“What scares science is the idea that something begins only where nothing ends. Science can’t start its stories with ‘In the beginning’ because, being experimental, it can’t admit to a time when there was nothing material upon which to experiment.
“But myth’s stories start with ‘Once upon a time.’ Myth needs to know what happened ‘in the beginning,’ because primitive man always needed the gods’ permission to tell our story. And he needed a place to tell it, some particular time and space that had to be consecrated for this purpose. Outside this holy place was chaos in which to wander was to die.
“It is this, finally, that marks the difference between myth and science, ‘fiction’ and ‘fact.’ Science banished ‘nonbeing’ five hundred years ago and only recently had to reinstate it. We don’t have a pantheon of gods to tell us about nonbeing any more, but we do have ‘fiction’-which concerns itself with the shadow of nonbeing. To think about death is to think about what is there and is not there.
“Science doesn’t know, doesn’t care, about things that might not be there. Can’t know or care, because science deals only in ‘facts.’ It must fail in this endeavor, because facts can’t tell us how or where to begin or end. Yet having a beginning and an end tells us we are alive. It takes the poet to point that out to us. The philosopher. The mythmaker. The purveyor of fictions.
“Robert Ardrey, all of the above, used science’s facts to show that by Precambrian times there was life, but there was not death. Not as we know it. Organisms were immortal in the sense that they merely divided. They were alive but they didn’t know they were alive, and life seemed set to go on this way forever.
“But Nature was also using what Stephen Jay Gould calls contingency, a two-tined fork of accident and chance. Accidents of variation-sometimes the two sides of a newly divided ameba did not exactly mirror one another-and accidents of chance. Meaning, here, mutation. Mutation, that always sudden, always unforeseen, sometimes radical differentiation of an organism from its parent. A change that is inheritable.
“Sometime during this ongoing process, some mutation by some organism introduced the capacity to reproduce rather than merely divide. With reproduction, the individual became possible. As Ardrey says, the hen no longer needed to split in two, she could lay an egg. An individual egg.
“With the individual egg came the possibility of variation. Infinite variation. Infinite selection. And… infinite death. By choosing evaluation, life chose death. Only with death came the consciousness that we are alive, and, for man and probably many other animals, the consciousness of death. With that understanding came everything that self-aware beings think of as life. It’s scary, but only death gives life value and meaning.
“When did all of this happen? The geological demarcation about 570 million years ago between the Precambrian and the Paleozoic eras marks what is called ‘the Cambrian explosion’-the first appearance in the fossil record of multicellular animals with hard as well as soft tissue. The Burgess shales, named after fine-sand fossil beds in western Canada that preserved soft-bodied fossils in exquisite detail, date from about 40 million years after that. Too soon for ‘the relentless motor of extinction,’ as Gould puts it, to have eradicated very many of those new multicellular species.
“The Burgess shales suddenly make the idea of man as the measure of all things silly indeed. This unparalleled fossil record of soft-bodied sea creatures destroys any illusions we might still cling to that evolution is a stately progression of life from simple to complex structures to that unbelievable apex- Homo sapiens. Chance, not design, rules.
“This is Gould’s contingency — which borders on the chaos theory of the subatomic physicists. Had the weather been a bit different in the Precambrian… had a certain dragonfly not died in the Mesozoic… The point is that the species which survived the Cambrian’s catastrophic extinction-species without whose survival we could not have occurred-was no more fitted to survive than hundreds of other primitive species that didn’t.
“Wild, wonderful species such as opabinia, anomalocaris, aysheaia, waptia, and hallucigenea died out, and their fossils were persistently misclassified as early versions of phyla that did make it through: trilobites, brachiopod crustaceans, sea cucumbers, polychaete worms, jellyfish. Because no one, not even scientists, wanted to admit we came into being only by chance.
“What does this leave us with? Despair? To find meaning, must we shut down our minds and posit some sexist patriarch in a long white beard who created all of this in six twenty-four-hour days, then kicked back with a burger and brewski on the seventh?
“Gould regards the whole process of contingency with breathless wonder at its beauty. He feels the same moral responsibilities he would if he believed that God or a pantheon of gods and goddesses had planned it all. Here we are, after all, all sensibilities intact, even if by blind chance.
“Probably no one in this room believes that evolution, or creation, or both, occurred just to place us at the center of the universe. The fact that we have lived on an insignificant piece of dust circling a minor star in an inconsequential solar system for not even a single tick of the clock of life is not our central concern. But we are here, we are somebody, we mean something, and who we have been is important at least to us.
“I have gotten ahead of myself with the Burgess shales, but they do set the stage for a short review of life’s earliest beginnings, before the carnage starts in this room…”
Carnage in this room. Jesus, thought Dante’s policeman’s mind, he did come back to the States knowing a hitman was waiting for him! Dante had to…
Then he almost blushed. Dalton’s carnage was the ex pected rejection of the audience to many of his theories of man’s origins and nature, not a fear that a hitman named Raptor was going to whip out a big pistol and start blazing away at someone unexpected.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Skeffington St. John was nursing a massive depression in his posh Century City office-temperature-controlled, furnished with antiques-careless shoes up on one corner of the hand-polished mahogany desk. Two hundred coats of the thinnest of oils, each hand-rubbed into the wood until it glowed like distant fires reflected in still water.
Outside, L.A. was being washed away by the pineapple express. This particular sort of storm system is created when a strong winter low born in the Gulf of Alaska dervish-swirls off the coast of Washington State to drag warm, waterlogged clouds up from the tropical Pacific. It explodes over Southern California, the L.A. storm drains overflow, electric power shorts out, and million-dollar houses slide off their hillside stilts to end up as kindling on the canyon floors below.
But here, high in his ark above the raging waters, St. John suffered at a perfect 72 degrees F. He looked more like a film idol than a film attorney, with his piercing blue eyes, beautifully coiffed and gleaming gray hair, impeccable clothing. Now a touch of sadness on his stern, angular, clean-cut features as he daydreamed of his lost daughter, Molly St. John-he would never think of her as Moll Dalton, not ever, never.
Oh Molly! Molly! You beautiful child who at age five would have put Shirley Temple to shame! On the particular afternoon he was remembering, Daddy had just bathed little Molly and somehow had gotten so splashed in the process himself that he had stripped to towel off also…
Thus was born Horsy, the little secret game between just the two of them. St. John naked on his back on the big round bed made popular by Playboy centerfold shoots of those days, tiny naked Molly astride his bucking-bronco hips, riding the horsy, hanging on for dear life, shrieking with delight. Gripping horsy’s pommel with her little hands as it got bigger and bigger and stiffer and stiffer, the bucking bronco bucking harder and harder and faster and faster, little Molly hanging on tighter and tighter with both little hands as she shrieked with laughter…
What an explosion, on that first dim afternoon with the shades drawn against the searing LaLa Land light! Shrieks and tears, of course-totally unexpected hot and wet and sticky stuff all over her little hands and Daddy’s lean belly…
But a week later, Daddy volunteered another half-day home from the office just to take care of adorable little Molly. Bath, splashing, naked, toweling off, big dim bedroom… This time it didn’t surprise little Molly when Daddy’s big stiff pommel suddenly spurted all white and sticky. By now it was just part of the game of Horsy…
The intercom buzzed. St. John got his feet on the floor, his mind back inside his head, and answered. “Yes, Angelle.”
“A Lieutenant Stagnaro from the San Francisco Police Department, Mr. St. John. He wants to talk with you about-”
