Beauty at the bottom end
I’m a father again. Of triplets. I saw them for the first time this morning and my little heart went boom-bang-a-bang. They are swallows. When swallows first nested at my place I stood in the garage with one hand on the teapot sized skull of Baz the labrador to watch their aerobatics. Baz died in 2008, so I must now have been landlord and godfather to at least 15 generations of birds. Few things in that time have given me more pride and pleasure.
A friend has just sent me A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee. So far I’ve read only the first two chapters of 12, but that’s enough to have knocked off four billion years.
Chapter one described an inhospitable world and the various slimes and bacteria that evolved to survive in it, creatures it’s easy to admire but hard to feel fellowship with. Only in chapter two did things start to get personal, with the evolution of worms. What made worms distinctive and what set life on the path to you, me and the swallows was the development of the anus.
Pre-anus life forms stayed where they were or drifted haphazardly. They fed by filtering the world around them. They lived a life of undirected chance. Post-anus life forms, however, had direction. Worms, however primitive, were now oriented to the world with a mouth at one end and its opposite at the other.
Having a front and back end gave worms a sense of purpose. They now deliberately went somewhere to eat something, just as swallows and we do. In the beginning was the anus.
My swallows nest in the dark of a woodshed that I no longer use as a woodshed because I don’t want to disturb them. And it was from there that the three fledglings emerged on this bright morning to have their first glimpse of the world. They were already fine fliers. Two flew straight to a railing where they sat side by side while their parents fussed around them.
When I came too close, one of the parents, to whom I have never been anything but considerate, came swooping at my eyes, swerving away only at the last microsecond, grazing my scalp, squeaking its threats, a fearless four-ounce fighter pilot. The third
chick, meanwhile, perched on the door of the woodshed and I spent most of an hour spying on it, ‘‘my heart in hiding stirred for a bird’’.
The bird’s head bobbed and swivelled as it took in its new world. What it saw was Eden, because for each of us the world as we first know it is our point of origin, the template against which we measure everything that comes after.
And what I saw was the next 10 chapters of the book. For if you were to strip my fledgling swallow down to its essence, divesting it of wings and legs and plumage, you’d be left with the prehistoric worm, the mouth at one end, the anus at the other and a sac of guts between.
And the stuff you stripped away was 600 million years of evolution: the spine and skeleton that evolved to stiffen and protect it; the legs and wings that began as knobs of flesh to drag and nudge the worm along the sea-floor, that morphed into fins as the worm became fish, into limbs as the fish hauled itself out of the water and then finally into wings as it took to the air.
Here, then, was a new-hatched flying worm, a feathered sac of guts, a winged anus.
And I found it beautiful.