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Morton Marcus: Good evening, everybody. This is Mort Marcus and I'm here on a very special Poetry Show. We're going to do something tonight we've never done before and I think you're going to find it quite interesting. But first, I'd like

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to thank Stapleton's Natural Foods grocery for providing support that helps to make the following hour of programming possible. Stapleton's Natural Foods grocery specializes in organic and commercial produce at 415 River Street in Santa

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Cruz. We'd also like to thank Cabrillo College for providing support that helps make this portion of the programming possible. Remember Cabrillo College fall registration is happening right now in the gym and will go on, well, just

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tomorrow that's August 17th, the first two days have happened on the 15th and the 16th, and wil go on from 9am to 8pm. And a you know, yours truly, Mo t Marcus and Joe Stroud, teach t Cabrillo. I would urge you o take classes out there. It's

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a very, very fine college a d institution. And not only tha , but we would even like you o take some of our courses. n case you don't know it, I tea h film out there among oth r things. And on Wednesday night , I will be giving a course in t

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e history of comedy on fil , beginning with Chaplin a d Keaton, going up to Lubitsc , Woody Allen, whole lot of 3 s and 40s motion picture. So, co e on out to Cabrillo and sign p for classes. My film class, y the way, is listed under t

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Well, I said we have a very special program tonight. And so e English departmen we do, because tonight, or actually tomorrow, August 17th, in the year 1930, is the birth date of probably the most

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important British poet of the last twenty-five years. And most of you know, that is Ted Hughes. Many of you know it, by the fact that Ted Hughes was the husband of Sylvia Plath before suicide. But I'm not going to give you a birthday program on Ted Hughes

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tonight, which I did last year. And Joe has done several programs on Hughes himself. I'm just going to read you two poems by Hughes as a segue into what tonight's program is going to be all about. And they are both later poems, if you tuned in

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last year, you've heard the first one before and it is called, "Roe Deer." And very simply, during the biggest snowstorm of the year, Hughes comes riding out to his farm, he's a dairy farmer, and suddenly these two deer appear.

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ROE DEER by Ted Hughes In the dawn dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year, two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted. They had happened into my dimension the moment I was arriving just there. They

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planted there two or three years of secret deerhood, clear on my snow windshield vision of the abnormal and hesitated in the all-way disintegration and stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds, I could think the deer were waiting for me to

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remember the password and sign that the curtain had blown aside for a moment. And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road. The deer had come for me. Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs

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away downhill over a snow-lonely field towards tree-dark. Finally seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up into the boil of big snowflakes. The snow took them and soon the nearby hoofprints as well. Revising its dawn inspiration back to the

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ordinary. Now, that, to me is a sign of many things that Ted Hughes does in his poems. He is trying to find a way into other consciousness. He is trying to find a way into realities that

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are bigger, maybe stranger, but in a way define him and us in a new light. In this case, the deer or the animal world are waiting to welcome him in into the way that animals experience the universe. But of course, it falls back into the ordinary as

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he says. In other poems, he actually gives and describes that strangeness. This is the other poem I want to read by Ted Hughes. In this case, he gets up at dawn, a very cold dawn, and he goes out, and he fishes for salmon. And this description of

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the river and the experience, if you'll notice, makes it seem as though he is a part of the environment, part of the river, part of the salmon themselves, so that he extends our sense of what reality is, and how we can experience it and therefore

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enrich our lives. And it is this that I'm going to be talking about tonight, what I call the vision of poetry. What makes poetry so different. It's not just the word games, it's the way the world is seen by the poet that makes us experience

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the universe, our humanity, and all life in a totally new and sparkling and surprising manner. And this is Ted Hughes' poem, "Earth-Numb," which will lead us into what I think you will find is a shocking, surprising, and absolutely wonderful work that I

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will be reading through the rest of the forty minutes left to us. But first, "Earth-Numb," and notice how he does this. Notice how the language here works the vision so that we become part of this entire experience, not just a man, fishing for salmon, but a

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man who is part of river, earth, salmon. EARTH-NUMB Dawn, a smoldering fume of dry frost. Sky edge of red hot iron, daffodils motionless, some fizzled out. The birds,

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earth-brim simmering, sycamore buds unsticking, the leaf out crumpling, purplish. The pheasant consigliere cry. Jupiter ruffling softly hunting salmon, and hunted and haunted by apparitions from tombs under the smoothing tons of dead

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element in the river's black canyons. The fishing lore is a prayer and my searching like the slow sun, a prayer like a flower opening, a surgeon operating on an open heart with needles and bang! The river grabs at me, a mouth flash, an electrocuting

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malice like a trap, trying to rip life off me. And the river stiffens alive. The black hole thumps, the whole river holes and I have one. A piling voltage hums, jamming me stiff, something terrified and terrifying, gleam surges to and

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fro through me from the river to the sky and from the sky into the river, uprooting dark bedrock, shatters at an air, cartwheels across me, slices, thudding through me as if I were the current, till the fright flows all one way down the line,

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and a ghost grows solid, a hoverer, a lizard green slither, banner heavy. Then the wagging stone-pebble head trying to think on shallows. Then the steel specter of purples from a forge of water, gagging on emptiness as the eyes of

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incredulity fix their death exposure on the celandine and the cloud. Well, what is this all leading to? It is leading to, as I said, the subject of tonight's show, the vision of poetry. You can be

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as facile and as wonderous with words as you want to be, but if you do not have a way of looking at the world that can grip your reader and can show him a new sense of reality, a different sense of reality, a different consciousness if you will, then

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the poems are never going to work, then they're not going to have the value of poetry. They're not going to make something happen. Tonight, I propose to read to you from a scientific treatise. A book that I think is so astounding, I

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recommend that everyone on the air right now just go out and buy it. If it's too late tonight, certainly tomorrow. Tell your local bookstore to get this book in because this is the kind of vision, this is the kind of vision that makes life seem

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like something totally new, and after I have read even a few pages of this, I hope that you will realize that your life will never be the same again. I am reading from David Bodanis' "The Secret House." He is the author of, "The Body Book," and has a

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degree in pure mathematics from the University of Chicago. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, The Literary Time Supplement, and the International Herald Tribune. He is a pure scientist. And what he

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does in, "The Secret House," is merely take us through 24 hours in a house like yours and mine on an ordinary day, a house which is being lived in by a couple, a male and a female. And he shows you what goes on in this house. What I am reading

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you is not science-fiction, it is not fiction at all. It is scientific truth, but it is our everyday life looked at from the viewpoint of a microbiologist, looked at from the viewpoint of a microscope, looked at from the viewpoint of sound systems that

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can record what is going on in the micro-world. Therefore, we are giants and what we do is being looked at as it affects beings that we don't even see or, as you will see from this book, did we know existed? Therefore, let me read to you,

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beginning at the beginning, from the "Secret House" by David Bodanis, that's B-O-D-A-N-I-S. And I'm starting off with morning, when the alarm clock goes off. And if that does not seem of interest to you, just wait five minutes and if this

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thing hasn't caught you up, then my name isn't Morton Marcus. MORNING IN EVERYONE'S HOUSE From the alarm clock, a spherical shockwave traveling at mach one starts growing outward, spreading and spreading till it

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hits the wall. Some of the energy it carries causes the curtains over the window to heat up from the friction of the onslaught. Much of the rest rebounds back, enters the ears of the two sleepers and finally rouses them awake. There's a

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rolling of eyes and a stirring of head. Then a female hand gropes out from under the security of a comforter, fumbles on the bedside table, finds the alarm clock and clacks down the button on top to turn it off. The buzzing from the alarm clock

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stops but the even higher frequency shriek from a quartz-crystal inside takes over, spreading in a growing sphere out from the clock as the sound wave did, striking the walls and heating the curtains too. But this second

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room-filling shockwave is inaudible to the two humans. The waker, desperate to fill the rigors of the morning with some soothing music, fumbles out from the covers again towards the radio. The spherical pulses from courts in the alarm clock crash

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on heated over her arm, but she is not to be deterred. The radio is found, switched on listened to for a brief instant, then the tuning knob is furiously grasped. Some simpleton had left it on the new station last night. Now it must be moved from

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that driddle and switched to the haven of the neo-classical music station. The tuning knob quickly rolls, speeding across the megahertz to the new location. There's a crackling as it moves between stations, a slight hiss and buzzing to which the wakers

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single-mindedly ignores. Certainly as things are the cries of distant exploding galaxies consumed in their death throes and sending out massively powerful particle radiation across space and time in the process of their obliteration.

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Other static comes from lightning strikes on distant continents, which send electromagnetic pulses through the upper atmosphere that travel across deserts and seas into the bedside radio. All are received, then passed over and ignored in

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the hunt for the right station. The radio disturbs the other sleeper, and after some fruitless tugging of the comforter, a division of resources is ordained. The first waker lies back to savor the music while the second one,

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stifling deep inner protest, unsure of his domain and wondering where the civilized conversation of his usual radio station has gone, gets ready to emerge from the bed. Whack, thump, bam! A man's foot extends out of the bed and lands

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on the floor. The floorboards jammed down and the vibrations travels sideways like pond waves to the wall. The whole house compresses in the new loading, bricks where for the floor fits into the wall shrinking smaller by 100,000th of an inch from a

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weight. Any impact that doesn't get lost in the walls stays quivering in the floor, the chest of drawers starts lifting up and down as does the bed, the chair, the table with its plant on top, the stack of magazines and Sunday papers in the corner,

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and even the old coffee cup left down on the floor. All lift up and bounce down, rebound up and crash down again as the floor reverberates to get rid of its buzzing energy. And a particularly energetic leap out of bed, this bouncing of

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furniture can be seen, lampshades especially are prone to being knocked over in such moments. But even with a softer landing, the furniture shaking takes place. Then the second foot touches down. The waker stands up and he steps to the

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double-glazed window to see what is happening outside. Then he slides the window and it's aluminum frame closed. The invisible shower outside of an electrical forcefield has not proved captivatingly interesting to him. In fact he hasn't even

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seen it. As the wind closes, long slivers of its aluminum frame come tearing off. On a steel windows, such tearing friction would provide a niche, a nice niche for future rust to sprout. But here the aluminum window quietly goes about

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repairing the scratch itself as it always does. Before the culprit has even turned away, a new layer of aluminum oxide starts growing out sideways from the intact portion of the window. It spreads across the microscopic gouge, covers it and

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seals it and only stops when it has formed a perfectly fitting replacement for the bit that was lost. When aluminium was first discovered in the last century, such self-repair caused it to be treated as only a precious and mysterious new metal could

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expect to be. The Emperor of France scrapped his pure silver dining set and had it replaced by one composed entirely of this new and vastly expensive material: aluminum. The American Congress considered a proposal to buy some of this glittering

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substance and put it in a slab on top of the Washington Monument as a sign of respect to the nation's founder. The project was subject to lengthy discussion because of the outrageous cost. Only when British chemists discovered

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aluminum alloy in a down German Zeppelin in the First World War did its use as an ordinary metal begin to spread, so that now its presence in low-cost siding windows is treated as perfectly The waker is now on his way to the bathroom. As he steps, the

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normal. floor continues to shake and the dust continues to dance from the invisibly rebounding furniture. But there's also something else which moves under his feet. Some, things, rather roused out

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of their sleep because the waker strides over them. These are the mites. Thousands and thousands of tiny mites, male mites and female mites and baby mites and even crunched to the side away from the main conglomerations, the mummified corpses of long

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dead old great grandparent mites. Brethren have their stir in the bed too where they have spent the night snuggling warm and cozy under our two human sleepers, and which now the great burden above them stirring, these mites are

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beginning to stir for the day too. This sounds unpleasant, but it's quite normal. You don't have to leave the same sheets on for weeks, let the dog crawl everywhere and generally do all those other awful, unhealthy things we expect of people whose

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rooms are infested with bugs to get them. Even if the room is well aired and the floor clean, the dog never even let up to play, the mites, the mites will still be there. Epidemiological studies show that nearly 100% of our houses are host to these

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creatures. It's the same in Germany, Sweden and apparently every other other advanced country too. The consolation is that these are not great visible mites that produce itching, let alone the all too visible and loathsome bedbug, but rather a

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special, ultra tiny, so small, they were only discovered in 1965 breed that lives in human carpets and beds and nowhere else. Mites have been called sacks with legs on and that's a fair description. There's a mostly naked body, a few loose

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armor plates on it, holes for breathing, eating, elimination and copulation, and stubby little hairs sticking out all over to help feel what's going on. Each one has eight legs, because at one time, they were in the same evolutionary line as

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the spider. But that was over 300 million years ago, and since then matters have changed. The spiders went on to become great multi-eyed hunting carnivores but mites went a different way. And many have ended up as peaceful grazers munching

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whatever is leftover from the larger creatures they shelter near. In the house, these leftover nibbles are skin. Tiny rafts of human skin flakes, there's plenty of them around. The skin rubs off when you move in bed and it's brushed off when

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you dress. It falls off the body at a stupendous rate whenever you move tens of thousands of skin flakes per minute, and it tears off at only slower rates when you stand perfectly still. For us, the skin flakes are insignificant, noticeable only

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when they pile up as dust. But for the waiting mites they are manna from heaven. Hidden down at the base of the carpets, these mites have only to wait mouth up for this perpetual haze of skin flakes to

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rain down on them. The ultimate and parachuted food rations. For the mites that live in the bed, an estimated 42,000 per square ounce of mattress dust, two million total in the average double bed, the floating skin rafts are even more accessible.

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They slip through the weave of any pajamas that might be worn, through the spaces between individual threads in the bottom sheet, and so tumble down onto the mites contentedly waiting on the bottom. The warmth in the bed is nice for the mites'

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original evolution was in the tropics, but carpets are alright too, because the mites just slow down all their actions to make do in the greater cool and carpet fabrics. What the mites do in their protected habitats is what most animals spend their

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earthly existence doing. They eat, they defecate, and in propitious moments, they copulate. Twenty fecal pellets emerge from each mite a day squeezed out of special anal valves, a vast heap containing nearly as many pellets as there

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are stones and the Great Pyramid would fit easily on the period at the end of this sentence, and a few are probably there, come to think of that, already. The fecal pellets are so small that they float and ascending offering up to the gods who

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kindly let loose the sustaining skin flakes perhaps, and they soar and travel throughout the house. Some of the mummified ex-mites are hollow and light enough to float up too. Another Egyptian style funerary offering to join the pellets. With a

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mites make things more complicated than the ancient Egyptians is that not all floating mite-shaped husks in the home are mummies. Some are just the discarded shells of growing mites for like many insects, these carpet and

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bed-dwellers shed their skin on a regular schedule. Having it go dry, crack open, and a new naked mite step out. A half day or so after being reborn this way, the fresh mites are ready to mate. It is a delicate process. In certain

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cases, the male produces a sealed packet of sperm leaves it on a convenient surface and then departs. The female chasely having no part in the proceedings up to that point then discretely sits on the packet or in the case of those

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females with a genital openings on their top surfaces plops backward on it. It's not quite what we're used to, but it works. My family's with thousands of members have been found living 16,000 feet up on Mount Everest. Others have been

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found in the Antarctic deep under the Pacific Ocean, and even in the case of one New Guinea species, living out their whole lives, successful mating procedures included, within the fungal growths that are carried on the backs of large weevils

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living in moss forests. The environment of suburban bed and floor present few rigors after that. Into the bathroom goes our male resident, and after the most pressing need is satisfied, it's time to brush the teeth. A tube

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of toothpaste is squeezed, it's pinched metal seams are splayed, pressure waves are generated inside and the pace begins to flow. But what's in this toothpaste so carefully being extruded out? Water mostly. Thirty to forty-five percent in

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most brands, ordinary everyday simple tap water. It's there because people like to have a big gob of toothpaste to spread on the brush and water is the cheapest stuff there is when it comes to making big gobs. Dripping a bit from the tap onto

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your brush would cost virtually nothing. Whipped in with the rest of the toothpaste, the manufacturers could sell the water at a neat account and pleasing $2 per pound equivalent. Toothpaste manufacturer is a very lucrative

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occupation. Second to water in quantity is chalk, exactly the same material that school teachers used to write on blackboards. It is collected from the crushed remains of long dead ocean creatures. In the Cretaceous seas, chalk particles

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served as part of the wickedly sharp outer skeleton that these creatures had to wrap around themselves to keep from getting chomped by all the slightly larger other ocean creatures they met. Their mass graves are our present chalk deposits.

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The individual chalk particles, the size of the smallest mud particles in your garden, have kept their toughness over the eons, and now on the toothbrush they'll need it. The enamel outer coating of the tooth they'll have to face is the

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hardest substance in the body, tougher than the skull, or bone, or nail. Only the chalk particles and toothpaste can successfully grind into the teeth during brushing, ripping off the surface layers like an abrading wheel grinding down a

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boulder in a quarry. The craters, slashes, and channels that the chalk tears into the teeth will also remove a certain amount of buildup yellow in the carnage and it is for that polishing function that there it's there. A certain amount of

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unduly enlarged, extra abrasive short fragments, tears such cavernous pits into the teeth, that future decay bacteria will be able to bunker down there and thrive. The quality control people find it almost impossible to screen out these errant

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super-chalk pieces and government regulations allow them to stay in. In case even the gouging doesn't get all the yellow off, another substance is worked into the toothpaste cream, it's titanium

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dioxide. It comes in tiny spheres, and it's the stuff bobbing around in white wall paint to make it come out white. Splashed around onto your mouth during the brushing, it coats much of the yellow that remains. Being water-soluble, it leaks

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off in the next few hours it is swallowed. But at least for the quick glance up in the mirror after finishing it will make the user think his teeth are truly white. Some manufacturers add optical whitening dyes, the stuff more commonly found in

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washing machine bleach to make extra sure that that glance in the mirror shows a reassuring white. These ingredients alone would not make a very attractive concoction. They would stick in the tube like a sloppy white

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plastic lump, hard to squeeze out as well as revolting to the touch. Few consumers would save a rubbing in a mixture of water ground up blackboard chalk and the whitener from latex paint first thing in the morning. to get around that finicky

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distaste, the manufacturers have mixed in a host of other goodies. To keep the glob from drying out, a mixture including glycerin glycol, related to the most common car antifreeze ingredient, is whipped in with chalk and water and to give that

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concoction a bit of substance, all we really have so far is wet colored chalk, a large helping is added of gummy molecules from the seaweed, chondrus crispus. This seaweed ooze spreads in among the chalk, paint, and antifreeze then stretches itself

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in all directions to hold the whole mass together. A bit of paraffin oil, the fuel that flickers in the camping lamps, is pumped in with it to help the moss ooze keep the whole substance smooth.

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With the glycol ooze and paraffin, we're almost there. Only two major chemicals are left to make the refreshing, cleansing substance we know as toothpaste. The ingredients so far are fine for cleaning, but they wouldn't make much of the

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satisfying foam we have come to expect in the morning brushing. To remedy that, every toothpaste on the market has a big dollop of detergent added to it. You've seen the suds detergents will make in a washing machine, the same substance added here will

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duplicate that inside them out. It's not particularly necessary, but it sells. The only problem is that by itself, this ingredient tastes, well, too much like detergent. It's horribly bitter and harsh. The chalk put in toothpaste is

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pretty foul tasting too, for that matter. It's to get around that gustatory discomfort that the manufacturers putting in the ingredient they tell perhaps the most of all, this is the flavoring and it has to be strong, double-rectified

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peppermint oil is used. A flavor is so powerful that chemists know better than to sniff it in the raw state in the laboratory. Menthol crystals and saccharin or other sugar simulators are added to complete the camouflage operation. Is that it? Chalk,

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water, paint, seaweed, antifreeze, paraffin oil, detergent and peppermint? Not quite. A mix like that would be irresistible to the hundreds of thousands of individual bacteria lying on the surface of even an immaculately clean bathroom

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sink. They would get in, float in the water bubbles and just the ooze and paraffin, maybe even spray out enzymes to break down the chalk. The result would be an uninviting mess. The way manufacturers avoid that final obstacle is by putting something

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into kill the bacteria, something good and strong is needed, something that will zap any accidentally intruding bacteria into oblivion. And that's something is formaldehyde, the disinfectant used in anatomy labs. So it's

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chalk, water, paint, seaweed, antifreeze, paraffin oil, detergent, peppermint, formaldehyde, and fluoride which can go some way towards preserving children's teeth. That's the usual mixture raised to the mouth on the toothbrush

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for a fresh morning's clean. If it sounds too unfortunate, take heart. Studies show that thorough brushing with just plain water will often do just as good a job. And anyway, a much more pleasant mixture of substances for the mouth awaits

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in that other chamber of chemical concoctions a little way down the hall, the kitchen. Well, that is the first several pages of the series of, "The Secret House," by David Bodanis. We have been reading from this

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book in connection with showing you vision and poetry, or how one must, and how all poets attempt to see the world in a new way to show it in an individual way, maybe the way they particularly experience it through their language. And as

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you can tell, in this case, especially with the mites the author really raised his language and was extremely poetic in his rendering as to what was going on in the house. After a short musical break, we will once more return and see

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what goes on in the kitchen as we pursue this very, very exciting book on our everyday life and the everyday life of a household called, "The Secret House," but right now, a musical break.

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We have some announcements as usual. First of all, I'd like you to be aware of the cafe poets' Wednesday Night readings at the Portofino Cafe, Pacific Grove Plaza downstairs at 620 Lighthouse Avenue, Pacific Grove. On Wednesday, that's

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tomorrow, August 17th, Kent Fearbend reading from, "The Sunset of August." That is Kent Fearbend, reading from his book, "The Sunset of August," admission $3. It is at 8pm at the Portofino Cafe 620 Lighthouse Avenue, Pacific

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Grove, the cafe poet series. I'd also like to alert you to a writing workshop that has been going on since August 3rd. The time is from 7:30 to 9:30 each Wednesday evening. And the person who was holding it is Robert Lundquist, a very

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excellent poet from Santa Cruz. The telephone number you can be reached at is 426-0353, that is 426-0353 for Robert Lundquist, who is conducting from 7:30 to 9:30pm a ten-week workshop on the writing of poetry. So, do pay attention that. Robert is

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very sensitive and very insightful. An announcement from the American Poetry Association: poets pick up your pens. You can win $1,000 if your poem is the best in the American Poetry Association's contest, or you

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can win other prizes, so get published if you want. Send as many as five poems, each can be up to twenty lines long. Send your poems to Poetry, box 1803 Santa Cruz, California 95061. That is five poems up to twenty lines long to Poetry, box 1803

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Santa Cruz, California. Well, tonight I am taking a departure after reading several Ted Hughes poems in which he reaches for the magic to in some way, redefine reality so that our whole conception of

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ourselves and our environment, and our whole conception of our lives becomes new, exciting, and charged with meaning. I went on to start reading from a book called, "The Secret House," which is really a scientific book that looks at life in a

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suburban house, inhabited by a man and a woman. And already, I think you have discovered some very shocking things. The book once more, if you've just tuned in, is looked at, or looks at the house and looks at these giant human beings from the

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viewpoint of a microscope. So in other words, we're seeing the microscopic life that lives in a house as human beings go about their day. And we've just taken the male from the bathroom where he has brushed his teeth to the kitchen and we continue.

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Come in the kitchen, toss the newspaper on the table, and what's there to see what a great mob of tiny creatures fleeing for their lives. These are the pseudo mon ends, and they're one of the most widespread bacterial beings in the home. There are

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many thousands hanging on by strands to your face as you walk in. A good number on your arms and bath robe, and even more on any recently moist house service. Here on the kitchen table they are flailing and twisting and desperately trying

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to make it to the far side away from the human. But in this endeavor, they suffer one near insurmountable problem. They are too small, not the size of a mite, not the size of half a mite but smaller still, itty-bitty, so tiny that a pile

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of 100,000 would not be visible and so short. At the far end of the table, the one they are lunging for after the newspapers landed on the table is an awful 400,000 body lengths away, what for us would be 400 miles over a flat road. And the creatures

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can't walk; they can't walk, trot, jog, skip, or sprint. They can't talk, they can't even crawl. With no arms or legs, all those modes of locomotion are out of consideration. They're shaped like simple, stubby tubes. What we might look like

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if stuffed into a rubber wetsuit that had no outlets for our arms or head. Yet even-shaped like that these pseudomonas still have to flee across the table from this awful thing that is coming after them, the newspaper laid down by the human male. So

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they swim, no arms, so the breaststroke is out, no legs, so a flutter kick wouldn't help. But something even better than that is provided for their use: a propeller. Each one of the great mass of creatures congregating on the kitchen

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table aged-elders and just-arrived youngsters has a massive powerful tail sticking out of its rear end. It doesn't have any muscles in it, but it does have an angled pipe attachment at the base leading inside. And where that fits

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there is a chemical motor in position to drive it. As it's their only way forward, it has to be able to start every time. It does. Each creature just aims and the motor starts up, the propeller begins to turn and it's off. Round and around the

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propeller goes and forward and straight the creature was propelled, to us it speed would not be particularly impressive 1,000,000th of a mile per hour. But on the scale of these little beings, that's fast. Scaledd down to their length, that

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equals seven body lengths a second, which is better than even Carl Lewis at his best that the last Olympics. Still, even an Olympic sprinter would take a long while to make 400 hundred miles and these tabletop creatures, despite having that

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propeller going for them, have a long haul ahead and they conduct it in a strange way. Each creature starts off okay, moving forward steady and on course, propeller thumping, but as soon as it's made, any amount of progress is suddenly goes

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berserk. The turning propeller stops turning, goes still, and then starts up in the opposite direction. That holds the creature back in reverse, twisting in [unidentified] and veering it off its course as an outboard motor switched into

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reverse on a fishing boat would do. But then, just as suddenly, the aberration ends, the tumbling and twisting stop, the chemical motor turns the propeller back on the right way. The creature advances forward again, with no sign at all that

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this little hiccup ever happened. The whole reversing ruckus only came about because the creature was trying to get its bearings. It's a pretty peculiar way of getting your bearings, but in lieu of compases or sun angles, it's the

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best they can be expected to do. Also, it works. If the creature propels itself into a dangerous zone, there will be lots of these moments of backward twisting, and that will help to get it turned around heading to safety. If it's already in a

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safer region, there are fewer slippages, just enough to check that everything's still okay, and the creature stays headed in the right direction. So the mob regresses along the table with black back-slidings and confusions and collisions and an

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unholy mess to be sure, but still moving away from that awful thing, that newspaper that has just been thumped down on the table. Which it would be very unwise to stay near. This thing, just this morning newspaper, tore so offhandedly

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onto the kitchen table a moment befores. As the paper impacted, great gobs of material in it fell out, not newsprint that's rigid enough, but such extras is the hemp, linen, wool, asbestos, glass, fibers, glues, and other substances the modern newspaper

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is filled out with. And in that deluge, there was also an extraordinary gush of loose ink, usually microscopic, though sometimes slightly inky fingers after the crossword stage has been reached, give an intimation of what's been happening.

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Newspaper ink is not attached to the fibers of the paper, but instead is held on by rough cracks in the interstices between them. The slamming impact of the newspaper on the table is enough to rub some of that loose. It splashes out in

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horizontal jets, and any pseudomonas creatures caught in the advancing dark fluid would not have long to live. Aside from the oils and detergents in the ink, there was also a high concentration of anti-microbial poisons worked

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in. It's good for keeping ink stores fresh when they're waiting at the printers, but here, splattering loose on the table, it's what causes the frantic ride of fleeing pseudomonas we started with. So far so good but how did the

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pseudomonas creatures get to be on the table in the first place? They came from the dish towel in the kitchen and the horrors contained within that simply-striped object are not for the weak-hearted to behold.

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What is a dish towel? A simple weave of cotton fabric. That means, as we shall see in discussing clothing, that it has long protoplasm-filled tunnels winding within it with minerals, proteins, and soluble fats sprinkled on and a nice

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sugary-based cellulose gridwork to hold the whole thing together. Bacteria would munch happily on that by itself, but since it's a dish towel, there are two other additions mixed in: one is food, the odd fragment of bread crumb, a bit

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of grease left on one of the washed up plates, that sort of thing. Tucked safely away inside a dish towel, each such food residue will suffice for thousands of specialized microbes. But the second special characteristic of a dish towel

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is worse, that is moisture, bacteria thrive in moisture. It should be no surprise then that public health microbiologist consider the dish towel and its partner in crime, the improperly squeezed out sponge, to be one of the leading spreaders of

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bacterial populations in the home. Wipe casually over the table after cleaning up the night before, it deposited great numbers of pseudomonas there. Moisture transferred with them and the nutrients dissolved in that moisture provided all that

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the creatures needed to multiply for the morning after. The problem could be avoided by wiping down only with a fresh cloth or making, oh- the problem could be avoided by wiping down only with a fresh cloth, or making sure every surface is

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bone dry before finishing, but who's inclined to see to that every evening? All this buggy propagation can give the wrong impression about what's been going on in the kitchen overnight. Certainly there are all those creatures on the table

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and many more where they came from in the sink, fridge, and on the shelves. But that does not mean they have been assaulting the stored food all night, swimming up to it, squeezing it, munching it, and generally making a mess of it. They've

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tried, but they've often failed to make even a mark for the food in your kitchen fights back. Consider the humble egg within the refrigerator. Overnight, it was steadily breathing, wheezing out and pulling in all the gases

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in the refrigerator atmosphere. It did its breathing through little holes in its surface. And while those holes might be just the thing to bring in oxygen for any embryo that was the form of an egg. They also have the bad habit of letting in any

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bacteria. Often cousins of the same pseudomonas we met on the table that happened to have ended up on the surface of the egg. The holes are shaped like hollow golf-tees and are broad enough for a dozen or more mooching bacteria to slide down

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each one at a time, so much for the weak point. Now, for the defense. At the bottom of those holes, the bacteria do not get a simple swim across to the yolk where the nutrients they could use are located. There's something in the way. Right at

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the bottom of each hole, a hard rubbery membrane is stretched across, in hard boiled eggs it's noticeable as the translucent film around the egg. Getting through this is no easy job. The bacteria have to twist and probe, secrete dissolving

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enzymes, and then push some more before they can pierce a hole through the stage one barrier. And considering the fate that lies in store for them on the other side, it might be better if they didn't make it. To us the white of an egg is a simple

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gooey watery thing that's interesting because it turns hard on being cooked and makes a nice contrast to the yellow yolk. Otherwise, it doesn't seem much good for anything. But on a microscopic level, it is something more.

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The white surrounds the yolk like a chemically loaded and booby-trapped sea, quite capable of destroying fleets of bacteria that enter into it on their voyage across to the yolk. The invading bacteria are allowed to slip into the sea without

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problem once they've made it through the first barrier. They're even given a few minutes of unbothered propeller-throbbing swim. Only then, well away from the safety of the shell wall, does the attack begin. Sizzling lysozyme,

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lysozyme enzyme sear into the bacteria's cell walls, rendering them open and leaving great numbers dead. More lysozyme streams onto the bacteria and then even more before the sizzling let's up. The same lysozyme defender is found in

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human tears, they are regularly splitting open errant bacteria too and so leaving the surface of the eye, one of the few regions of the body relatively bacteria-free. After the lysozyme attack, the way might look clear for the bacteria

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survivors, but in fact, things have only become worse. All around them, the nutrients that they need to sustain them on the swim are slowly being wrapped up by living processes in this strange white sea.

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The bacteria need iron to keep their propellers turning. The egg white creates slithering proteins that will latch on to the nearest iron before the bacteria do, wrap around it and chemically lock it away, zinc and copper nutrients get wrapped

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up by this insidious protector as well. Possibly the bacteria could make it anyway, for even without the main iron meals they need, it's just possible that their propellers might have enough thump left to put them across to the yolk. If the

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bacteria could just swim over to the nearest vitamins, riboflavin and biotin are especially abundant, just a few body lengths away, they might still be able to cross in time before they found it from lack of iron. They don't make it. The living

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egg white creates from its depth, other substances far smaller and more maneuverable than the bacteria. These reach the bombing vitamins first, wrap around, and almost destroy them, rendering them useless to the bacteria when they do finally

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arrive. That was the last chance the bacteria had. Now they're too far from the shell they fell down to make it- now they're too far from the shell they fell down to make it back. And in the other direction, the yolk that they were aiming for all along,

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that would give them nice juicy proteins and fats, if they could only get to it for some hunger-appeasing substance, that yolk is too far away in the forward direction. As a result, the bacteria die, one after the other, bobbing uselessly, their

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propellers still, starving from lack of food out in this unsuspected guardian sea that came alive and swore to them once they entered it. The white, once again, has done its duty. The tin cans in the kitchen do an equally stall with job of

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preservation. Most of each can is simply pressed steel, the tin that gives it the name has a coating on the inside, only a fraction of a millimeter thick but that slender layer is enough. The tin splutters out extra electrons which form a

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barrier against corrosive acid in the food weakening the can. And without that corrosion, there will be no micro-cracks or thin points for microbes to get in. Tins of mutton brought to the Antarctic by Shackleton in 1908 were opened fifty years

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later and found to be perfectly edible. The mechanism is so simple. The cans are so widespread over one hundred billion in annual world production that it's hard to imagine what a difference their introduction has made.

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Until the era of tin-cans, armies were limited in size by the number of chickens, steers, cows, and other food animals they could lug along behind them, or hope to find on the way. In 1795, the French revolutionary government

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announced a 12,000 Franc prize for a way of storing food to get around this limitation, and in 1809, a Parisian candy-maker, [Nicolas] Francois Appert, pocketted the sum with an early invention of the sealed can. Napoleon use sealed cans first

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to supply his Grand Army on the invasion of Russia. The invasion ended in disaster, but the cans of food held up fine and the technique has only progressed in popularity since. Finally, but in a different way, defending itself in the

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overnight kitchen is the gentle apple on the shelf. It has been injected with an aging chemical by a certain outside force and unless it can do something against that, it will no longer be the firm, inviting fruit it was last night. Instead its

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tissues will break down, its water will leak out, a good apple is eighty-four percent water, it will shrivel and so often rot and so the apple gets to work. It has curious stabilizing enzymes inside that get called out to fight against

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the tissue rotting. Like the pectin put into home canning jellies to make them solid, these enzymes store up the thin internal walls of the apple, not reverting the aging, not totally stopping it and bringing back pure youth, but rather acting as

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the ideal rejuvenation drink that a Swiss clinic is supposed to do, slowing down time's ravages and limiting its display. On its outside, the apple can do even more. A thick and watertight wax oozes out onto its surface spreading from

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tiny pores within, as unnerving to see and close up, as would be the spectacle of an explorer oozing a thick rubber wetsuit out from the pores of his own skin, when conditions get too rough to go bare skin. For the apple, that coating also limits

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the aging damage, keeping it from going dry and not letting its precious and limited internal water supplies out. But what malignant entity has forced the apple into this precarious state has given it the chemical that's switched on the unwanted

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aging. The answer can be found by looking at the rest of the tray when the apple rests. The other apples lying next to it are the culprits for their surface have come trickling out clouds- from their surface have come trickling out of clouds of

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invisible ethylene gas, a potent aging stimulator, in large quantities it has a sweetish smell, which many hospital patients will remember for it is also used as an anesthetic. When it floats to any other apple, it starts the changes that lead to

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aging. It's an inevitable process, coated in their DNA, that the apples can do nothing about. Apples in the wild all trickle out this ethylene gas, and they do so as a way of ensuring that

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when one ripens, all the others around will ripen at the same rate. The apple we started with just happened to be resting at the center of the group of apples on the tray, and so got more of this ethylene dose than the others, not that much more

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though, the waxing skin and internal shoring up is going on in the others to hold off their over-hasty decay too. Tomatoes and avocados get it even worse, forced to respire at a terrific rate as the ethylene gas produced in the kitchen grows

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closer to them at night. Well, we have been reading from, "The Secret House," a microbiologist's book about what goes on in an ordinary suburban house inhabited by two people. The name of the author is David

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Bodanis, that's B-O-D-A-N-I-S. Again, the name of the book is, "The Secret House," it is put out by Simon and Schuster as a Touchstone paperback book with a lot of infrared, and blow up, on microscopically blown-up pictures of many of the things

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talked about, a very lovely book. I do suggest you get it and remember, we were reading this because it illustrates a new way of looking at reality, a way that, in this case, is not science fiction, and is not fiction, but is the vision that

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is given to us by science, and the new scientific instruments that have been invented within the last ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty years. And so we can see our everyday reality and from this microscopic description in a totally new

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manner. But in the end, I would like to go back to the man who started this all off, Ted Hughes, whose birthday is tomorrow, the great British poet. Because in the end, as I read through, "The Secret House," it seemed to me that

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finally what came was not just an exotic or a scintillating description of the life around us that we do not see but a sense of the wonder of life that is going on all around us, glamorously alive on a virtual symphony of existence on all

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different levels. And it once more showed me, as Ted Hughes says in this poem I will read that, what poetry in the end and what all our talks about in the vision, given by the poet, seen by the poet, rendered in his words, is the vision of the

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celebration of life and the unity of life. And I will, therefore, like to sign off tonight with a happy birthday to Ted Hughes, who, as I said, was born on August 17th, 1930 or 58 years ago tomorrow. I would like to read one of the last poems he

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has written in his new and Selected Poems. A poem called: LIFE IS TRYING TO BE LIFE Death also is trying to be life. Death is in the sperm like the ancient mariner with his horrible tale.

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Death mews in the blankets - is it a kitten? It plays with dolls but cannot get interested. It stares at the windowlight and cannot make it out. It wears baby clothes and is patient. It learns to talk watching the other's mouths. It laughs and

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shouts and listens to itself numbly. It stares at people's faces and sees their skin like a strange moon, and stares at the grass and its position just as yesterday. And stares at its fingers and hears: "Look at that

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child!" Death is a changeling, tortured by daisy-chains and Sunday bells. It is dragged about like a broken doll by little girls playing at mothers and funerals. Death only wants to be life. It cannot quite manage.

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Weeping, it is weeping to be life as for a mother, it cannot remember. Death and Death and Death, it whispers with eyes closed trying to feel life

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like the shout in joy, like the glare in lightning that empties the lonely oak. And that is the death in the antlers of the Irish elk. It is the death in the cave-wife's needle of bone. Yet it is still not death.

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Or in the shark's fang, which is a monument of its lament on a headland of life. And I would like to sign off by telling you that this last half-hour was brought to you by Plaza Books and Stuff on the

00:56:52.100 - 00:57:13.340

mall and we appreciate their support. I'd also like to say that "Word Play," literature, fantasy and readings from our satellite system, will be on Mondays from 9 to 9:30pm. "An Eye for An Eye," by Ursula LeGuin will be on August 22nd.

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It is a story about a space scientist who remains behind on an alien planet after the conclusion of her mission. After many years of life among the aliens, she is puzzled and troubled by visitors from home. I would like you all to stay

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tuned for "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" a wonderful show with Tim Folger that follows. I hope you found this a very provocative show tonight. This is Mort Marcus saying, I will see you in two weeks. Next week, Joe Stroud and probably

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myself will be here with a wonderful poet, Phil Dow, who will come down and visit with us and talk with us, and I think you will find it a very, very interesting evening. That's Phil Dow next week. Right now we go out with Philip Glass, and

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"Northstar" which is what we have been playing all evening.