The Nudibranch Elegies Anthropocene's End

By James Lawry

Jim Lawry's poems memorialize the losses we all suffer as Earth's crowding compresses our living spaces to interrupt the subtle biological webs holding our lives together.These two books of poems honor, praise and eulogize the lives of sea slugs and other denizens going extinct as we pay tribute to thousands of species that our children will never see and will never return to our planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regal House Publishing
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781947548251

James Lawry

Educated at Stanford University and UCSF in biology and medicine, James Lawry became another ancient mariner loving science and literature. Author of Essential Concepts of Clinical Physiology, The Incredible Shrinking Bee: Insects as Models for Microelectromechanical Devices,as well as numerous technical papers, poetry, and plays including Otto's Inferno and his newest play, Xanadu, a Mathematical Farrago.

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The Elegies: An Overview

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Germany, 1862. At Jena University Anton Dohrn studies marine invertebrates under Ernst Haeckel, who explains to him Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Ernst developed a recapitulation theory of evolution that hypothesizes that during embryological development every animal passes through the evolutionary stages of its predecessors.

Anton travels to Naples, Italy, to study marine invertebrates in the Bay of Naples and discovers new beauties: the nudibranch Hermissenda and the Grotta Azzura, the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri. In Naples Anton establishes the Stazione Zoologica, a Marine Zoological Research Station where visiting zoologists from all over the world assemble to study and learn together.

Anton falls in love with Hermissenda. In the library of the Stazione he discovers ancient writings in her Nudibranchian Language. Anton translates these into German and writes his Nudibranch Elegies.

The Nudibranchs

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The nudibranchs are an ancient group of soft mollusks or sea-slugs from the Cambrian Era, that evolved about four hundred and fifty million years ago. Nudibranchs live only in the sea and breathe through open or naked gills [nudus, naked, brankhia,

gills]. Nudibranchs probably arose from snails, lived on hard surfaces, and scraped up their food. They lose their shells during their larval stages when they swim freely as veligers. Adult nudibranchs are hermaphrodites that display wonderfully changing shapes and fragile diaphanous colors. The natural colors of nudibranchs are hard to preserve satisfactorily even on film.

Anton urges us to look at the animals because human theories are never final. It is only with clear eyes and an open mind can we discover how

invertebrates and nudibranchs live. Anton’s drawings and writings convey new wonders to be found in the sea, and that awe enriches each new eye, heart, and mind that searches patiently and intently for a new understanding. Be relentlessly curious. Start with the details. Learn how the earth breathes.

Each year thousands of plant and animal species disappear. We shall never meet or know them. Our children will never see them. Today, they seem to be leaving forever. The extinctions of species are inextricably intertwined with human activity.

Dendrodorus: Her body is black, sometimes with cream or white spots. Her rhinophores carry elongated white knobs at their tips. The edges of her mantle are frilly; the remainder of her body is soft and delicate.

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Flabellina, our Spanish dancer, is a very colorful aeolid nudibranch. Her cerata are orange or yellow. Her body is purple or bluish. Her rhinophores are red.

Hermissenda, Anton’s lover, is a brightly colored nudibranch. She normally lives on the West Coast of North America and Mexico, but as a veliger larva she traveled to the Mediterranean in a ship’s bilges.

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Hypselodorus, A dorid nudibranch from the

Atlantic and Mediterranean.

Discovery

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On a shelf in the basement of the library of

Jena’s Academy of Sciences

behind bound copies of the (1895)

Jenaische Zeitschrift fuer Naturwissenschaften,

I found old drawings and manuscripts

together with chips of marble statues and pieces of dried ancient kelp taken from a cave in Capri.

The eggs of Nudibranchs, encased in amber,

shimmered under my microscope.

In awe I deciphered a new language from crumbling pages.

Scrawled in a strange alphabet: the letters the shapesof the cells of marine algae and hydroids.

I was discovering glorious things

their ancient authors never intended for me to see.

Drawn to these speckled and stained fragments

my heart and fingers pieced together a record

all the way back to the Cambrian Era.

Nudibranchs had dappled time with many

silences, but a few had written and signed their names:

Hypselodoris, Hermissenda, Flabellina, Dendrodorus.

I could scarcely believe that

Nudibranchs had lived in our oceans for eons.

After extreme labor I set their writings

over into my native German.

Anton Dohrn,

Stazione Zoologica, Naples, July 27, 1924.

Note: Nudibranchs lay their eggs in flat ribbons or masses attached to rocks, kelp, algae or other objects on the sea bottom.

I love the Nudibranchian language:

Soft, fluid, opalescent

As quiet as Flabellina’s kisses.

Satin syllables murmur

Of Mediterranean summers

Sweep in and out in swirls

Around stones in the ebbing tide.

Not a single eddy tastes

Uncouth.

Anton Dohrn

Our Translations from the Nudibranchian

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1. Dendrodorus:

The grotto was now empty.

Here I found poor Hermissenda.

Emptiness had gotten bored with itself and her.

Flabellina had torn poor Hermissenda’s foot from her

cerata,

And pulled her severed body around as if she were

a sled.

Hermissenda, frightened, now barely alive, had everted

herself like one of those crazy Holothurians,

had pulled herself out of herself too quickly,

too roughly, too violently, so that one rhinophore

had been torn completely away,

the blue one at its ring.

I could see it there on the sand—

this little pipe—wriggling like a worm.

It took me a long time to find my soul again,

not to look at what she had lost.

I shudder to see her head from the inside now,

with one rhinophore missing, only an empty hole

and all cavernous.

Poor Hermissenda.

I am afraid for her now, lying there on her side,

contorted.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Note: For anatomical terms see illustrations.

Holothurians are sea cucumbers. Sea cucumbers are echinoderms like starfishes that have leathery skins and long worm-like bodies.

Timor mortis conturbat me, Latin from medieval poetry: the fear of death disturbs me.

2. (Report from a trilobite but written in Nudibranchian)

Anarmit under helme and Scheild.

With rhinophores held erect, cerata raised and armed

with cocked nematocysts—

Weapons carried to bruise and batter by an infuriated

horde of nudibranchs—

Commander Hermissenda rose to greet me.

Hatred had distorted her tentacles.

She had risen from the depths of time during

our prehistory, in which nudibranchs and trilobites

had waged war over eons. In both our kingdoms

living had now degenerated into pitched struggles

to survive.

We’d battled through the night flailing and bellowing

to keep our courage up, to save our provinces and

ourselves.

We sought to drown each other and dismember each