Our Transgenic Future by Lisa Jean Moore;

Author:Lisa Jean Moore;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

Pure Nostalgia

I’ve long had a very vexed relationship with Charles Darwin. His fragility and tenderness appeal to me. I have a soft spot for his lifelong vulnerability to a weak belly, painful gut, and endless days of vomiting. His love of his children and Emma, his wife, move me. I read his letters, biographies, other accounts.7 In a letter to Emma before they are married, he refers to his stomach and anticipates the pleasures of being with Emma in marriage over the professional tasks of grand theorizing: “I have no very particular news to tell you, as you will guess by my having written so full an account of my stomachic disasters.… I think you will humanize me, & soon teach me there is greater happiness, than building theories, & accumulating facts in silence & solitude.”8

So ordinary in his extraordinariness. As a scholar, I admire his skills of observation and concentration and his many talents of dissection, description, and drawing. Yet, as is usually the case with intellectual crushes from the nineteenth century, Darwin is a complicated and flawed figure. While I sympathize with his interior and marital conflicts over religious beliefs, I am also disgusted by his racism and sexism. Even with some nascent humanitarian and abolitionist ideas, his work was undeniably inspiration for eugenic and imperialist thinkers, practices, and policies.

Sometimes, even still, when I struggle with insomnia, I imagine the world through his eyes. Lush and colorful, a proliferation of life, bursting, free and pure of human tinkering, corruption, and interference. I have a certain old-world nostalgia for Darwin (like my Little House on the Prairie fantasies of Utah)—I dream about traveling on a boat for five years. But nostalgia is a sticky trap, swept away by my urgent longing for a simpler past that never was. Me in nineteenth-century attire, wiping sea spray from my face with a handkerchief, nodding as Charles describes a mollusk he turns over in his hand. Maybe it’s weird that a queer middle-aged feminist in New York City is so consumed by anachronistic abstractions and impossible romantic sequences. But I indulge myself and construct an earth before airplanes, the internet, cruise ships, invasive species, and the Anthropocene. I dream about being Darwin’s sidekick on the Beagle, spying the signs of the flourishing Galapagos. Bright sunshine, blue-green oceans teeming with sea creatures, white sails balancing on deck as we precisely calibrate the dials on mechanical instruments or sketch the dolphins flanking the boat.

I project all this purity, innocence, and lack of moral gray areas into my fantasies. It is not lost on me that these fantasies are based on dominant phallocentric tropes of man conquering nature, but my life subverts these tropes.

Waking up from such lucid dreaming on a chilly Brooklyn November morning, I hustle Greta to the bus stop as she complains in great detail how her cowlicks are messing up her haircut. I nod in absent-minded maternal sympathy and whisper, “Whoa, a bad-hair day at ten is rough.” She frowns, sensing sarcasm.

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