[Video: Florence + The Machine, “Shake It Out.” Lyrics here and, of course, elsewhere.]
Among the gems rolling around the streambed in the gentle currents over at whiskey river during the last week, these lines from Joy Harjo’s poem “Remember” especially jumped out at me:
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
It’s a liberating thought: that shorn of our skins, or perhaps blessed with transparent ones, we’d be shorn of our “races,” unable to form the instant “Oh, I see: Thou art That!” snap judgments which (yes) color our everyday interaction with strangers — speaking especially, of course, of “races” other than our own.
I’m not naïve enough to think we’d be free of all stereotypes and prejudices — our bigotry is instinctive, a product not just of prehistoric survival in a Darwinian world but of our perceptions, which depend on observing differences among classes of, well, things. A wall is not the same “thing” as the artwork hanging on it. But we enthusiastically proclaim our love of the nuances of Musical Genre X while sneering at the subtly different nuances of Genre Y. My favorite along these lines is the argument which goes, more or less: I’m not as prejudiced as you are! (a) I’m open-minded, but (b) you are a flaming ignoramus, an unknowing prisoner of your cultural reality, and (c) I’ll never believe otherwise! Of course, speaking for myself, I have nothing but contempt for people who so argue *cough*.
I remember the intellectual bliss of learning in 2003 that the Human Genome Project had successfully completed its task, of determining the precise location of all human genes along their respective chromosomes — two years ahead of schedule, even. And it really was a marvel of scientific observation, practice, and cooperation. The catch: I didn’t really know what “mapping” the “genome sequence” meant. It did not mean, especially, that we knew (or know, even now) what every one of those genes does, let alone in combination with other genes. From the National Institute of Health’s Human Genome Research Institute:
A genome is an organism’s complete set of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a chemical compound that contains the genetic instructions needed to develop and direct the activities of every organism. DNA molecules are made of two twisting, paired strands…
The human genome contains approximately 3 billion of these base pairs, which reside in the 23 pairs of chromosomes within the nucleus of all our cells. Each chromosome contains hundreds to thousands of genes, which carry the instructions for making proteins. Each of the estimated 30,000 genes in the human genome makes an average of three proteins.
…and, a bit later on the same page:
Sequencing means determining the exact order of the base pairs in a segment of DNA. Human chromosomes range in size from about 50,000,000 to 300,000,000 base pairs. Because the bases exist as pairs, and the identity of one of the bases in the pair determines the other member of the pair, scientists do not have to report both bases of the pair.
The numbers in those passages simply overwhelm the flailing of my own meager genetic predilection, such as it is, for solving mathematical puzzles. But in general, they explain why we hear announcements, seemingly monthly, that a “gene” for some characteristic has been isolated or discovered. (I suspect those announcements will continue for a looong time.) Somewhere out there, I’m certain, someone longs for the identification of a “skin-color gene” — or even better, a gene specifically for Color A, B, or C. Because once we have that, we think, we could make everyone have the same skin color! Far more ambitious and worthy a goal, it seems, might be to identify a “prejudice gene”: the switch that gets flipped such that we pump culturally acquired stimuli from our five senses into our lizard brains — ensuring we not only observe differences between groups of people, but also react emotionally to them. That’s a gene I’d happily dispense with!
Here’s Harjo’s poem in full (with gratitude, again, to whiskey river):
Remember
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
(Joy Harjo [source])
_______
Note: The title of this week’s post alludes to a passage from Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. One of the characters, a hilariously cynical (but not too cynical) maid named Sabina, makes periodic biting observations about the play, through the fourth wall. Like so:
I can’t invent any words for this play, and I’m glad I can’t. I hate this play and every word in it.
As for me, I don’t understand a single word of it, anyway,—all about the troubles the human race has gone through, there’s a subject for you.
Besides, the author hasn’t made up his silly mind as to whether we’re all living back in caves or in New Jersey today, and that’s the way it is all the way through.
I’ve never seen a production of the play, only read the script — when I was 18 or 19 years old, the first time — but have always loved it.
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