About Me: Dorian Sagan

This poem appeared on the Upaya Newsletter 07/26/2010

 

Dorian Sagan, son of astronomer Carl Sagan and biologist Lynn Margulis, offered this wild and cogent poem at the Lindisfarne Fellows meeting…
My name is Dorion Sagan.

I am so grateful and therefore, as we learned yesterday, happy to be here.

I am a writer.

I am an animal.

I am a differentiated clone of nucleated cells surprisingly, but not inappropriately, derived from the sexual union of an astronomer & a biologist, at the end of the McCarthy Era.

I am a collection of microbes, including symbiotic bacteria recovering for the last 2 billion years—they may never recover—as organelles.

I am a complex thermodynamic system who has availed itself of jet fuel to come here and worry about energy while eating cookies made from the world’s first strains of perennial wheat.

I am a lineal descendant of the first life, recycling a water-based chemistry full of hydrogen-rich compounds, like methane and sulfide, characteristic of the inner solar system four billion years ago at the time of life’s origin, soon after the sun turned on.

Atomically, I contain elements like carbon and oxygen, made not here but on the inside of distant stars that then exploded.

Stochastically, my lineage escaped several serious mass extinctions, not including the global pollution crisis precipitated by the first water-using photosynthesizers that toxified the entire planet but whose fresh air I now breathe.

Spiritually, I seem to be a slice of the eternal “I am,” temporarily hallucinating the reality of being separate from others.

But enough about me.