[Scanning electron micrograph of vibrio cholerae bacteria, which cause cholera. Magnification is 22,399x / photo: CDC/Janice Carr via: Phil Moyer] Like all that casts a large shadow the BacterioSphere is haunted by bad dreams. However, it is a lost literary sentiment, it are our dreams that teach us who we really are, and few night monsters educate with the skill of those crystalheaded spider-legged syringes that hunt down dozing bacteria. All this in good metaphor. Swarm upon swarm of viral predators come buzzing out, searching for that unprotected pinhole through which to inject their malicious virionic code. It is in their JuJu power to transform a free bacterial agent into a zombie machine, a single-minded pathogenic killer or just another speck of dead weight to be devoured whole. Pure spookery. The diminishing returns of antibiotics has the white coats looking for a return to folk-medicine by researching the viability of the BacterioPhage as a source for future anti-bacterial medicine. The tradition is alluvial and mythic, the Phage prefer to live in (sea)water and the logic behind medicinal baths as a cure for bacterial infections, cholera and leprosy included, makes medical sense. But wildness has a long tail, and the BacterioSphere has found ways to draw the virus into its own outward spiralling system of defences. 'That what doesn't kill me makes me stronger', and several species have succeeded in adding the BacterioPhage to their tool box, turning them into a dairy farm slash courier service that first synthesises bacterial code before twittering it through and outside the Sphere; the virus beams light through the open spots of the Bacterial palimpsest of machination and goes out into the open to beneficially regulate, for instance, the sex-ratios of useful insects. With the bacteria life has put its foot down: what the life force has woven into the bacteria, with the finest threads of gold it could find, is a complete disregard for superfluous possessions. Bacteria are an anarchic reticulating bulk of Smart Slime. They are composed out of that what the world has to offer, as if the most talented Jura watchmaker found himself scratching an itch on an intergalactic nanotech scrapyard. They are as self-reliant as a mob of freshly ashore Russian sailors looking for a drink: they will get what they want in one way or another. Bacteria have past nor future, civilization nor kulchur. They are always brand new and forever close to their roots. As a superorganism they are obedient to the metaphor of the magic carpet only, and of course the starry-eyed have proposed sentience, speculating on the possibility of human-bacteria communication through an interface of chemico-poetic matrices. Cherish these thoughts with agnostic sympathy. Like Chinese is its own classic language, bacteria are their own ur-species. But while Chinese caved in to the flaky concessions of Pinyin and the foreign logic of the Qwerty-keyboard, the bacteria have remained high-spirited literati, loyal to the allusive rococo of Classic Mandarin. By taking life as it comes, by making sense of what is available, bacteria are able to arrive at bewildering solutions to the ever pressing problem of how to make the best of a hopeless situation on a beggars budget: every white coat has at least one story of bacteria thriving under conditions meant to kill them. They have even defeated death: even when on the brink of whispering last words bacterial ingenuity does not fall silent. The rock-hand-scissors motive stands as a parallel for those self-mummifying bacteria who outmanoeuvre death by transforming themselves into a metabolically suspended quasi-crystal: the endospore is the downward spiral that goes upwards, a tautological emergency exit into blissful oblivion or oblivious bliss or blissful obliviousness or oblivious obliviousness, a paradoxical ark that only prolonged boiling can sink. The formation of an endospore is the most monumental coup of evolution, a transformation of life into non-life. According to any meaningful definition or theory of life the endospore is death, but, of course, it is death with the snag of resurrection. Once environmental conditions favour normal living again the endospore return to life as if the last 10.000 years never happened. Religions have been founded on less. Present everywhere and visible nowhere: bacteria are the vivid shorthand pictures of nature, a psychedelic spectrum analysis of what life can be, bacteria are the wisdom woven in the Gordian knot of Life, the near-immortal ideograms through which life creates its floating record of extreme imagination. Bacteria are a jubilant never-ending free verse without punch line… |
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