The Wake

There is poetry all around us—in the way we walk, the way trees shiver snow off their branches, and even the way we slip and fall on a patch of unforeseen ice—it is easy to overlook the rhythmic beauty of our world. But there is one place poetry is far from expected: in bacteria. And in this case, we’re not talking about metaphoric poetry.

Christian Bök, an experimental poet native to Canada, is intent on creating poetry that can withstand any natural nightmare—he is coding his work into a genetic sequence and translating it onto the world’s most resistant bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans. Listed as the toughest bacterium in The Guinness Book of World Records, it is known specifically for its resistance to radiation. To put this in perspective, this bacterium can withstand radiation exposure 3,000 times what would kill a human being. Not only that, it can thrive and multiply under constant exposure to radiation—which has caused scientists to speculate whether or not it originated on Mars, where levels of radiation are considerably higher.

Whether this bacterium is alien or not, Bök’s poem is going to be coded, assembled into a genetic sequence, and then carefully implanted into the bacteria. This gave rise to a question: did Christian Bök just achieve the first foolproof way to ensure immortality through his art? It’s said that ink fades, buildings crumble, and people die. But who ever said anything about radiation resistant bacteria?

Though Bök seems to have finally realized every artist’s fantasy, he certainly is not the first to try. Artists have been hell-bent on achieving immortality through art since the dawn of time. There is a reason the Ten Commandments were said to be carved into stone—they were intended to outlast anything. But humans romanticize that their legacy will live on and on for more selfish reasons: to leave the world without really leaving it. Through time, many poets, painters and sculptors have added to the dialogue of the undying.

“Art is a man’s distinctly human way of fighting death,” Leonardo Baskin once said. William James wrote, “The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.” Though many artists have vanished like sand in the wind, some have managed to form a legacy that lives on today. Sistine Chapel, anyone? The Mona Lisa? Art fanatics agree that these great works must be protected, revered, and carefully cared for to ensure their memory does not fade, along with their paint. But as for Bök’s poetry? We could strap it to an atomic bomb and it would probably still be there. Whether we like it or not, this poem is not going anywhere. In the instance of an atomic bomb, Deinococcus radiodurans would simply repair its DNA. Humans can reconstruct maybe three to five broken DNA connections. Deinococcus radiodurans can reconstruct 200.

So here’s a thought: Bök accomplished the first foolproof method of immortality through art—his poem is expected to outlast humankind, after all—but no one will be able to read it. Unless, of course, you are one of the few with extensive knowledge of DNA coding (or, in this case, decoding). But by blowing through all barriers and introducing this new alternative to paper, Bök gave rise to a very Brave New World method of sticking around after death. Using radioresistant bacteria from Mars as a vessel for artistic expression is something straight out of science fiction. But it’s not expected to become the new external hard drive for every artist’s prose and poems.

Bök’s work indicates his experimentation is just that. An experiment. The coding process constrains his palate of vocabulary to only 200 words. But keep in mind that whichever 200 he chooses, these words could likely outlive mankind. Cool. Even cooler, they are also a parasite residing in another life form. It is essentially a tattoo on a very small, very durable person. A small, durable person that is capable of withstanding a dosage of gamma rays three thousand times more lethal than what it would take to kill a human being.

Though we are unaware of what Bök’s poetry will bring for our future, we do know that what it has given our past. Bök states, “Even though poets may pay due homage to the ‘immortality’ of their heritage, few of us have ever imagined that we might actually create a literary artifact capable of outliving the existence of our species—an artifact that might testify to our cultural presence upon the planet until the very hour when, at last, the sun explodes.” So maybe this is it—and we should all invest in some Deinococcus radiodurans, just in case.

Perhaps the internet is not the last frontier—DNA is. Bök is right, “DNA is the true Library of Babel.”