“Gregor Mendel was high when he discovered genes and the principles of genetic inheritance. Is that what you're saying?” I said looking at the bearded old man who looked at me with a glint in his eye. We had struck up a conversation in one of the library aisles, where he was seated reading a magazine. Out of nowhere, he had blurted out this bit of esoteric knowledge in my direction.
“Wouldn’t you be stoned out of your gourd if you lived in a monastery?" he said raising his bushy eyebrows. "Think about it. This dude is Germanic, so he’s got a geometrical head to begin with, but the impossibility of his task would certainly require divine intervention. First of all, he was a monk. We all know that monks are just the institutionalized shamans of our cultures. The methods may differ, but the psychological end result is the same. He had no social obligations like the rest of his hive. In isolation, he practiced the technique of self control, meditation, celibacy, rote chanting, wine drinking, prayer, and who knows what else. Surely, he entered mental states not accessible to those living a normal life in 'perpetual anxiety about a means of livelihood'. Freed from the neural bonds of social anxieties, combined with his monastic practices created a twenty-first century brain smack in the middle of the nineteenth. He was receptive to the genetic messages from Gaia herself, who saucily whispered her kinky secrets in his ear. Heh!”
Thyme
I didn’t know what to make of this information. It was fascinating, but I certainly didn’t know what to do with it. Being in a polite and somewhat curious disposition, I egged on the old fellow with further queries.
“What do you mean about the impossibility of his task?” I asked him. "His work was rational, logical, and meticulous."
He sat up straight and waved his magazine around. “They accused him of fudging the numbers. Others said his assistant had done it. What he did was a statistical lightning strike. In his plant hybridization experiments, he could’ve chosen any other of the countless species and gotten no coherent results, but he chose the ones that yielded uncannily precise probabilistic fruit. What or who was driving his hand?”
“Divine intervention?” I hazard a guess.
“If by divine intervention you mean the network of global vegetative intelligence interacting with his complex neuronal electro-biochemical nervous system. An interaction that is only possible by opening the doors of perception via esoteric practices, including monasticism. Then yes, it was divine intervention.”
He sat back and stared at rows upon rows of books. Then he waved the magazine at them.
“We make a mistake, lad, in thinking that evolution is being pushed from behind. Perhaps our evolution is being pulled by a strange attractor at the end of time. Like a seed that contains the future genetic blueprints of a plant, our seed existance on this planet is but a stage of development that is unfolding according to some grand evolutionary blueprint. I see you have a backpack full of science and engineering books in your hands. As you continue your education, you will learn to parrot the symbols and sequences, then you’ll develop your own unique combinations, and finally, you’ll work with others to create higher structures and find new truths. But unless you experience those truths within your own being, the way Mendel experience the genetic realities of his peas within his soul, the essence of those truths will remain forever beyond your grasp.”
I chuckled and shook my head. "Next you'll tell me that Darwin's opium addiction helped him discover the theory of evolution."
He grinned and motioned for the empty chair beside him. “Come on, sit down, fellow seeker. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
I was free the rest of the afternoon, so I sat with the old crazy guy in the musty library and listened to the rest of his yarn.
Tomato
Oregano
Witchstick Pepper
Thyme
I took these images with an Olympus TG-6 in microscope mode. I used an IDOO hydroponic system to plant the seeds on December 5, 2021. Growth has been slow and some funky mold appeared in a few of the pods, but overall it's coming along nicely. Thank you for visiting.
All images by @litguru
Resource
Iltis, Hugo (1943). "Gregor Mendel and His Work". The Scientific Monthly. 56 (5): 414–423 as found in Wikipedia's page on Gregor Mendel.
I enjoyed the thought provoking story of Mendel's adventure. I read it last night while I was super stoned off of some new weed I'm smoking, and by the time I finished looking at the post I was ready for bed passing out on the PC lol.
I'm curious about that hydro system. I clicked the link to check it out.
It looks like it's working well enough.
How do you feel about it? Does it suit your needs adequately?
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Weed is very conducive to the enjoyment of light reading and the visual arts. I have a hard time reading technical stuff under its influence, so I avoid it in such cases.
I got the system during a sale, so I thought I'd try my hand at hydroponics. So far it seems to be working well. Some of the pods developed mold and the seeds did not germinate. The germinated pods also have some green stuff, but apparently it's not bad just unsightly. I don't know how to prevent that from happening. The system I got came with four containers of 2L capacity. Each container has room for 5 pods. They look small, so I'll see in a few months time if the experiment is a success.
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I am so gullible I was looking up Darwin and opium.😅
I love your plant pictures...great illustration.
All in all, you are very clever.
Thank you @agmoore! It was great fun photographing my plants and trying to come up with a story around them. So happy that you looked up more about Darwin. I don't know much about his personal life myself, but I think the old crazy guy would say something like this:
"That rascal Darwin was a stoned ape! He used opium to treat his various illnesses. Today we know just how powerful a substance it is, and how its indescriminate use leads to great suffering. In his day, however, opium was used as medicine, and it was perfectly acceptable for a gentlemen of his stature. He quickly became addicted to it. Anecdotal reports from far out neuronauts indicate that the opiate experience takes one down a soft vegetative reality, where one can easily experience and visualize primitive evolutionary vistas. Victorian poetry is filled with such haunting imagery, and we all know what those poets were up to. For those in the know, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Darwin's altered mind allowed him to re-live our species evolution through long spans of time, and then after having seen the big picture, it was just a matter of arranging the symbols like pieces of a puzzle. We'll never know for sure, but that's my story, and I'm sticking to it."
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