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Kismet – don't knock it. I mean the little flurries of coincidences and symbols that seem to herald approaching change. I've been informally watching the dynamics of change for as long as I can remember. It seems to me change comes in clusters, and its triggers seem to fire independently and simultaneously, mostly in areas of life already pregnant with something: anything from a death to an unexpected success or an unforeseen setback.
Take the infuriating fairground game Penny Falls, where you feed coins into a slot and they drop onto a moving ledge of other pennies, forever on the verge of falling. It's like that: energies, purposeful or not, gather and gather and eventually reach a critical mass, at which point a trigger sets them all falling.
I've also found that change-clusters send a signature up-front: a notice of impending change. A couple of pennies fall in advance, and you can see the area of pressure they fell from. This is how change seems to work. My first novel, Vernon God Little, came from watching the signature of a high-school massacre. The matter of affluent teens exploding was about to arrive, the culture was overheated, and these were the first pops – and it did arrive, and arrived to stay. Likewise, I sketched the setting of my most recent book, Lights Out in Wonderland, an allegory of late capitalism, when times were booming; but it was clear, once banks started giving loans to people without incomes, that the pennies were ready to fall.
Hence, strangely, axolotls. Bear with me: I don't feel it's wishful or magical thinking to say we appear to be approaching a change in the very foundation of thought about life and the universe. The pennies are stacking up. The signatures have appeared in the last year. I feel the kismet like the drawing-back of the tide before a tsunami. Towards a sudden time when the internet seems as baroque as wax-sealed parchment. Cancer treatment as dumb as being bled. Our notion of space as arcane as the flat earth.
On science's side, the signatures are that Darwin's theories have developed major holes and quantum mechanics suddenly explains things better. To practical ends, quantum computers are being designed to prove theories far stranger than fiction, involving multiple universes and communication between molecules anywhere across space. Meanwhile, computing rapidly approaches "the Singularity" – that point when computers become more able than us to design and build their own superiors. There's already one credible university founded solely on the study of changes that will accompany the Singularity. As for human life, genome-mapping was like breaking the sound barrier. We now accelerate into the straight, past stem-cell research and, perhaps, less than a decade away from safely regrowing ourselves.
Hence, curiously, axolotls.
One night, after the right drinks with Bridget Nicholls, founder of Pestival, the organisation dedicated to weaving art into bioscience and vice-versa, I was prompted to add a small signature to the kismet I feel around us. Musicians including Andy Mellon (trumpet-player with Bellowhead) and Ben Nicholls (double-bass-player with Seth Lakeman) were inspired to compose music for the axolotl after seeing them at London Zoo. I have added a small reading in the voice of an axolotl parent, admonishing its young after a couple of its neighbours' limbs disappeared. Which is the point about axolotls, and brings them sharply into the modern day: they may have been around for millennia (the Aztecs worshipped them, believing them to be the secret manifestation of Xolotl, the god of lightning and death), but we have suddenly realised they have something we badly, badly want. They can regrow themselves. Science wants to know how.
It's the perfect kismet for me. I grew up near Lake Xochimilco where I discovered magic in the air and underwater. This lake, situated south of Mexico City, is their last habitat on earth – and they're almost extinct there. I used to keep them as pets, used to watch them regrow limbs and tails, used to negotiate a better price from the street vendors who sold them, because they were already missing a part here or there.
The axolotl is a symbol of so much we're about to hit upon – certainly worth setting music to. The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is a type of salamander that never metamorphoses. Although it grows to sexual maturity, reproduces, and lives a long life, it remains a water-dweller throughout, never leaving an essentially infant state. They are genetically this way – and science is currently studying those genes like mad, unlocking the secrets of regeneration, cancer signalling, cell migration. The holy grail of persistent youth. In just a few weeks, an axolotl can regrow its limbs, tail, jaw – even its spinal column.
And I, who used to watch them leer back from a tank in my bedroom, cool-looking amphibians with jester's hats, have survived to see them become symbols of major oncoming change. It might seem strange – and, well, they are strange, and I am strange, and neither of us matured – but to spend this Saturday at London's Natural History Museum, setting their strangeness and our strangeness and their hope and our hope to music, with tequila and marimbas and trumpets and lights … just seems like a signature we should do. Just because. Kismet.
Comments
20 June 2012 11:51PM
Slightly pretentious Bolivian writer Julio Cortezar wrote a fantastic story called Axolotles. Highly reccomended.
21 June 2012 12:10AM
Love it. Axolotls, and my favourite limb regeneration protein, Anterior Gradient 2. The future.
21 June 2012 12:18AM
Bolivian?!!? Slightly pretentious?! Some mistake surely
21 June 2012 12:24AM
"Darwin's theories have developed major holes"
Really? What shape might they be, and who spotted them?
21 June 2012 12:46AM
and to think that I thought the word was an invention of MAD magazine!!
21 June 2012 12:46AM
Axolotls, indeed any non-human, are naturally better than the parasitic humanoid.
21 June 2012 1:37AM
How did Julio Cortazar become Bolivian? Always thought he'd been born in Belgium and had spent most of his life in Argentina and France where he died. Did I miss reading a chapter in "Hopscotch" while it was telling me to go round and round in circles?
Pretentious? No more pretentious than the usual suspects in 20th century Argentine literature or in 20th century Anglophone literature for that matter.
When I was a kid, a friend of my mother's kept axolotls in a giant fish-tank. I used to stare at them sometimes while visiting. They were lumpy-looking grey-green-brown things all piled one on top of the next. Not the most beautiful of animals but fascinating.
Everyone knows of course they can reproduce while still in the immature newt state.
21 June 2012 2:16AM
Wonderful creatures!
How long before they're obliterated to make way for a pipeline / plantation / holiday resort?
21 June 2012 4:25AM
That's just perfect. Thanks.
21 June 2012 6:05AM
He was Argentine, his name was spelt Cortazar and the story is called Axolotle. But other than that, well done, it is a great story. Check out 'The night face up' too, that ones great
21 June 2012 6:39AM
"Axolotls"
"You're welcome"
21 June 2012 6:58AM
What on earth is he talking about?!
21 June 2012 7:19AM
everyone should read at least half of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch....preferably drinking Scotch and hopping like an axolotl !!
21 June 2012 7:54AM
Yes, good question. "Darwin's theories have developed major holes and quantum mechanics suddenly explains things better"...I am pretty much a scientific illiterate but I don't see how a theoretical model of how things work at the smallest scale in physics could be held to replace a theory of how things work on a biological scale. It might be held to contradict Newtonian physics but Darwin? You might as well say that Freud or Marx cancel out Darwin. Cool creatures though.
21 June 2012 8:09AM
I just received a new book, called "Evolution: a view from the 21st Century" by James A Shapiro - and it's so exciting I stayed up half the night trying to finish it. For the pernickety scientist, critical of the least slight to Darwin, it has almost 1200 references to published and peer reviewed works.
For the layman who can persevere through some of the more necessarily convoluted term, processes and contexts, and who doesn't much care about saving Darwin's 19th century guesswork, the book reveals a marvellous world of natural genetic engineering, with a toolkit that is mind boggling.
Nothing prepared me for this - but what a world! Bacteria which get together to re-engineer their genome to beat antibiotics, genomes which are actually read-write disk storage, with whole "cassettes" of components revised simultaneously in all essential ways either saved for future use, or enacted specifically on the proceses which affect the next generation - thus explaining sudden jumps in functionality. Changes are enacted over all possible timescales: fractions of a second, generations, or even evolutionary periods.
The idea that the genome components wander aimlessly with lucky mistakes surviving is no longer an infuriating Zombie Science - dead but refusing to lie down and be buried. Someone finally blew its head off, and it's now safe to come out and think.
The 21st Century looks like an exciting time for genetic understanding - rather than a place where 19th century hacks stand guard, and in the hopes of keeping up the farce long enough to sell their last container load of opinionated books, cling to an age of chimney sweeps and quill pens.
21 June 2012 8:43AM
You can be sure that non-humans don't hate themselves the way you do. Pity.
21 June 2012 9:01AM
While I love axolotls (especially my two 20-year-olds), I think the author is talking pretentious twaddle, especially about Darwin... I do want to hear the trumpet player from Bellowhead play something about 'xos, though.
21 June 2012 9:03AM
Aristotle had an axolotl
And he fed it from a baby's bottle
But its tiny epiglott-el could not cope
And so it throttled...
This was my favourite poem as a kid. I was fascinated by axolotls. Even the word was wonderous. I would love to go to this and indulge the 6 year old me.
21 June 2012 9:18AM
Is it related to colour changing Chameleon?
21 June 2012 9:19AM
what do they taste like? maybe deep fried like calamari?
21 June 2012 9:35AM
"Darwin's theories have developed major holes" Really? What shape might they be, and who spotted them?
They are circular - and very, very large! Check out James Shapiro's "Evolution: a view from the 21st century" - it comes highly recommended by Novel Laureate Sidney Altman, Nobel laureate Werer Arber, National medal of science winners Carl Woese and Lynn Margulis, among others.
Or try The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey - more approachable but still full of fascinating research. Darwin freely admitted that chance could not be a scientific theory explaining evolution, because chance never moves ina single direction, whereas evolution moves onward to greater complexity and function.
As Shapiro shows, it is innovation which is at the heart of evolution, and not random lucky flukes (something the genome is specifically equipped to try and avoid) because without it, selection has nothing to select.
The sleight of hand which presented this swiss cheese of an idea and tried to ram it down everyone's throats - as Dawkins said, "anyone who disagrees is ignorant, stupid or insane - or wicked, but I don't want to contemplate that" - in the face of mounting contradictions from the lab will make our intellectual peacocks a laughing stock for future generations of schoolkids. But with this new school of sophisticated systems analysis, perhaps we can redeem ourselves, if the zombies will only go away!
21 June 2012 9:52AM
"Axolotls"
"Bless you."
21 June 2012 9:54AM
Iain, what makes you think Shapiro's retrotransposons blow any holes in neoDarwinism? He certainly didn't.
21 June 2012 10:07AM
The Axolotl Song - http://youtu.be/MxA0QVGVEJw
21 June 2012 10:47AM
I wandered lonely as a clod
Just picking up old rags and bottles
when all at once I came upon
a host of axolotls
upon the bank beneath the trees
a sight to make a man's blood freeze. MAD Magazine, c 1965
21 June 2012 10:52AM
Guardian - keep up the DBC Pierre articles about Mexico please, splendid stuff!
21 June 2012 11:08AM
Could you mean Einstein's theories? I'm not clear how Darwin is being undermined by Quantum mechanics, but perhaps i missed that article
21 June 2012 11:16AM
I've really enjoyed DBC Pierre's travelogue through Mexico. Can we have more of him?
21 June 2012 11:29AM
Wow, people are really enjoying messing with the word 'axolotl'.
On an unrelated topic, when I was investigating the mafia, I ws querying a barman about his clientel and he said: 'Boy, you sure axolotl questions.'
21 June 2012 11:39AM
CU later, alligator. And
Thanks alottle, axalotl.
21 June 2012 11:40AM
Oh, and
Sayonara, capivara.
21 June 2012 11:42AM
I had a curious feeling as I read this. I could detect something, small details, building up to a more profound result. I felt the kismet, I saw the signs. All pointed towards the inevitable conclusion: that you're talking absolute bollocks, mate.
No-one argues that there are holes in Darwin's theories explained by quantum mechanics, except for people who understand neither. Cancer treatment advances constantly, and for many cancers is now splendidly effective. And axolotls... well, okay, they're pretty cool.
21 June 2012 11:49AM
A brilliant answer to a stupid statement. Well done, sir.
21 June 2012 11:50AM
Actually, Dawkins says thats most peoples misunderstanding, that evolution is chance, when in fact it is anything but.
21 June 2012 11:55AM
'Kismet' would appear to be DBC's new buzz-phrase, a la 'paradigm shift' - also explained via the image of coinage. Carry on.
21 June 2012 12:08PM
apologies for the laziness regarding his birthplace.
no more pretentious... probably a little bit more if we are honest eh? This does not detract from his talent mopst of the time. Blow up is a fantastic collection of stories. Its a shame the 60's British film based upon that story was so...
21 June 2012 12:33PM
Isn't it axolotls, rather than newts, that Uncle Ken is interested in?
21 June 2012 2:36PM
That is exactly the basis for Darwinian evolution! Every organism is slightly different from its peers (variation) and those most poorly suited to their particular environment are weeded out.
21 June 2012 7:01PM
I once saw an Axolotl in a tank in a museum in Camberley, Surrey. It was many years ago when I was a kid. Stood there watching it for ages as it moved about very slowly. I remember thinking how it looked like a cross between a fish and a lizard. Charming little creature. Just thought I would share this totally pointless reminiscence with others.