Endless forms most beautiful

I am running ahead in my narration too fast, so let me take a step back and collect another thread of the story and follow it up again to the point where I now stand in time. An important point that is, the second rite of passage in the painful stages of the process of growing up. The first gateway was the first school cycle, which was more eventful for what happened outside than in the school education itself. The second gateway was the passage into the second school cycle: this one coincided with that turmoil of body and mind that is called the onset of puberty and the opening of that long period of transformation of a human being that is called adolescence. One step back is needed to look at the change more closely. There's a before and after and a threshold in between, and in stepping across that gateway some of my old favorite thoughts and occupations faded away and got replaced by new ones, some remained, in lesser intensity, some got transformed.



One other passion of my elementary school years I still haven't mentioned was a deep fascination with the evolution of the living species. For a period of time before my parents split and before my paternal grandfather died, every weekend my father would pay a visit to his parents who were at the time still living in a comfortable apartment in the city center. He would take me with him, and as a reward he would then take me to the Museum of Natural History, not far from where my grandparents lived. There I spent a great deal of time looking at fossils, from the early ammonites to the impressive skeleta of the large dinosaurs. I thought the slow motion of geological eras, during which living species slowly changed into other species, climbing slowly up the road of complexity, was the most beautiful vision of life that one could possibly envision. I was dimly aware that some religions postulated the simultaneous creation at some ridiculously recent age of all living species simultaneously, but that was clearly a lie in the face of the fossil and geological evidence one can find accumulated in huge amounts in every corner of the earth, and anyway even the religious people themselves (at least in that part of the world) seemed utterly unconvinced of their own creation myths and dismissed them readily as "metaphors". Evolution by natural selection was beautiful and fascinating, and wonderful for a child to contemplate.



I was intrigued by some obvious questions: at what stage in the evolution had intelligence first appeared. Sure enough, one needs large brains and that sets a limit in time, but what about the few hundred million years during which dinosaurs had been the most highly evolved species on the globe, they had large brains alright, sometime even a secondary brain down the spinal cortex presumably involved in that part of the neural activity the cortex takes care of in our bodies as well. Well, what about them? The big carnivores walked in upright position, another feature that was often linked to the emergence of intelligence in primates evolving into hominids. Had they developed comparable intelligence at any stage before their extinction? If they had, would anything in the fossils record remain that could be used to prove it unmistakably? In other words, would the tools fabricated by early hominids have survived for archaeologists to see if they had been not hundreds of thousands of years old but hundreds of millions of years older? Of course I did not have answers to such questions, but in the way a child's mind operates, I fantasized about it endlessly.



Seeing my growing interest in the evolution of life on earth, my mother gave me as a present the beautiful book "Life before man": the natural history book authored by the Czech palaeontologist Zdeněk Špinar and beautifully illustrated by the Czech painter Zdeněk Michael František Burian. It became one of my favorite books of that early period. I spent endless time reading it many times over, fascinated by Burian's very careful reconstructions of life scenarios in the early ages of life on earth. I especially came to appreciate the difference between a job well done, and carefully justifiable on the basis of scientific evidence, like the author and illustrator of this book had done, and the careless inaccurate things that children were normally fed in books directly aimed at them (Špinar's book was not meant as a children's book). I think it help me develop that critical sense that distinguishes what is well done from what is not, and ultimately what is science from what is not. The earlier one develops this sensitivity in life the least likely one is, later on, to fall into the lure of pseudoscience, fringe science, and all that.



My father also bought me a set of models of dinosaurs to play with. They were very nice models, the analogs of the Burian illustration as opposed to the drawings in children's books. They were not the cheap bags of dubious plastic dinosaur-like toys sold to children in street fairs and toy stores, but more accurate models based on reconstructions in museums and made of far better material. I suspect these were also not thought of as children's toys. I did play with them though, as play and thought are still indistinguishable at that age. My favorite game was to construct scenarios, three-dimensional analogs of the Burian life scenes in the prehistoric world. I set the stage on my room floor, used collected rocks and pieces of wood to create a landscape, ferns and small plants and the dinosaurs models to populate it and imagined stories to unfold it in time. There in those artificial landscapes all my thoughts and questions about the origin of intelligent life, about the rise and fall of species, became concrete tangible events acted out in a play.



While I speculated about life on the early Earth, I naturally also speculated upon life beyond Earth. That was the time, as I mentioned already, when I was also exploring my mother's science fiction collection. Again there were recurrent questions that especially attracted me: would it happen that on other world with conditions similar to the Earth, if such existed somewhere in the cosmos, life might have followed the same initial steps and then diverged, with another branch of evolution becoming the one giving rise to higher intelligence? What if only marine life were available? It was also the time when I had my great fascination for the Pacific Ocean and its life forms and its human cultures on the scattered islands.



I started looking more and more closely and carefully at seashells. The variety of forms, the patterns on the shells, that again seemed to embody in a single branch of the large evolutionary tree of life on earth the full spectrum of enormous complexity of forms that evolution is capable of generating. I read and learned about the way shells grow, the way pattern form, their algorithmic beauty. I imagined worlds on which this line had become the one that would lead to higher life forms and eventually to intelligence. What would be then the chances of contact with an alien civilization that descended from seashells?
All these thoughts and questions were played out in new landscapes were seashells and alien worlds and ancient earths were concocted.



This material way of expressing thoughts through scenarios and storytelling came gradually to an end as I approached the preadolescent stage. Thought got gradually internalized and play diverged into a different sort of entertainment. The more sophisticated the manipulation of language became, the less the need for visualization and implementation of thoughts into material objects. Writing soon took over as the main mean of expression, gradually suppressing the visual modes and the more manual forms of creativity. Artists are the people who manage to revert this process, or those for whom it never happens or to a far lesser extent. I make the shift to verbal expression very rapidly, around the time when I underwent that rite of passage at the end of elementary school and into the next cycle. The last large scenarios built in my room go back to that year: afterwards the wood and stones were dismissed, the dinosaur models and the seashell receded to a passive role of room decorations and became silent.

How I learned to love the bomb

It was 1980 when I made the transition from first to second school cycle, from elementary to junior high school, or middle school as it's called in those parts of the world. In the same year America elected Ronald Reagan and Europe braced for the inevitable Cold War escalation that would shortly follow. The feeling of impending catastrophe was palpable and real: most people in Europe at that time expected a nuclear war between the two superpowers to be a very concrete near future scenario. The Pentagon hawks seemed unstoppable. Were we supposed to look at those icy figures in the Kremlin, at the likes of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, for the hero that would rescue Europe from this madness? The future looked bleak, the clouds of war seemed to be gathering with increasing strength. Every year the stockpiles of warheads in the nuclear arsenals kept growing, ready to annihilate life on Earth many times over. The strategy of deterrence that had kept the superpowers in check for so long was being undermined by the first talks of "Strategic Defense Initiative", the infamous "Star Wars" scheme. The perspective of Europe disappearing in a ball of thermonuclear fire felt suddenly very real.



It was the years of remarkable cinema productions that raised awareness in the population about the real meaning of nuclear war, beyond the silly "duck and cover" propaganda of the previous decades. When the beautiful British animation "When the wind blows" came out in movie theaters I went to several shows. I saw all the rest as well in a short span of time afterwards: from the magnificent 1960s classics like "Dr. Strangelove" to the recent productions, the somewhat cheesy American "The Day After" and the chilling British reply on the same theme, "Threads". I quickly developed a fascination for nuclear energy and the workings of peaceful and military applications of the same.



I felt for the first time quite certain of what I wanted to do as a grownup: I wanted to become a nuclear physicists. If the human mind was able to control such immense and ominous source of energy by splitting the atom, if it was capable of constructing hydrogen bombs that could recreate the sun on earth, then I wanted to be that mind. If our fate is to die in thermonuclear fire, then better be the masters of our destiny than its slaves. I was especially attracted by the long and difficult training involved in becoming a nuclear scientist, the advanced mathematics, the physics of the quantum world. I wanted to face that challenge, I wanted to start learning what school deferred far too long. I went to the only place where I knew I could get good math and physics books at a cost we could afford: the local section of the Communist Party and its Association for Cultural Exchanges with the Soviet Union. That's how I had my first encounter with the Mir international editions: scientific books published in the Soviet Union in a varieties of languages and sold in various countries at subsidized prices. I got away with about ten math and physics books, most of them too advanced for my age, but slowly conquered over the following years, and with the Collected Works of Lenin added to the bunch for less than the cost of a meal at the school cafeteria.



My mother had a subscription to Scientific American since the year before I was born. During my three years in junior high, I voraciously read eleven years of the back issues plus every new one that arrived each month. In those days, at least in the local edition, each issue had an article about issues related to nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, perspectives for the future developments of the Cold War. The other main source of excitement in the Scientific American issues of 1979-1980 were the two Voyager missions and their encounters with the giant planets and their moons. The descriptions of the new worlds: the volcanos of Io, the Ocean of Europa, the rings of Saturn. There were other marvels: superconductors, cellular automata, the pioneering days of neuroscience, the very early steps in the miniaturization of electronics.



I suffered from a serious physical injury while playing basketball in the school team during my second year in junior high. The ligament of my left knee essentially disintegrated. It is still presently in that pitiful state, which severely limits the range of sports I can play. I was confined to a long convalescence, which I spent reading all the remaining Scientific American issues and every other book I could lay my hands on that had to do with physics or mathematics. I gradually expanded my aspirations of a future life as a physicists from the domain of nuclear energy to the wonders of planetary science, radio-astronomy, electronics, and whatever could be talked about in terms of equations and their solutions. I cultivated my ideal of the scientific hero, something along the lines of a Sergei Lvovich Sobolev, director of the Soviet Institute for the Atomic Energy with its own A-bomb project on the side of the discoveries of basic science and higher mathematics. I was a Cold War monster, and immensely proud of it.

The liquid world

During my last year of elementary school, while I was coming to terms with the new experience of living only with my mother, which was both a relief and a fright, I came to develop a strange obsession with that side of the globe that only looks blue, the Pacific Ocean. The fact that you can turn the globe around and if you look at it from the right angle you do not see any trace of dry land seemed ominous. I came to think of it as two different planets oddly glued together, one with a gaseous atmosphere and solid landmasses, inhabited by all sorts of land animals and plants, and natural living habitat where humans and their civilization evolved. On the other side a liquid world, populated by life long before our dried land had seen anything but barren rock, with strange creatures of the deep. I was especially fascinated by the liminal zone that separates these two worlds and by the human civilization that developed in this thin boundary: the sparse islands of Oceania. I spent most of that year reading all I could find about the civilizations of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, their ethnic and linguistic groups, their artifacts, their gods. I read all I could also about the oceans, about the great whales, the dolphins and the experiments that have been carried out to probe their intelligence and language, the songs of the humpback whales.

I spent those last five months of the first of many school cycles writing on the typewriter, which now only had to be shared with another user, a long text that collected all my musings and findings about the Oceanic culture and my own personal cult of the sea and of the effects on the human mind of its close proximity. I presented my text at the final examination day, much to everybody's puzzlement. There was nothing at all in the school curriculum that resembled what I had produced: if pupils were supposed to know what the Pacific Ocean is and be able to locate it on the map that was about all there was to it. I did not care, I never cared much about school and curricula, I was in the process of discovering a world, and what is it all to that?



My mother's family was made of coastal dwellers, akin to fisherfolks and sailors, but their sea was the tame Mediterranean of the Greek myths, of Sirens and Cyclops. If our narrow stretch of water that separates Europe from Africa had managed to produce so much in the minds of men, what might an ocean stretching half a planet wide have done to the inhabitants of its scattered islands? Why the ocean meant so much to me at that stage can be widely speculated upon, a collective archetype of the unconscious, a pungent metaphor of the world divided, a faraway civilization as another form of escapism into the distant worlds of science fiction? All may well be, but none will do justice entirely to the feeling of awe and marvel that Oceania inspired me. When in much more recent times I ended up taking frequent trips to Australia and visit personally the collections of Oceanic art, and see the Pacific Ocean stretching away from its shores, that early fascination lingered on in my mind, guiding me towards this or that artifact, buzzing with words and images, digging up old and half forgotten knowledge.

The sky divided

I was in my final year of elementary school when my parents finally separated. It should have happened much earlier for the sake of the common good, but the pressure of conformity in a society that had only so recently and reluctantly accepted modernity imposed a heavy burden on the choices of individual lives. Even then, at the height of the societal changes brought about by the sudden and much needed revolution of the late sixties and early seventies, the notion of family might have been dead and rotten, but it still held its grip on the population with remarkable tenacity.

At that time, my father had just started his new appointment as associate professor in Europe's oldest university.
Yet, when it became known that, in order to embellish his job application and increase the chances of getting the job he had appropriated work that was of my mother's and passed it off as his own, she threatened to throw all his belongings out in the street and filed for divorce. It should be mentioned that the divorce was in fact granted, not on the basis of the serious charges of misappropriation of intellectual work, which the court would not even consider, but on the ground of a silly affair my father had been having with a plump German Fräulein. Such was the mind of the time.

The long and tense years that preceded the split and the unpleasant events that surrounded it had left my mother in a despicable state. Her recurrent episodes of manic depression intensified, alternating between fits of violent rage, depths of depression, alcohol abuse and magical bouts of creative work in between. A life lived with such intensity and despair is not bound to last very long. I understood then and there that the rest of my growing up years were going to be a rush against time, to reach legal maturity and financial independence while my mother was still with me, the threatening specter of a constricted and claustrophobic life with my father looming large in the background. With all my best efforts, I only managed it by a very small margin: I left for the US on New Year's Day of 1994, at the age of 23 with the promise of a first meagre salary just after completing my studies. I had barely made it in time: two years later my mother was dead. I had succeeded in exorcising the specter of my father, the possibility of his gaining control, at least by means of financial dependence, over the course of my life. I had achieved my primary goal: the uncompromising "live free or die" call. Through all those years of tragic intensity, trying to leave childhood behind at high speed, rushing through adolescence and into maturity, I grew to despise the people who linger in childhood forever, who rely on complacent parents for financial support well into their adult life: I never asked for anything, I never got anything, except a clock ticking away, and ticking fast. Except time flying by and a feeling of urge, a need to achieve as quickly as possible my complete independence, a liberation from the quicksands of family, planning my escape like an obstacle race where I found myself over the years negotiating my way around studies, the precarious balance of family life, always on the verge of breaking apart and make my worse nightmares come true, and the historical changes of the world at large, that forced me repeatedly to make unexpected changes of plans at breathtaking speed and without having any time to think of the consequences or to look for possible alternatives. I managed it all quite well altogether, given the initial conditions, but I would not recommend to anybody this sort of "parkour" as a coming of age experience. There's enough in it to purge the most resilient romantic of the myth of idyllic childhood memories.