My Amoeba Is Unaware

of this poem in its favour, though it sharesin my totality. Like adverbs, it qualifiesthat to which it is attached, addingslowly, carefully, painfully, to my living.Hosts pay for dinner though the guestbe uninvited, and symbiosisis seldom equal. What most impresses meis its immortality, and the 'bigness of its littleness'.Truly a marvel of adaptation, equally at home in ponds or paunchessince the beginning of life, and a threat to religion, withan ancestry older than all the gods. Not being oviparous,and multiplying geometrically by diffusion of fission,parent and child are the same. Such a conceptionis wholly immaculate, needing no redemption.Hence no one is born at the expense of anotherand death is purely external, an accidentbut not a law. Then as its sizeis the reverse of colossal, it seems as far removedas a prowling space-ship, thus creatinga vastness and mythology in my internal universewhich makes me macroscopic. Too longhave the surfaces sufficed us. Beauty, we are mistaught,is skin deep, and holy men, lonely in caves,have tried to resist temptationby dwelling on the viscera of women,thus spitting at heaven and bespattering themselves.I proclaim equal rights for the parts, the wonderof interdependence, the worthof the cellular proletariate whose ceaseless labourbuilds the cathedral of eyes and hands. I honourthe encyclopaedia of the pseudopodia. The I of the selfis no less in them than in the entire colony, for individualitylies beneath collectivity. But as to a relationshipunsought by either side, there is needfor bio-justice. None need tolerateinvasion of frontiers, bascillary insurrections,unicellular anarchy, though such zealbe without evil. I am its good, it is not mine, and herein liesthe right of defence. Therefore though I praisethis protozoic ancestor,I aim at its death with all my feeble weapons,knowing I do not know if it still survive.