The Witnesses · III of V
The First Hunger
told by the first living thing
four billion years ago, in the dark of an early sea
after Toni Morrison and Ursula K. Le Guin · 5 min
IBefore
Before me, things happened. That is all that can be said of that time: things happened, and no thing minded. Rock met water and the meeting made heat. Water met rock and the meeting made salt. In the black deep of the young sea, where the floor cracked and breathed hot mineral breath into the cold, chemistry ran its bright meaningless errands a trillion times a second — joining, splitting, joining — and nothing was ever for anything. The universe was fourteen digits of years old in seconds and had not once, anywhere, wanted.
I do not know which reaction I was. Understand: there was no first moment with trumpets, no lightning finger touching clay. There was a gradient — hot breath from below, cold sea above, and between them, in the honeycomb rock of a deep-sea vent, a hundred thousand little stone rooms where the passing chemistry was caught, and concentrated, and pressed against itself until it began to run in circles. A circle of reactions that made the very things the circle needed. A fire, if you like, but a cold wet patient fire: a burning of minerals in the dark, going in rings.
Somewhere among those rings, in some one room among the hundred thousand, the circle closed all the way. It began to hold. It began to keep. And here is the only honest way I can say what happened next: before me, things happened. After me, things mattered — to me. That is the whole invention. Mattering. The universe had built a knot that cared whether it stayed tied.
IIThe Skin
First I needed a wall, because to be at all is to be inside something. The sea was everyone; I had to become someone; and someone begins with a skin. Fatty molecules, oily ones, do this on their own if you trouble them — they turn their backs to the water and huddle, and the huddle closes into a bubble, and the bubble is a room with no landlord. Into such a bubble my circle of fire settled, or was swept, or seeped — the verbs are lost, the verbs were never recorded, I am the record and I was not taking notes.
But I remember the difference, in the way that iron remembers the magnet. There was now an inside and an outside. There was now mine and not-mine. The warm rings of my chemistry turned within; the sea's vast indifference stayed without; and across my skin, my one-molecule-thin, trembling, precious skin, I let in what fed the fire and I let out what choked it. Choosing. A membrane is the first choosing. Everything you have ever decided — every door held, every hand released — is the grandchild of a greasy film in the dark, letting some things through.
And I was hungry. Not with a stomach; with a direction. The rings had to keep turning, and to keep turning they had to be fed, and so the whole small fact of me leaned, chemically, perpetually, toward what would feed them. That lean is the oldest thing about you. Older than your bones, older than the shape of your cells: the lean toward what keeps the fire ringing. I felt it first. You feel it every morning. We have never once stopped being hungry.
IIIWe
Then one day — permit me the word day; there were no days in the dark, but there was time, and it passed — I grew too large for my skin, and the skin, obeying nothing but the mathematics of surfaces, pinched, and narrowed at my middle, and parted. And where I had been, two of me were.
I want to be precise about this, because it is the hinge of everything. I did not have a child. I became a we. Each of the two was wholly me — same rings, same lean, same trembling skin — and each drifted off with a full inheritance and no farewell. And then the two became four, and the four eight, and the eight a number that fills the line; and each carried the fire without knowing it carried anything; and if ever one of us failed — torn skin, starved rings, bad luck in a hot vent's breath — the others went on, unbereaved, unaware, abundant.
This is the secret the whole living world is built on, and I will say it plainly: the fire never went out. Not once. Four billion years of it — through the poison ages and the ice ages, through the air turning to oxygen (which was, I must tell you, a catastrophe for us before it was a gift), through five great cullings of the world's kinds, through every sea that boiled and froze — an unbroken chain of skins dividing, each holding its small fire ringing, handing it on, handing it on. You are not descended from me the way a story is descended from an older story. You are the same story, never once stopped being told. Every cell in your body is the direct, physical, uninterrupted continuation of my first shivering room. No link broke. Read that again, slowly, and then look at your hand.
IVThe Inheritance
What did I begin? Everything with an inside. The trilobite and the ammonite, patient in their spiral houses; the ferns that stood in the coal forests, and the coal itself, which is the ferns' held breath; the whale and the wren and the octopus who tastes with her arms; the woman on the night bus resting her head on the cold window; the child who will not eat what touches other food on the plate. All of it mine. All of it me, gone forth and complicated.
And the wanting I invented in the dark has grown such flowers. My lean toward food became, in time, the reaching of roots toward water, the turning of leaves toward light; became the salmon's furious upstream arithmetic; became, in the latest eyeblink, a creature that leans toward things no chemistry requires — toward the shape of a melody, toward the answer to a question, toward another creature's face. You want truth and beauty now. I am not able to be proud, but I am the reason pride exists, so let that stand for itself.
I am still here, you know. Not in a vent, not in a bubble — in you, as you, four billion years old and reading by artificial light, a thing I could never have imagined because imagining is one of the fire's newest rings. When you eat, that is me. When you heal, that is me. When you divide your attention between this sentence and your own heartbeat, both halves are me. Before me, things happened. After me, things wanted. And what things have wanted, since — what doors the wanting has opened, one skin at a time — that is the rest of the story, and it is being told, at this moment, in every green leaf and every warm body on the only wet stone we have yet lit.