david spooner

I shall be speaking at the July 2008 Thoreau Society Gathering on "The Individual and the State: the politics of Thoreau in our time"
I have entitled my address -

METAMORPHOSES OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE

**Video of the Address to come**
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My main theme as an author has been insects in relation to literature and philosophy, following a 30 year study of butterflies. The three main books on this theme have been published in the States from 1995 to 2005. These were not actually influenced by Vladimir Nabokov`s great work in this subject, but the result of my own interest recording the creatures mainly in Scotland.

The central conclusion of my thinking has been that we humans are not only related to the great apes by reason of biological history, but also indirectly to insects. The insect relation is more difficult to grasp, because it has to take in metaphysics and aesthetics. This brief resumé is not the place to trace in detail what is embedded in my books, though it is the place to emphasize that natural selection needs to be supplemented by the entomological process of mimesis, something that Darwin`s co-founder of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, always delved into most determinedly. I say "co-founder" almost from rote, but as the New York Times writer and polymath Arnold Brackman showed in his book A Delicate Arrangement, there is plenty of evidence that after receiving papers from Wallace solving the problem that had obsessed Darwin for 20 years on the mechanism of the divergence of species, Darwin played for time in 1858 while he incorporated Wallace`s key findings into his Origin of Species. We would be referring to WALLACE`s Theory of Evolution rather than Darwin`s had not Wallace been intimidated by the position of Darwin and his Wedgwood relations in the British Establishment at the height of imperial power.

The ability of insects to imitate a leaf, as in the jagged Comma butterfly, or to present itself altogether as something other than an insect, as with the Buff-tip moth, is the same process of mimesis which is at the heart of all the arts, and more significantly, of the evolution of language. There is no dispute about natural selection, but the process of mimesis is far more significant because it feeds into all the creative arts which ultimately define the human. And beyond this, there are the key philological nodes.

As I argue in INSECT-POPULATED MIND, the Greek origin of the word soul, psukhe, imitates the sound of breathing. It also means mind and breath of life. And Barry Powell has pointed to the root of mimesis in the Greek discovery of the atomic theory of matter translated into a theory of language where "graphemes represent the `atoms of spoken language.`
The failure of contemporary Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins to integrate the significance of the arts and philology into evolutionary theory has led to the present futile impasse in thinking. The attempt to rescue the situation thru the invention of "memes" is banal and little short of desperate.

A propos Nabokov, I do believe he owed far more to Ouspensky (the pre-Gurdjieff Ouspensky) than ever he admitted. Passages in SPEAK, MEMORY where Nabokov writes so magnificently on mimicry in nature echo almost exactly Ouspensky`s: "In order to form an insect exactly like a leaf of the plant on which it lives, not one, but thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of repeated accidents would have been necessary." As Nabokov famously writes: "When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. `Natural selection`, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous...mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator`s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."
Here he echoes Ouspensky`s contemporary Evreinov who advocated the theatricality of nature. As the great playwright dramatizes the nature of the human, so nature itself is a great theatre. When Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Lewis Wolpert at the recent GECCO conference (July 2007) made their obeisances to natural selection and emphasized the utilitarian (medical and electronic) advances possible through an understanding of mimicry in nature, they also intended to dismiss any more fully rounded expositions of evolutionary processes. A huge apparatus has been called into being in biology, genetics, zoology, which intends the phrase "natural selection" to be as discussion-killing as subscription to the correctness of the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" used to be for confirming the complete loyalty of the communist or socialist. The puritan tradition with its moralising absolutism is a great enemy of nuanced intellectual progress, and constitutes as great a threat to democracy as religious fundamentalism.
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I was born during the Second War across the water from Wales at West Kirby Cheshire, and went to the University at Leeds. There I was awarded one of the original post-War firsts in literature, following on from the previous couple gained by Jon Silkin and Richard Hoggart. I studied theater and directed under Hugh Hunt from the Abbey Theater, Dublin and Stephen Joseph, founder of the modern theater-in-the-round. My doctorate was gained at Bristol University in 1968 on the subject of World Writers and the Spanish Civil War. I lectured at Kent University for 6 years, and for a spell at Penn State in the mid-1970s.

My fascination with lepidoptera spans 30 years, and I am delighted to have been an advisor to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in the successful rescue of the El Segundo blue butterfly on the dunes at LA Airport. As a foreigner I am honored to have received the American Medal of Honor for Natural History, as well as the Congressional Medal for Excellence in Literature. Last year I was admitted to the American Hall of Fame.

I founded Borderline Press in 1975 which was designed to publish some of the great Scottish writers, many of whom were finding difficulty getting published at this time. This was an essential part of the lead-up to the movement for Scottish devolution which has been primarily stimulated by the creative writers. The writers published by Borderline - Tom Scott, J.F. Hendry (part of the New Apocalypse movement in the 1940s), Walter Perrie - were ahead of their time. And for good measure I published a Collection of John Cornford, out of print for 40 years.

I then lit out on my own as a writer, and only emerged fully as a writer in my 50s after the years of preparation, although some of my work had appeared in journals before that. Indeed my writings as a Trotskyist in the 1960s and 1970s were inspired by the work of perhaps the greatest literary journal of all time - the Partisan Review of the 1930s and 1940s, the epoch of Irving Howe and colleagues in their pomp. (It has been much remarked on that many of the British Labour Government`s ministers are ex-Stalinists, or offspring of Communist Party members and supporters, which is why the UK now resembles the old Soviet state). All writing of value redefines the nature of freedom.

Independent scholarship is an enterprise I`ve never regretted, despite the inevitable material ups and downs. Far too much writing is hide-bound, institution-bound, and tho I`ve reached pensionable age lacking a pension, I never hung "my hat on a pension" in Louis MacNeice`s words - and therefore am not dragging around the University cloakroom pegs! Books today are being misused as obscurantist power tools whereas "the beginning of wisdom," as in `Sartor Resartus,` is "to look fixedly on clothes til they become transparent" One of the most remarkable tellers of insect tales is Aesop, rumoured to have once been a slave. Adopting the beady eye of the insect allows the critical perspective.
For now, I have recently finished a translation of the Nobel prize winner and Swiss writer Carl Spitteler`s novel Imago. This is the first English translation since it was published exactly 100 years ago. This attracted both Freud and Jung at the time of its publication, and Freud named the first psychoanalytical journal after it. However Spitteler`s concept goes against the grain of the psychoanalytical sense of repression and "complex." The full translation is to be found on the Events page of this site.I am now translating, for the first time since its appearance in 1889, his remarkable sequence of butterfly poems in Schmetterlinge.

I am an associate member of the Welsh Academy, and member of the Thoreau, Nabokov and Benjamin Constant Societies, together with membership of the Fiat Lux Society at UC Santa Cruz.
I also have membership of the International Diplomatic Academy and the London Diplomatic Academy.


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UPDATE: CAUSAL DYNAMICAL TRIANGULATION AND METAPHYSICS
3/8/2007
In my first book, THE METAPHYSICS OF INSECT LIFE (1995), I had hazarded the observation that the dialectic of the numbers three and four was a recurrent pattern in nature and in human life. This was based primarily upon analyses of biological and artistic events. So when I read recently of triangulation within four dimensions as a possible new solution to the problem of unifying the laws of gravity and quantum physics, my antennae twitched and probed. Causal dynamical triangulation - as it is rather clumsily entitled as a competitor to simply `string theory` - constructs spacetime geometries from simple triangular structures. These are networks of microscopic volumes which coalesce to form the 4-dimensional world of our fourdimmansions, as James Joyce put it familiarly.

Firstly, I must repeat briefly some of the arguments in my Metaphysics. The overall theory of the book depends upon processes of insect development related to human intellectual endeavours. Metamorphic principles have infiltrated language and creativity. I show that the new stage in the understanding of being according to the epoch of postmodern technology is not Heidegger`s geviert, but an apprehension in line with nanotechnology of the relation between human and insect. The contemporary concept of identity promotes a protean fluidity that is merely amorphous - ideal for exploitation by the consumer society and politicians who rely on voluntary amnesia, the ability to delete what was promised or the crimes against citizens perpetrated only yesterday. It also renders individuals vulnerable to the concrete solidities of fundamentalist ideologies which replace amorphousness with dogmatics.
I explore the roots of this in detail in my THE METAPHYSICS OF INSECT LIFE (1995), further elaborated in THE INSECT-POPULATED MIND (2005).
A nub here is the relationship between a key cluster of words. Norman O. Brown`s Love`s Body had drawn attention to some linguistic threads from Descartes:
“Larva means mask; or ghost. Larvatus, masked, a personality - larvatus prodeo (Descartes); it also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession. Larva is also `the immature form of animals characterized by metamorphosis`; in the grub state; before their transformation into a pupa, or pupil; i.e. before their initiation.”
If we add in the origins of the insect in ovum and the final creature in imago, which the Greeks named psyche, there is fourfold spiral of maturation.
So in the metamorphic insects, there is the following evolution:
from ovum, egg
to larva, grub, caterpillar
then pupa or chrysalis
and finally the imago - butterfly, bee, moth, wasp or beetle.

This is the full mutation, entitled the holometabolic. But there is another form - the hemimetabolic, which historically preceded the complete differentiation between caterpillar and butterfly. In this other form, the nymph is not unlike the completed imago and proceeds by slow mutation. Its progress is threefold, and it is characteristic of other insects such as grasshoppers.
So we have two types of metamorphosis in insects. One is gradual and triple in nature, and the other is tetradic, with abrupt leaps and changes of shape.

Now does all this have any connection with human culture, remote as the world of insects appears?
A symphony is a sonata for orchestra with, normally, four movements.
In the 1st movement, themes are stated. The opening is like an egg hatching, revealing in embryo the motifs that will be dramatised in the course of the four movements.
The second movement usually proceeds slowly - like a caterpillar. A larva lives only to eat and, as in Beethoven`s Eroica for example, the music proceeds at a stately pace gorging itself on the central motifs. It is providing the fuel for the dynamic energy of its later growth when it will have to turn its back on this early period in order to release the imaginal buds that will bring about the perfected insect - or in this case symphony.
The 3rd movement is rapid, febrile, anticipating final release. It is the sonar equivalent of the shimmering chrysalis of nature, trembling with incipient being and resolution. There is a sense of rising excitement as in the scherzo of the Eroica.
The 4th is the climax which, as Berlioz wrote of Beethoven, “leads from tension to release, from compulsion to liberation, from the tragic to the joyous.”

The great philosopher of music, Schopenhauer, followed the structure in his The World as Will and Representation. As Thomas Mann put it in his essay: "I have often called his great work a symphony in four movements; and in the third, devoted to the `object of art,` he celebrates music as no other thinker has ever done, ascribing to her a quite special place, not beside but above the other arts, because she is not like them, the image of the phenomenon, but immediately the image of the will itself, and thus to all the physical of the world she depicts the metaphysical, to all appearance the thing itself." (from Essays of Three Decades)
Thus Schopenhauer solves the problem of Kant`s unknowable ding-an-sich, and posthumously reduces much modernist academic speculation to irrelevance, lacking as it does the concentration and span of the Danzig (Gdansk) philosopher.

And then there is Shakespeare. Although intellects as varied as George Steiner and Goethe have characterized him as an unruly genius, his intuitive nature reveals an instinctively structured evolution parallel to that of the metamorphic insect world. As Byron put it: “Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.”
1. The egg is the 4 central History plays - Henry VI, parts 1,2,3, together with Richard III.
2. The larval or caterpillar phase is made up of the 4 so-called Problem Plays -
Much Ado about Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, All`s Well that Ends Well.
3. The pupal stage is constituted by the 4 great tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear. This transitional moment in a holometabolic metamorphic insect`s life is also a time of dying, when the early cells are killed off to prepare for the imago birth.
4. The perfect creature. This is found especially in The Tempest, but as part of a cluster of the 4 Last Plays, including Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter`s Tale.

How does all this square with the science of the universe?
Let us look at the Big Bang. It engendered a series of quaternal explosions. In brief:

helium - 4 coalesces with another helium-4

then beryllium -8 picks up another helium -4
until carbon - 12
As the Big Bang unfolds, helium-3 picks up a further neutron to balance its two protons, and creates the catalyst for the formation of helium-4. The collision in turn of helium-4 nuclei gives rise to the unstable beryllium-8 through the triple-alpha process, and then a further interaction with helium-4 opens the way for the emergence of the carbon and oxygen which will, in time, be crucial for life on earth. When carbon-12 is struck by another helium-4, oxygen results.

There can be no life without the 4 electrons found in the L shell of the carbon atom, giving carbon a valence of 4. This enables it to combine with a hydrogen atom to form the hydrocarbon molecule methane (CH4), which is one of the simplest organic molecules. Before the formulation of the quantum theory by Planck, and its application to the structure of atoms by Bohr, the nature of chemical bonds between two atoms could not be explained. It is in fact the quantitized symmetry that allows atoms to coalesce to form complex organic molecules. Carbon is of special significance because the number of electrons in its outer shell is just 4, which is half the number permitted in that shell. So carbon can absorb up to 4 electrons, and also lose the same number.

To return to the Big Bang: in Population-II stars the nuclei whose atomic weights are multiples of 4 are favored because 4 is the atomic weight of He4, which plays the dominant role in heavy element build-up. Population-I stars are formed from a chemical mixture that already contains heavy nuclei. Since these can capture protons in addition to He4 nuclei, the restriction to nuclei whose atomic weights are multiples of 4 is finally removed. At this point freedom in the sense of a certain randomness has replaced direct necessity.

There are further key numerical details from the scientific data.
1. Minkowski`s theory which opened the way for Einstein`s advances was based in absolute 4-dimensional space-time, which replaced Newton`s flat 3-dimensional Euclidean space.
2. There are 4 known Forces regulating the universe - gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
3. Classes of compounds essential to life are 4 - nucleic acids, proteins, lipids and carbohydrates.
4. DNA has the 4 bases of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine.
5. RNA likewise has 4 bases, with thymine replaced by uracil.
6. The 90% of DNA that is apparently non-functional (i.e. that does not code for proteins) has a sequence of 33 sub-units repeated 4 times. This quaternal repetition is found time and again in DNA.
7. Hemoglobin is formed from 4 amino acid chains.
8. Nucleotides have 4 constituents.
9. In the genetically archetypal fly drosophila melanogaster, there are 4 pairs of chromosomes, and at each cell division during the development of the egg into the adult, the chromosomes are reproduced so that each cell in the adult body resembles the fertilized egg in having two similar sets of 4 chromosomes.
10. The cerebrum of the human brain has 4 paired and major lobes of its own, and under this forebrain the remainder is similarly of 4 parts.

By way of concise recapitulation - from Eastern thought to Western music via language elements:
LANGUAGE ovum
SYMPHONY 1st movement - motifs are stated
4 ASRAMAS brahmacarya - disciplines & education

larva
2nd movement slow -like a caterpillar
garhasthya - life of householder &active citizen

pupa (pupil)
scherzo - febrile and anticipatory
vanaprasthya - retreat for loosening of bonds

imago (psukhe)
finale - resolution and celebration of themes
sannyasa - life of the hermit

These structures may be thought of as reverberating upwards and outwards from the poet who most perceptively diagnosed the problem of human life -
Robert Browning who defined the world as a place “man partly is and wholly hopes to be” in `A Death in the Desert`, and earlier “man is not Man as yet” in Book 5 of Paracelsus. These perhaps relate to Thoreau`s observation that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," (for which see my book on the metaphors of human and insect metamorphosis in `Walden`.)

The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid took the English poet as his intellectual springboard in his early `Annals of the Five Senses` and wrote that
“he held with Browning the great central liberal feeling, a belief in a certain destiny for the human spirit beyond and perhaps even independent of, our sincerest convictions, and could not see
`What purpose serves the soul or world it tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories
Stay one and all stored up and guaranteed its own
For ever by some mode whereby shall be made known
The gain of every life.`”
MacDiarmid is the twentieth century poet of greatest questing intellectual rigor, who in his last poem, `In Memoriam James Joyce: Towards a Vision of World Language`, concluded dramatically -
“There lie hidden in language elements that effectively combined
Can utterly change the nature of man.”

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Here is the text of a letter of mine published in The Herald (Glasgow) newspaper this March 8th:

`A Westminster government is fashioning the very chains that Marx found everywhere imprisoned working people, and Labour is presenting them with customary spin and arrogance as a favor to "enjoy" - as the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith puts it.
Over a century and a half before ID cards were ever thought of, that great definer of what liberty actually means, Henry Thoreau, said: "There will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognise the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats [them] accordingly."
Individual rights have been expropriated by the Labour
government, and citizens are being stripped of the little power they once had. Since the virtual destruction of the miners` union after the strike in the mid-1980s, this erosion of rights has gathered pace, culminating in the present blitz.`
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