“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.