THE XENOTEXT, BOOK 2

In Book 1 of the Xenotext, the author set out his plan to encode a poem into the genome of a deathless bacterium (extremophile), ‘thereby writing a text durable enough to outlive any apocalypse, surviving until the death of the Sun itself.’ It is an enterprise comparable to deep space and time exploration, and in the second book he reports the success of the amazing experiment. He speculates that, ‘buried within the biochemistry of Life itself, there really does exist an inner beauty, if not a hidden poetry – the aesthetic potential of genetics.’ More specifically, the starting point is a laconic sonnet on Orpheus that is translated into a sequence of DNA, then implanted into the genome of the extremophile D. radiodurans, whose remarkable resilient characteristics are described in the first prose sequence. The microbe ‘interprets the poem as a set of instructions for building a protein, whose sequence of amino acids encodes a second sonnet, Eurydice. In this way, the microbe ‘becomes a durable archive for maintaining a dialogue between this pair of poems, preserving them for all time against any adversity.’

The whole extraordinary enterprise encapsulates a poetic vision, preserving ‘a motif of lost love so that we might imagine the endurance of our greatest thoughts beyond the doom of our ephemeral existence. (p. 105) It is a wistful reflection way beyond the horizon of an individual human existence and the demise of poetry itself. The Xenotext assigns a codon of DNA to each letter of the text, ‘creating a protein segment, in which each of the amino acids corresponds to a letter in the poem Eurydice’, while the protein is tagged with an incarnadine fluorophore that makes the germ fluoresce, so that – unbelievably - the cell emits a rosy glow. The implanted gene XP13 constitutes a genetic command implanted into Chromosome 1 of the microbe, and includes a stop at the end. This is illustrated in a series of phonographs, and the evolution comes to an end when equilibrium is reached after 318 generations in a much simpler and less complex form, the process of which is driven by an algorithm, The Game of Life. The other poem comes to a similar end after 295 generations, after which comes the Great Silence and a poignant poem, The Oracle at the End of Time:

Stars, as pale as faint moths, devour the shroud of night – a swath of sackcloth burnt to shreds….

The dead, enslaved to tasks beyond these graves, leave behind no voiceprint

For the spell that, when cast in Hell, might turn our gaze to watch our bygone lovers burn.

As you can see from the above snippet, the poetry itself is very powerful, ‘a bright token’ in the cosmic darkness, where we are seen as cosmonauts in distress, ‘stranded and marooned in space, where we dread immersion in the shadowed vastness, because it is our isolation and our ignorance, made visible. None of us can escape its pull, even when we close our eyes against it.’ (p. 141) Missing from this bleak evocation is the experience of divine love and light – the great sages and saints maintain that we are more than castaways in an alien universe, but that this same universe is consciousness trying to know itself on the inner and not simply on the outer plane; we are expressions of that same life and consciousness. The author explains the significance of the component parts of the text towards the end of what is surely a unique and brilliant undertaking – though personally, I would rather encode the music of Bach, which I believe have also been sent to space as a mark of human genius.