The Bug

Are we not drawn onwards, we few, drawn onwards to a new era.

Two or three evenings a week during this year’s winter and spring, I would sit in the forecourt of the Pagan God of Fertility (it’s a petrol station called Astarte) and watch the reddening corpus of the ATTA conference centre begin to glow as the sun began to set.

The building, a low-slung affair, lies opposite me beyond the six lanes of traffic of River Bank Road. It has for an entrance portal what appears to be an insect’s head; and, as I just mentioned, the building begins to glow crimson at dusk, until, once the sun has been properly set, it is illuminated in a vivid scarlet intensity, red eyes burning under two oblique horns - or antennae - above a sign proclaiming its current purpose:

Vaccination Centre

Originally supposed to open in early 2020, inspiration for its particular design was - according to its creators - the idea of an ant colony. Probably not a particular ant colony. More likely the universal concept of one in which all the conference organisers, attendees and presenters do their thing in the spirit of a shared collective intelligence; knowing their place, and performing their role(s) with as much corporate proficiency as their Linked-in profiles would suggest they are capable.

It explains the portal: it must represent an ant’s head. And I suppose it explains the name of the place, ‘Atta’ being a genus of leaf-cutter ants.

Behind me, running parallel to the road, the River Daugava whispers her secrets to the sea. She won’t mind me saying that. She cuts the capital in half, and she has come here through all that untamed unconscious of the Latvian countryside. When you take a dip in her in the warmer months, various marvels are made manifest. Birds dip and swoop, insect life hovers in a darting film, and now and again some kind of salute is sounded: a wedge of swans, for instance, flying towards you out of the wide sky; as wide as the smiles and giggles of the children splashing in the shallows. You don’t have to pay attention to her, by the way. It’s all water off a duck’s back to her and the pagan spirits she hosts.

The vibe of the petrol station forecourt changed from winter (when even what-you-would-normally-have-thought-to-be-tough lads would creep out of their low-slung BMWs, their alarmed eyes staring out above the muzzle of designer black mask) to spring, when the forecourts on the wide River Bank Road began to serve as chilly nightclubs. The Circle K about half a kilometre to my right was more for the late teens and early 20s (bass rumbling and rattling the car speakers, gaggles of giggles and shy feet, emotion bubbling up and over like a shaken bottle of fizzy cocktail on opening); while this here Astarte served a more mature Russian-ish crowd: classically labelled booze being mixed with Coke as those eager to get out milled around the motors parked around the stout Oaks. 

Yes, there is a pair of oak trees. They predate the forecourt by I would judge to be a century, and their roots grip and commune with the soil near the river and under, too, the tarmacked shield of the street and its whispering motion of tyre. They have been encircled by concrete circles: walls on which you can sit and chat and drink and flirt; and for their steeple, they have a crown.

I didn't indulge by the way. I was just killing time while waiting for my elder offspring to finish indulging in what is becoming an almost professional-level understanding and acceptance of angles vertical and horizontal, all completely bereft of any notion of the virtual: her body moving to caress, trick, curve, strike, and read momentum and the thoughts of others. 

She has football training in amongst a maze of Soviet five-storey blocks a kilometre away. The cosy little community stadium in which they play is almost opposite the centre where I married her 6-month pregnant mother in a ceremony that I hadn’t understood - at the time - on the shortest day of the year. We were brought there by ambulance, and I was placed in a waiting room with mirrors on all four walls - if you would Adam-and-Eve it, which if you ain’t familiar with cockney rhyming slang means, and this will become a theme: 'believe’.

‘Eve'. That is, like ‘ATTA’, isn't it? It reads the same from the front as it does from the back. These kinds of words, or groups of words, are called ‘palindromes'. A spelt out form of the two-faced god, Janus, who is associated with doors and gates: the guardian of space and time, looking into the past and the future. According to something I read* in this forecourt of the Pagan God of Fertility (Sexuality and War), these palindromes were used to “articulate the most embryonic form of human ideas. There was, for example, a palindromic incantation used as a hymn of divination (which) tied the sun god ‘Helios’ to the ancient sorceress and earth-goddess Hecate.”

Let’s read on before it gets too dark: It seems that palindromes were put to work back in the dawn of this Judeo-Christian, Neo-Platonic etcetera, (you know better than me or at least just as much) script to which the oaks, and the Daugava, bless them, are I suppose inured. They would be the language form used to articulate the magic squares which occulted the name of a god or demiurge, or “mystically and mythically (express) certain cosmological relationships.” They were, you could say, in that way ‘deified' (that’s right!).

If, in all seriousness, you will allow this funny example from the Garden of Eden:

Adam: Madam, I'm Adam

Eve: Eve

Okay, some wit came up with that whimsical first conversation later, probably. Back at the dawn of the palindrome (as far as we know), they were used, according to Dmitri*, in magic squares, spells, incantations, oracular consultations and divinations of supernatural powers.

Talking of … well I was going to say ‘supernatural' but let’s settle for ‘a little out of the ordinary’, check out this photo my daughter took:

That’s quite a red, eh? You could, if the fancy was with you, term it ‘engorged'. During the daytime, as I mentioned earlier, it is the most high-profile vaccination centre in Latvia. On a certain date or two in spring, it was opened up to anyone who required or craved the injection of medical intervention regardless of age or underlying condition. If I remember correctly, the freedom doses had come from the Danes, who had deemed the batches blood-clottingly problematic and, therefore, decided to send them on to countries ready to take the risk. Latvians queued for hours to get them into their systems.

I say ‘Latvians', but any anthropologist worth his or her salt could have drawn a few tentative conclusions about what kinds of masked-up citizenry were observing two-metre distancing outside while scrolling or scrying the polished black surfaces of their smart technology in a carefully managed queuing solution - for about three hours or so.

You can be sure that they all had faith in the science. I know because I read about them in a number of mainstream portals whose journalists were delighted in the response of these wonderful, and predominately young, adults. Their educated responsibility was contrasted with the ‘whacko anti-vaxxers', who were - in one brave display of journalism - portrayed as a Dodo (not a palindrome), whose particular assemblage of DNA is no longer, of course, with us. Evidently, the suggestion being that their unwillingness to participate in the rollout due to some ridiculously ill-informed reservations represented a crossroads in humanity’s journey. A (logic) gate, through which only the enlightened could pass with whatever marvellous genetic material they possess.

Regarding our genetic code, did you know that a palindromic sequence is a nucleic acid sequence in a double-stranded DNA or RNA molecule in which the nucleotide sequence on one strand runs in the opposite direction to the one on the opposite strand? For example, the following is a palindromic sequence:

CAATTC

GTTAAG

This is because, in DNA molecules, the nucleotide Adenine is always paired with Thymine (I know!) and Cytosine with Guanine. 

These palindromic sequences are, it turns out, quite common. Large parts of the X and Y chromosomes are arranged in such a manner. Indeed, a palindromic strand allows the Y chromosome to repair itself by bending over, so to speak.

The adjective form of ‘palindrome’ is also to be found in the acronym CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. This discovery is the basis for what has become a 700 (or more)-billion dollar technology that allows for the editing of genes within organisms. ‘Organisms’ here being used to include human beings. The CRISPR Cas9 protein can introduce mutations to disable a gene, replace faulty ones, or just turn genes on or off.** I'm sure I have seen some feel-good Ted-Talk by a guy with a bitching Linked-in profile proselytising this in a conference centre somewhere.

Of course, there are - for now - always going to be a few of the species keen to speculate on Brave-New-World-like applications of this technology. It’s probably something in their genes. Maybe they think that in the near future some form of ‘voluntary’ gene therapy will be required to remove this conspiracy-theory-prone burden from both them and society at large.

For now, these poor afflicted heretics are probably speculating on the following dystopian plot twists: maybe in order to provide the data required by the genome sequencers, could a population’s genetic material be harvested during surge PCR tests? Could the technology be seized by a ruling class looking to - I don't know - demand that the populace submits to receiving injections of an experimental medical intervention in order to be able to work, pay their mortgage, feed their children, or as Tony Blair recently stated: ‘do a normal life'?

Or could it fall into the wrong hands?

The Chinese have, apparently, been experimenting on changing the genomes of children. Thank God, we are never going to copy any of the policies of the Chinese Communist Party***. Can you imagine some kind of social credit system being introduced to reward the socially responsible and punish the socially irresponsible? Can you imagine not being able to work because you failed to get a booster shot to deal with a new variant of virus? Can you envisage a world or country in which your trade union negotiates a deal that allows you to opt out of the injection by agreeing to spend half your salary on having a swab stuck up your nose every 72 hours?

Me neither. 

While we are here in the world of palindromes and nucleotides, I read this on Wikipedia: palindromic sequences in P nucleotides play a role in the diversity of T cell receptor genes. 

T-cells work to provide a cellular immune response. T-cell receptors are special proteins on the cell membrane. Memory T-cells play an important role in the ability of our immune systems to protect us against viral infections “including - it now appears -Covid 19”. These T-cells, who have a memory of dealing with the large family of coronaviruses “stick around for many more years longer than acquired antibodies”.”****

Professor Danny Altmann in an interview with The Imperial College London, referencing a study published in Science Immunology, stated that “Researchers in Singapore analysed people who had SARS 17 years ago and demonstrated that they still have rip-roaring T cell responses to the virus.”

We don't, though, hear much about these plucky little chaps from journalists whose duty it is to inform us about what we need to know to be scientifically informed and what we need to do to be socially responsible. Neither, of course, do we hear about cycle thresholds; Vitamin D levels; Ivermectin; deaths and adverse reactions recorded on sites like the MHRA or EUdraVigilence; all-cause mortality broken down by age-group; the sceptical opinions of an array of experts in their field; or anything remotely like that.

Instead, they give approval and encouragement to the human beings filing in formation to the ant colony: all of them knowing the science and their place within it. Each with their own personalised version of those ‘two million reasons’ to get their Covid pass and guarantee their participation in the new era - at least for six months or so. 

Well.

Before I go, sat here in my motor between two currents while our government aims to pass mandatory vaccination laws and allow employers to dismiss the unvaccinated, I think it is fitting to point out that if one of the Ts in ATTA is removed, you have - long sign aside - a palindrome that exists in the Latvian lexicon: 

So:

Bye.

I’m going for a swim.

* Palidromes: The Ascending Tradition - Dmitri A Borgman

**https://www.newscientist.com/definition/what-is-crispr/

***https://www.cbc-network.org/issues/faking-life/crispr-technology/

****https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/07/28/immune-t-cells-may-offer-lasting-protection-against-covid-19/

***** https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/201833/cell-immunity-what-does-help-protect/