Element 6

 

 

The chemical element carbon seems to have a bad press these days; people dream of becoming carbon neutral and achieving net zero carbon emissions; they wish to transition to a post-carbon economy and, in the meantime, worry about the size of their carbon footprint (a term popularised by a $250 million ad campaign by BP in an attempt to convince individuals that they too were responsible for greenhouse gases and that it was unfair simply to point the finger of blame at the fossil fuel industry).*

But carbon, despite what eco-evangelists may believe - and unlike suphur, obviously - really isn't diabolical in nature (it is produced within stars, not the burning pits of Hell). 

 

In fact, thanks to its universal abundance, unique diversity of organic compounds, and a rare ability to form polymers in the terrestrial temperature range, carbon is sometimes referred to as the king of elements and serves as a basis for all known life. 

 

The human body, for example, is composed of about 18% carbon and green plants (which are 45% carbon) can't get enough of the stuff, using it as they do to photosynthesise vital organic compounds. 

 

Thus, I don't imagine our vegetal friends are too unhappy that - thanks to human activity - there's now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there used to be (and before anyone starts wetting their pants about global warming, it's worth remembering that if it wasn't for CO2 and other GHG trapping the sun's heat so that it doesn't escape back into space, the oceans would be frozen solid).

 

Of course, no one's saying that the warmer it is, the better it is; I'm not denying a significant rise in global temperature could be problematic (even for plants - who can only suck up and store so much extra carbon dioxide). I'm simply pointing out to those who mistakenly think of carbon as an evil pollutant which makes the environment dirty and impure, that this isn't the case.  

 

As always, things are complicated - and not helped by those who wish to moralise everything.  

  

* See Mark Kaufman's essay 'The Carbon Footprint Sham' on the digital media and news website Mashable: click here. 

 

 

Carbon Footprints and Diamond Geezers: On the Allotropic Love Affair Between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin and Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich 

getting all allotropic in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)

In a famous letter, Lawrence advised that, when it came to understanding the characters in his fiction, readers shouldn't look for the old stable ego or concern themselves with personal traits.

Instead, they should attune themselves to "another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which [...] are states of the same single radically-unchanged element".*

It's a nice - rather Futurist-sounding - notion and one that Lawrence scholars have often referred to over the years. But I don't know if anyone loves the word allotrope and its derivatives more than Thalia Trigoni, who theorises Lawrence's radical dualism on the basis of a concept first conceived by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, in 1841.

She also offers an interesting reading of the gladitorial scene in Women in Love fought between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, in which the former is equated with a lump of coal who is proud of his carbon footprint, whilst the latter is characterised as a real diamond geezer - all sparkle and no soot.** 

Whilst the essential point is that both are men of carbon, we all know which of these two characters the miner’s son and former schoolteacher privileges and with whom his sympathies lie - and it isn't the playboy industrialist. By refusing to acknowledge his own carbon nature, Gerald the diamond empties himself of real being. He dazzles, but he's ontologically void; lacking any inner life, any soul.
 

Birkin, on the other hand, is keen to immerse himself in the darkness of his own carbon-self:

"He is the primary representative of the unconscious and the instinctual […] the advocate of ‘the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head - the dark involuntary being’ (WL, 43)." [143].

But again, it's crucial to remember that Birkin and Gerald "represent two forms of the same mode of being" [143], each seeing himself reflected in the other. The naked wrestling scene is as close as they ever get to merging in a peculiar oneness and establishing an intimate and instinctive form of Blutsbrüderschaft.

It is, therefore, so much more than merely an episode of disguised homoeroticism, as many commentators have suggested: "The 'Gladiatorial' is an externalised psychomachia wherein the constituent elements of human nature merge into oneness at the same time that they are striving to break free." [145]

Of course, as we know, it doesn’t quite work out and things end badly for poor Gerald:

"Gerald experiences a death of the body, he becomes a mental machine-like being driven purely by mental reason. His physical intelligence freezes in a state that triggers a process of disintegration that will finally lead to his death in the Alps. […] A stubborn intellectualist who embodies the spirit of mechanical industrialization and rationalization, Gerald is unable to introduce his experience with Birkin into the symbolic order of understanding." [145]

That might be true. But, arguably, over-heated attempts to become-carbon and seek out dark gods also lead to self-destruction and acts of atrocity. And besides, isn’t it better to be a diamond with a fatal flaw than a lump of coal without?

Notes

* D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 732, to Edward Garnet, 5 June 1914, pp. 182-84. Lines quoted are on p. 183. 

** Thalia Trigoni, 'Lawrence’s Allotropic “Gladiatorial”: Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 137-47. See also her essay 'Lawrence's Radical Dualism: The Bodily Unconscious', English Studies, 95: 3 (2014), 302-21.  

This post is a revised extract from a longer review of D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity that will appear in The Lawrentian, ed. David Brock, (Autumn Edition, 2020).  

Hurrah for the Horta! (Notes on the Possibility of Silicon Based Life)

The Horta: 'The Devil in the Dark'
Star Trek: The Original Series (S1/E25, 1967)

Image: startrek.com

I. C (6)

Carbon - as everybody knows - is the key component of terrestrial life and it's commonly assumed that, if there is life elsewhere in the universe, then it too will be carbon-based.

The reason for this, explains astronomer and popular science writer David Darling, "is not only carbon's ability to form a vast range of large, complicated molecules with itself and other elements, especially hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, but also its unique facility for maintaining the right balance of stability and flexibility in molecular transformations that underlie the dynamic complexity of life".

Nevertheless, this is an assumption and Darling concedes that we may - as carbon-based life-forms ourselves - suffer from what Carl Sagan termed carbon chauvinism; i.e., a form of prejudice that prevents us from seriously considering viable alternatives. And so, whilst it's true that scientists have yet to find anything in the chemistry of other elements that suggests they might be able to give rise to organic compounds, we shouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand.

Indeed, it seems to me perfectly legitimate to consider silicon, for example, as a possible basis of alien life. For not only is silicon a similar element to carbon, but it's also an important constituent of many living cells. In fact, silicon is the great white hope of many astrobiologists and science fiction writers who dream of strange and beautiful possibilities of being ...

II. Si (14)

People began speculating on the suitability of silicon as a basis for life at the end of the 19th century and they have continued to do so to the present day. In 1894, and drawing closely on the ideas of his time, H. G. Wells wrote:

"One is startled towards fantastic imaginings by such a suggestion: visions of silicon-aluminium organisms - why not silicon-aluminium men at once? - wandering through an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur, let us say, by the shores of a sea of liquid iron some thousand degrees or so above the temperature of a blast furnace."

Over sixty years later, American screen-writer Gene L. Coon conceived of a silicon-based entity called the Horta in an episode of Star Trek.

Basically a living rock, the Horta was both sentient and sensitive - a bit too touchy-feely for me, as a matter of fact - and moved through rock like a hot knife through butter, shitting bricks as it went, thereby solving one of the main problems that would face siliceous life (one of the flaws in silicon's biological credentials is that the oxidation of silicon yields solid waste material that would be difficult - to say the least - for a creature to excrete). 

Sadly, even if silicon has had a part to play in the origin of life, the astronomical evidence suggests it's unlikely we're going to be encountering any silicon-aluminium organisms, or mind-melding with Horta, in the near future. For as Darling notes:

"Wherever astronomers have looked - in meteorites, in comets, in the atmospheres of the giant planets, in the interstellar medium, and in the outer layers of cool stars - they have found molecules of oxidized silicon (silicon dioxide and silicates) but no substances such as silanes or silicones which might be the precursors of a silicon biochemistry."

See: 

David Darling, entry on carbon in his online encyclopedia of science: click here. 

David Darling, entry on silicone-based life in his online encyclopedia of science: click here. 

H. G. Wells, 'Another Basis for Life', Saturday Review, (December 22, 1894), p. 676.