[Dialogue] The Snout from http://www.american-buddha.com

[KroegerD at aol.com]

THE IMMENSE JOURNEY  -- THE SNOUT     
I have long been an  admirer of the octopus. The cephalopods are very old, 
and they have  slipped, protean, through many shapes. They are the wisest of the 
 mollusks, and I have always felt it to be just as well for us that they  
never came ashore, but--there are other things that have.  
There is no need to be  frightened. It is true some of the creatures are odd, 
but I find the  situation rather heartening than otherwise. It gives one a 
feeling of  confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, 
and  not through nor satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end as a  
two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and  
growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know there is  just 
as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is  to be sure 
of man's own part in it. 
There are things down  there still coming ashore. Never make the mistake of 
thinking life is now  adjusted for eternity. It gets into your head--the 
certainty, I mean--the  human certainty, and then you miss it all: the things on the 
tide flats  and what they mean, and why, as my wife says, "they ought to be  
watched." 
The trouble is we don't  know what to watch for. I have a friend, one of 
these Explorers Club  people, who drops in now and then between trips to tell me 
about the size  of crocodile jaws in Uganda, or what happened on some back 
beach in Arnhem  Land. 
"They fell out of the  trees," he said. "Like rain. And into the boat." 
"Uh ?" I said,  noncommittally. 
"They did so," he  protested, "and they were hard to catch." 
"Really--" I  said. 
"We were pushing a  dugout up one of the tidal creeks in northern Australia 
and going fast  when smacko we jam this mangrove bush and the things come 
tumbling  down. 
"What were they doing  sitting up there in bunches? I ask you. It's no place 
for a fish. Besides  that they had a way of sidling off with those popeyes 
trained on you. I  never liked it. Somebody ought to keep an eye on them." 
"Why?" I  asked. 
"I don't know why," he  said impatiently, running a rough, square hand 
through his hair and  wrinkling his  forehead. "I just mean they make you feel that 
way, is  all. A fish belongs in the water. It ought to stay there--just as we 
live  on land in houses. Things ought to know their place and stay in it, but  
those fish have got a way of sidling off. As though they had mental  
reservations and weren't keeping any contracts. See what I  mean?" 
"I see what you mean," I  said gravely. "They ought to be watched. My wife 
thinks so too. About a  lot of things." 
"She does ?" He  brightened. "Then that's two of us. I don't know why, but 
they give you  that feeling." 
He didn't know why, but  I thought that I did, 
It began as such things  always begin--in the ooze of unnoticed swamps, in 
the darkness of eclipsed  moons. It began with a strangled gasping for air. 
The pond was a place of  reek and corruption, of fetid smells and 
oxygen-starved fish breathing  through laboring gills. At times the slowly contracting 
circle of the  water left little windrows of minnows who skittered desperately 
to escape  the sun, but who died, nevertheless, in the fat, warm mud. It was a 
place  of low life. In it the human brain began. 
There were strange  snouts in those waters, strange barbels nuzzling the 
bottom ooze, and  there was time--three hundred million years of it--but mostly, I 
think, it  was the ooze. By day the temperature in the world outside the pond 
rose to  a frightful intensity; at night the sun went down in smoking red. 
Dust  storms marched in incessant progression across a wilderness whose plants  
were the plants of long ago. Leafless and weird and stiff they lingered by  
the water, while over vast areas of grassless uplands the winds blew until  red 
stones took on the polish of reflecting mirrors. There was nothing to  hold 
the land in place. Winds howled, dust clouds rolled, and brief  erratic torrents 
choked with silt ran down to the sea. It was a time of  dizzying contrasts, a 
time of change.  
On the oily surface of  the pond, from time to time a snout thrust upward, 
took in air with a  queer grunting inspiration, and swirled back to the bottom. 
The pond was  doomed, the water was foul, and the oxygen almost gone, but the 
creature  would not die. It could breathe air direct through a little 
accessory  lung, and it could walk. In all that weird and lifeless landscape, it was  
the only thing that could. It walked rarely and under protest, but that  was 
not surprising. The creature was a fish. 
In the passage of days,  the pond became a puddle, but the Snout survived. 
There was dew one dark  night and a coolness in the empty stream bed. When the 
sun rose next  morning the pond was an empty place of cracked mud, but the 
Snout did not  lie there. He had gone. Down stream there were other ponds. He 
breathed  air for a few hours and hobbled slowly along on the stumps of heavy  
fins. 
It was an uncanny  business if there had been anyone there to see. It was a 
journey best not  observed in daylight, it was something that needed swamps and 
shadows and  the touch of the night dew. It was a monstrous penetration of a 
forbidden  element, and the Snout kept his face from the light. It was just as 
well,  though the face should not be mocked. In three hundred million years 
it  would be our own. 
There was something  fermenting in the brain of the Snout. He was no longer 
entirely a fish.  The ooze had marked him. It takes a swamp-and- tide-flat 
zoologist to tell  you about life; it is in this domain that the living suffer 
great  extremes, it is here that the water-failures, driven to desperation, make  
starts in a new element. It is here that strange compromises are made and  
new senses are born. The Snout was no exception. Though he breathed and  walked 
primarily in order to stay in the water, he was coming  ashore. 
He was not really a  successful fish except that he was managing to stay 
alive in a noisome,  uncomfortable, oxygen-starved environment. In fact the time 
was coming  when the last of his kind, harried by more ferocious and speedier 
fishes,  would slip off the edge of the continental shelf, to seek safety in 
the  sunless abysses of the deep sea. But the Snout was a fresh-water  
Crossopterygian, to give him his true name, and cumbersome and plodding  though he was, 
something had happened back of his eyes. The ooze had  gotten in its work. 
It is interesting to  consider what sort of creatures we, the remote 
descendants of the Snout,  might be, except for that green quagmire out of which he 
came. Mammalian  insects perhaps we should have been--solid- brained, our 
neurones wired  for mechanical responses, our lives running out with the perfection 
of  beautiful, intricate, and mindless clocks. More likely we should never  
have existed at all. It was the Snout and the ooze that did it. Perhaps  there 
also, among rotting fish heads and blue, night-burning bog lights,  moved the 
eternal mystery, the careful finger of God. The increase was not  much. It was 
two bubbles, two thin-walled little balloons at the end of  the Snout's small 
brain. The cerebral hemispheres had appeared. 
Among all the  experiments in that dripping, ooze-filled world, one was 
vital: the brain  had to be fed. The nerve tissues are insatiable devourers of 
oxygen. If  they do not get it, life is gone. In stagnant swamp waters, only the  
development of a highly efficient blood supply to the brain can prevent  
disaster. And among those gasping, dying creatures, whose small brains  winked out 
forever in the long Silurian drought, the Snout and his  brethren survived. 
Over the exterior  surface of the Snout's tiny brain ran the myriad blood 
vessels that served  it; through the greatly enlarged choroid plexuses, other 
vessels pumped  oxygen into the spinal fluid. The brain was a thin-walled tube 
fed from  both surfaces. It could only exist as a thing of thin walls permeated 
with  oxygen. To thicken, to lay down solid masses of nervous tissue such as  
exist among the fishes in oxygenated waters was to invite disaster. The  Snout 
lived on a bubble, two bubbles in his brain. It was not that his  thinking 
was deep; it was only that it had to be thin. The little bubbles  of the 
hemispheres helped to spread the area upon which higher correlation  centers could be 
built, and yet preserve those areas from the disastrous  thickenings which 
meant oxygen death to the swamp dweller. There is a  mystery about those 
thickenings which culminate in the so-called solid  brain. It is the brain of 
insects, of the modern fishes, of some reptiles  and all birds. Always it marks the 
appearance of elaborate patterns of  instinct and the end of thought. A road 
has been taken which,  anatomically, is well-nigh irretraceable; it does not 
lead in the  direction of a high order of consciousness. 
Wherever, instead, the  thin sheets of gray matter expand upward into the 
enormous hemispheres of  the human brain, laughter, or it may be sorrow, enters 
in. Out of the  choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music 
that rolls  invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the 
ooze  along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say:  
fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the  Niger, 
fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully  to chase 
them back to the water. There are things still coming  ashore. 
The door to the past is  a strange door. It swings open and things pass 
through it, but they pass  in one direction only. No man can return across that 
threshold, though he  can look down still and see the green light waver in the 
water  weeds. 
There are two ways to  seek the doorway: in the swamps of the inland 
waterways and along the tide  flats of the estuaries where rivers come to the sea. By 
those two pathways  life came ashore. It was not the magnificent march through 
the breakers  and up the cliffs that we fondly imagine. It was a stealthy 
advance made  in suffocation and terror, amidst the leaching bite of chemical  
discomfort. It was made by the failures of the sea. 
Some creatures have  slipped through the invisible chemical barrier between 
salt and fresh  water into the tidal rivers, and later come ashore; some have 
crept upward  from the salt. In all cases, however, the first adventure into 
the dreaded  atmosphere seems to have been largely determined by the inexorable  
crowding of enemies and by the retreat further and further into marginal  
situations where the oxygen supply was depleted. Finally, in the ruthless  
selection of the swamp margins, or in the  scramble for food on the  tide flats, the 
land becomes home. 
Not the least  interesting feature of some of the tide-flat emergents is 
their definite  antipathy for the full tide. It obstructs their food-collecting on 
the mud  banks and brings their enemies. Only extremes of fright will drive 
them  into the water for any period. 
I think it was the great  nineteenth-century paleontologist Cope who first 
clearly enunciated what  he called the "law of the unspecialized," the 
contention that it was not  from the most highly organized and dominant forms of a 
given geological  era that the master type of a succeeding period evolved, but 
that instead  the dominant forms tended to arise from more lowly and generalized 
animals  which were capable of making new adaptations, and which were not 
narrowly  restricted to a given environment. 
There is considerable  truth to this observation, but, for all that, the idea 
is not simple. Who  is to say without foreknowledge of the future which 
animal is specialized  and which is not? We have only to consider our remote 
ancestor, the Snout,  to see the intricacies into which the law of the unspecialized 
may lead  us.  
If we had been making  zoological observations in the Paleozoic Age, with no 
knowledge of the  strange realms life was to penetrate in the future, we would 
probably  have  regarded the Snout as specialized. We would have seen his  
air-bladder lung, his stubby, sluggish fins, and his odd ability to  wriggle 
overland as specialized adaptations to a peculiarly restricted  environmental 
niche in stagnant continental waters. We would have thought  in water terms and 
we would have dismissed the Snout as an interesting  failure off the main line 
of progressive evolution, escaping from his  enemies and surviving 
successfully only in the dreary and marginal  surroundings scorned by the swift-finned 
teleost fishes who were destined  to dominate the seas and all quick waters.  
Yet it was this poor  specialization--this bog-trapped failure--whose 
descendants, in three  great movements, were to dominate the earth. It is only now, 
looking  backward, that we dare to regard him as "generalized." The Snout was 
the  first vertebrate to pop completely through the water membrane into a new  
dimension. His very specializations and failures, in a water sense, had  
preadapted him for a world he scarcely knew existed. 
The day of the Snout was  over three hundred million years ago. Not long 
since I read a book in  which a prominent scientist spoke cheerfully of some ten 
billion years of  future time remaining to us. He pointed out happily the 
things that man  might do throughout that period. Fish in the sea, I thought again, 
birds  in the air. The climb all far behind us, the species fixed and sure. 
No  wonder my explorer friend had had a momentary qualm when he met the  
mudskippers with their mental reservations and lack of promises. There is  something 
wrong with our world view. It is still Ptolemaic, though the sun  is no 
longer believed to revolve around the earth. 
We teach the past, we  see farther backward into time than any race before 
us, but we stop at the  present, or, at best, we project far into the future 
idealized versions of  ourselves. All that long way behind us we see, perhaps 
inevitably, through  human eyes alone. We see ourselves as the culmination and 
the end, and if  we do indeed consider our passing, we think that sunlight will 
go with us  and the earth be dark. We are the end. For us continents rose and 
fell,  for us the waters and the air were mastered, for us the great living 
web  has pulsated and grown more intricate. 
To deny this, a man once  told me, is to deny God. This puzzled me. I went 
back along the pathway to  the marsh. I went, not in the past, not by the bones 
of dead things, not  down the lost roadway of the Snout. I went instead in 
daylight, in the  Now, to see if the door was still there, and to see what things 
passed  through. 
I found that the same  experiments were brewing, that up out of that ancient 
well, fins were  still scrambling toward the sunlight. They were small things, 
and which of  them presaged the future I could not say. I saw only that they 
were many  and that they had solved the oxygen death in many marvelous ways, 
not  always ours. 
I found that there were  modern fishes who breathed air, not through a lung 
but through their  stomachs or through strange chambers where their gills 
should be, or  breathing as the Snout once breathed. I found that some crawled in 
the  fields at nightfall pursuing insects, or slept on the grass by pond sides  
and who drowned, if kept under water, as men themselves might  drown. 
Of all these fishes the  mudskipper Periophthalmus is perhaps the strangest. 
He climbs trees with  his fins and pursues insects; he snaps worms like a 
robin on the tide  flats; he sees as land things see, and above all he dodges and 
evades with  a curious pop eyed insolence more suggestive of the land than of 
the sea.  Of a different tribe and a different time he is, nevertheless, oddly 
 reminiscent of the Snout.  
But not the same. There  lies the hope of life. The old ways are exploited 
and remain, but new  things come, new senses try the unfamiliar air. There are 
small scuttlings  and splashings in the dark, and out of it come the first 
croaking,  illiterate voices of the things to be, just as man once croaked and  
dreamed darkly in that tiny vesicular forebrain. 
Perpetually, now, we  search and bicker and disagree. The eternal form eludes 
us--the shape we  conceive as ours. Perhaps the old road through the marsh 
should tell us.  We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are 
not its  perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is 
multitudinous  and emergent in the stream of  time.
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