Unseen forces rule the world.

They’re called bacteria and they’re out to get you. They’re easy; they just want to eat, sleep, and reproduce. Sounds like ‘the hood’. Viruses are the tricky guys, DNA in a condom, ready for action. Where did DNA come from? Are humans reproduced with the help of viruses? Are humans reproduced for the benefit of viruses? Is it a fundamental dimension like space or time, light or gravity? We get a false sense of security in the developed world that all is clean and pristine, sterile and anesthetic. On the contrary, the world is nothing if not esthetic. Esse est percipi. All we know are our perceptions, not the things themselves. This does not mean that there are no things themselves, which can lead to some misunderstandings about the nature of human existence, hence conspiracy, holographic paradigms, and general discontent with affluence. Would there be a world of light, color, and sound without someone or something there to perceive it? The world defines itself in its own image and likeness. What else lies there waiting to be perceived for lack of a charged coupling device capable of processing the info? The stringier the theory, the more dimensions that are required for it to make sense.

DNA is your bar code, your chip, your genus, your species,

your individuality, your history, your book, your genetic fingerprint all on a tiny chip embedded in every cell of your body. This is better than conspiracy, Nostradamus, and Revelations all put together. Birth is like scanning your goods through the supermarket checkout counter. Every act of sex is like inserting your ATM card and making a deposit. Death means turning in your coded key card at the hotel checkout desk, then waiting for the final reckoning. Only then do you find out about the tourist tax every state levies on the casual traveler. Every drool of spit is a blueprint to your physicality, if not your personality, complete with working title and nervous twitches, sexual preference: studs or bitches? You only get to fill in the blanks of a form getting longer with time, shorter on space. Junk DNA litters the passageways like dead ends in Istanbul, words that once had meaning until the entire context changed. Still the mud sticks to your shoes leaving a trail for the detectives to follow. Art imitates life, but poorly. You could never dream something like this up.

Language is one thing and races are another.

Races are historically geographic in nature, a genetic isolate in breeding, while language is a function of culture. The two phenomena parallel and overlap each other, but seldom form crisp clean lines equating a language/race on one side of the line to another on the other side. Sometimes it seems as though languages themselves are the conquering invaders, crossing borders and conquering new territory even when the number of people involved is almost insignificant. Latin America is probably the best example of this, where a mere handful of Spaniards subjugated millions of Native Americans with fear, cunning, superior weaponry, and germ warfare. Though decimated, the natives’ numbers rebounded with the help of an admixture of disease-resistant Spanish blood. Nevertheless, much of the culture was forever lost, and Spanish and Portuguese are by far the language of the majority. Interestingly, one of the surviving native languages, Guarani’, is a national language spoken mostly by non-Indians. Though shrouded in the mists of prehistory, something similar must have happened in India, where ethnic Iranians (Aryans) spread far more language than bloodlines over the sub-continent and over time, still expanding into the future, having left vestiges all over Southeast Asia. On the contrary, people very similar racially might speak totally unrelated languages, as in the Caucasus and Africa. There Hamitic-speaking Hausas reside far from their Semitic linguistic cousins and tend to be ruled by Hausa-speaking Fulanis, traditional herders who have their own language but use that of their subjects when acting as rulers. A similar situation exists in Ethiopia, where very dark-skinned people speak languages related to the very light-skinned people across the Red Sea. Sometimes it seems a people adopt a foreign language simply because it’s an improvement over their own. This, the Celts seem to have done repeatedly in the history of Europe. It could certainly be argued that they’ve sacrificed their culture in the process.

Forget DNA and its handmaiden language,

rewrite history in terms of cuisine, the trails of tomatoes and the paths of potatoes. The Chinese leave gastronomical tracks wherever they go. All people do. Thais immigrate with kitchen utensils, opening restaurants like plowing fields and claiming land, blurring the edge between origin and immigration. There’s something magic about a name on a map becoming reality in the flesh, complete with tacos and tom yam, spring rolls and pizza, sex and chocolate. The moon sets over a featureless plain as trains pass through the night and border guards check my papers. Names of cities flash by on signs like flash cards to study a language that just keeps changing everywhere you go. Just when you think you’ve about got it figured out, it shifts gears by some Chomskyan rule of transformation and proceeds by another set of standards. Those are the other borders that reside within consciousness, separating not time nor space, but operating systems, thought, virtual consciousness.

The cultural DNA of food leaves tracks everywhere.

The first thing I do in any country, outside of Asia at least, is look for Chinese food. In Venezuela, there are plenty of chifas, but no chaufa, only arroz frito. But there, egg rolls are called lumpia, a prominent Philippine dish, not the rollos or chun kun of elsewhere south of the border. I’ll have to try one to see if they’re actually the same dish. In Peru, soy sauce is known as sillao, similar to the si iw of Thailand and the original shi-yau of Cantonese, from which Japanese shoyu, typical Spanish soya, soy, and all other variations ultimately derive. Venezuelan food itself is typical of the fried greasy fare that defines the Caribbean, poor cuts of meat and an infinite variety of starches cooked in hot melted lard at varying levels of temperatures. The important thing is to soak up as much of that grease as possible to get the most for your money. Women proudly let their bellies hang out in imitation of their British counterparts, no reason to be ashamed of what’s in your genes and jeans. Hell, where I came from, if you didn’t put on fat you’d die, as did all those Roman dilettantes testing their luck in the northern winters.

The DNA of language can also go awry

when ‘smoking’ (pronounced ‘esmoquin’) becomes Spanish for ‘tuxedo’. Even more bizarre is the meaning it takes under the watchful eyes of Bangkok courtesans, probably because the word pronounced ‘soop’ also means ‘to suck’ as well as ‘to smoke’, and the rest is history. I heard white punks use the same term the same way a few days ago in a movie. Don’t think about this while eating your morning gruel. To talk about the DNA of culture is to acknowledge possibly more than just the similarities between the evolutions of Nature and culture, but also the unity, the interlocking connection between the two, culture presumably a plethora of Nature’s little experiments, little whirling eddies, off the main flow. As such, might there not be a common uniting factor, such as memory, which propels both?

Sometimes names of dishes don’t make sense,

like ‘airport noodles’ in the chifas of Peru, every one of them, mind you, but that’s half the fun. The first Thai restaurant in Flagstaff named some dish after an evil jungle princess, so now they all do. One only hopes they don’t go to Thailand expecting such, or even a jungle, for that matter. Of course, sometimes the DNA of culture can suffer horrible mutations, such as the case of Alf in Peru. Remember Alf, the walking talking dog-shaped doormat that ruled the airwaves back in 1990 or so? No, I didn’t think so. Anyway, he had a few good years in the ratings, if I remember correctly, though I can hardly imagine what sort of product would invest their hard-earned advertising budget in such nonsense. This was prime time, mind you. He WAS cute, I suppose, kind of a Garfield gone dog gone puppet. Well, anyway, it was strange enough that he was hugely popular in Peru back then, but reruns still running fifteen years later? Somebody needs professional help! A MASH*, Seinfeld, Friends, or Lucy, Alf is not. Still, the other prominent American sit-com currently on the Peruvian schedule is ‘I Dream of Jeannie’, so go figure. Escapist entertainment, anyone?

The chop suey kitchens of the American west are slowly disappearing,

replaced by more modern-styled eateries, whether fast food or more up-scale Chinese. They date to the days of the Old West, when foreign labor was needed, and so were cooks to feed them. One thing Chinese can do is cook, and do it fast. The menus are not only a relic of the past, but are almost identical in every place, from Northwest to Southwest. Most of the remaining original locations are in small towns, particularly those served by railroad. They are even quite numerous in Latin America, with some linguistic crossover. Fried rice in Spanish America is frequently arroz chaufa rather than arroz frito, chaufa itself being a corruption of the Chinese term for ‘fried rice’, so slightly redundant but quaint. In South America, Chinese restaurants are universally known as chifas, a corruption of the Chinese term for ‘eat rice’. Indonesia even gets in on the act. Some well-known ‘Indonesian’ dishes are cap cay (pronounced ‘chop chai’) and fu yung hai, essentially Asian versions of chop suey and egg fu yung, using a sweet and sour sauce instead of the more American-style brown gravy. In all of these places, Chinese people themselves remain essentially unmixed with the original inhabitants. In Thailand, where they are mixed, these phenomena are unknown, as they are in China itself. In Thailand an omelet is called kai jieow, simply a fritata, like a Spanish tortilla, not to be confused with a Mexican tortilla. Got it? Archaeological evidence has led some theorists to conclude that food was first cooked some ten thousand years ago in what is now Southern China. Could be. Those people were likely the progenitors of both modern Tai and Cantonese.

Abstract thought begins with the God gene,

the need to get beyond oneself, the need to go ‘out there’ to explain the unexplainable. The logic gene remains as a vestige of some prior need, for events to have cause and effect in a mechanical universe, the need to survive in a world of danger, the need to find order in chaos. Scientists now tend to find chaos even in order. The urge to find God is the same as the urge to ‘get high’. That’s what separates us from the great apes. The fact that pygmy chimps use the missionary position and give blow jobs (I hear) removes sex as the mark of human distinction. We must have evolved from some semi-erect stoner mutants that got ostracized from the group and just kept going. The Celts invaded Italy to get the wine, even though their Bohemian brethren had long perfected beer and spread it around the continent, as the Celtic word cerveza suggests. Boredom and the need for novelty might be a related distinctive mark of humanity. Cannabis has long had many adherents and other stupefiers their users, but alcohol has always been the drug of choice for the vast majority. Of course the real fruit is abstract thought itself, to be found in the arts and sciences of no other species. It’s not hard to imagine language itself evolving out of a drunken reverie gone transcendent. Three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered in alcohol. The battles with bottles come later.

DNAANDDNA

This is not writing; this is word processing, processing words to infinity in some sort of differential calculus. Word corresponds to thought corresponds to perception corresponds to reality. Did thought create language or did language create thought? The only questions remaining are those concerning reality itself, the field of reference. Language itself is only a medium, certainly neither rare nor well-done, high nor low, and an overstuffed one, spilling tracks and traces of ancient transgressions and future possibilities. I doubt that language can actually create reality, but then you wouldn’t expect that of DNA until you see the results. Does DNA create evolution or does evolution create DNA? To find some creative principle in evolution would be the greatest discovery of the 21^st century. If bacteria can create enzymes to combat antibiotics from scratch without the slow motion process of mutation and natural selection, then what else might be possible? Even if a bacterium is merely dialing up DNA at random to try and come up with a winning combination, still it is doing so in response to a need. While the needs of humans are far more complex than those of microorganisms, and an average generation twenty-five years, not twenty-five minutes, still the effects might be cumulative. The finest paintings of history are made of individual brush-strokes, as is the finest literature, even closer by analogy to DNA.