david spooner

What I try to do in my books is to show how insect metamorphic processes are more crucial to natural selection than evolutionary theorists have accepted. While not disputing Darwin, I work from A.R. Wallace`s insights. If we start from the greatest works of human consciousness (Beethoven, Mozart, Melville, Shakespeare), then humanity owes as much obliquely to the insect as the ape. 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 and 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).

As an advocate of the pantheistic unity of theory and practice - and let us return to the Greek multitude of `gods` of the streams and fields instead of the various Almightys - I founded Butterfly Conservation in East Scotland, and have served on the National Bio-diversity Committee for Scotland. I am a member of the academic council of the London Diplomatic Academy, which seeks to re-establish the role of the UN and international law. I opposed and continue to oppose the Iraq War as entirely the wrong post-9/​11 option. As I wrote in the Independent newspaper (19 September 2007), the cultural destruction of Iraq`s archeology and general culture calls up the words of the prophet of the Babylonian exile, Ezekiel: "The end is come upon the four corners of the land." Two and a half millennia since this prophesy, the White House with its annex at No. 10 Downing Steet have finally accomplished this devastation. We are living in bonapartist pseudo-democracies where the mass media engender charismatic personality cults that delude large sections of the population.

I began writing because I sensed a gap, some unmade synthesis between the arts, linguistics and natural sciences. Two books were catalysts of my thinking, two wonderful books full of Blakean energy and synthesizing genius. They are Norman O. Brown`s masterworks LIFE AGAINST DEATH and LOVE`S BODY. His letters to me are now in the NOB Special collection at UC Santa Cruz.

Brown`s books are essential supplements to the work of his great friend Christopher Hill on the seventeenth century British Revolution, and
constitute a series of propositions for taking the American Revolution forward to a level of real fulfillment. Working back from the modern legal definitions of `person`, Brown projects onto a vast humanscape the theater of present-day life. All his work reverberates with Louis Aragon`s dire forewarning:
"It is too late for you, Messieurs, for persons have finished their epoch on earth. Push to the extreme limit the idea of the destruction of persons - and go beyond it."
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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. 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.”

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 (øõ÷Þ)
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 relates 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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