help but, in the end, however useful and helpful they may be, there is a larger truth unexplored. As Baha'u'llah writes, "myriads of mystic tongues find utterance in one speech and how many are the mysteries concealed in a single melody, but alas there is no ear to hear or heart to understand." Perhaps this is one of the meanings of this verse.
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1. Northrop Frye writes that criticism requires some coordinating principle. See Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture, NY, Viking Press, 1965, p.58.
2. David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature, 2nd edition, Longman, London, 1981(1956), p.396.
3. David Daiches, op.cit., p.397.
4. Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words
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A JEW GENETICALLY BUT NOT IN PRACTICE
CEREBRATION
Yesterday, January 13th 2006 I listened to an interview with the American writer Norman Mailer. The interview took place at the Edinburgh Writers’ Festival in 2005. Mailer made a number of comments that were relevant to my life as a writer. I summarize those comments here before writing a prose-poem. Mailer said he thought truth was like a space station. It was a place from which to launch out into the world of greater truth. One is always approaching truth but never arriving. It was essentially a journey. Mailer went on to say he was a Jew, but in blood only, not a practicing Jew, not a believing Jew. I, on the other hand, am a believing Baha’i in mind and heart, but not in blood. Although my parents were Baha’is, the first generation in my family to identify with this new movement/religion, I do not see my belief as a question of blood, genetics, race, et cetera. This is because of the Baha'i principle of the independent investigation of truth. One does not inherit one's belief system in this new Faith. One comes to it indpendently. At least that is the theory. the reality is more complex. Mailer was asked if he considered himself wise. He said yes. Any wisdom I have acquired I see in terms of this belief system. The Baha’i Faith is the primary source of my wisdom, my meaning, my very survival as a human being.-Ron Price with thanks to “Interview With Norman Mailer,” ABC Radio, 11:05-12:00, January 13th 2006.
My first memory was making
mud pieces in about 1947/8
when your life was transformed
with The Naked and Dead,
your therapy, your self-indulgence,
your self-absorption, preoccupation.
This was the beginning, you said, of
the punishing monotony of writing.
You kept bringing yourself back in
book after book, getting yourself in
shape day after day—not in a fitness
studio but at your desk—3 or 4 hours
of putting words down—6 or 7 hours
reading and pondering, working out
the cerebration, the capacity to take
chances, occupying thematic places,
territories, for the most part familiar,
implementing old thoughts in new
contexts—and then the brain is tired
and contemplates nothing happily.
I did not have the early success
you had, but I still perceived it all
through the mirror of my soul;
I punished myself differently than
you, Norman, discarding roles,
calcifying selves, inventing new
personas with self-dramatizating
talent in the theatre of life, for it is
indeed a performance enacted before
an audience with a plot and script
composed of details from history.
With the power of the director,
with some fidelity to the script,
I have set this actor in motion
Resolutely and unreservedly,
to play my part, however small,
in the greatest drama in the world’s
spiritual history, widening my vision
and deepening my comprehension.
Ron Price
January 14th 2006
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THE GENETICS OF THE WASTELAND
SYNCHRONICITY
To students of twentieth-century modernism, 1971 was the year when Valerie Eliot published a facsimile edition of The Waste Land’s pre-publication manuscripts. 1971 was a significant year in my own life for it was the year I left Canada and moved to Australia. Thirty-six years later it looked like I would lay my bones in that vast and significantly dry dog-biscuit of a continent. The publication of the pre-publication manuscripts of The Wasteland was an event which invited new accounts of the poem’s genetics and fresh assessments of how those might bear on our understanding of the poem. My move to Australia invited a different set of life studies and interpretations of my life-narrative and as the decades advanced fresh assessments of their meaning. -Ron Price with thanks to Valerie Eliot, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, Harcourt Brace, NY, 1971.
By 1988 when I studied this poem
to teach it at matriculation level,
a quarter century after studying it
in English Literature so I could get
into university in Ontario at age 18,
pre-publication dates for the poem's
writing were defined as far as possible.
This central poem, this determinant
of our modern consciousness, which
told us something of who we are was
finished just after the Great War, after
millions died of influenza, foundations
for the old world crumbled unbeknownst.
1 Lawrence Rainey, "Eliot Among the Typists: Writing The Waste Land," Modernism/modernity, Volume 12, Number 1, January 2005.
12 January 2007
