Paternoster

The passage of time must have impressed prehistoric man as cyclical: the predictable recurrence of the seasons, and with them the altering conditions of life so closely linked to the climate. But the inescapable linearity of growing older revealed another characteristic of time, which was described imaginatively, perhaps most powerfully by the Greeks, in the the activities of the three Fates, one who wove the cloth, one who measured it and one who cut it. Human life as finite and determined by factors external to each person.

The cyclical nature of the biological world is present in each individual being. In mammals, for example, there are the regularity of the respiratory and cardiac cycles, both concerned with the provision of oxygen to the tissues throughout the body. But there is another cycle served by those two cycles, the so called citric acid cycle named for the biochemist, Hans Krebs, the Krebs Cycle. Krebs painstakingly found the steps of the biochemical process in which oxygen having been used in the preparatory steps of glycolysis, enables energy to be made available for work, both muscular and metabolic. But what is extraordinary is that this biochemical cycle is present in animals, plants and bacteria. There is even the astonishing finding that in certain anaerobic bacteria of great antiquity, the cycle can move in the reverse direction. Metabolism itself, has two moments, a catabolic or energy releasing phase, and an anabolic or tissue synthesising phase. In plants and animals the Krebs cycle moves only in the direction of catabolism.

This is a superficial account of something general to life which I understand very imperfectly. But a few months ago I had a dream which is the none too literal foundation of the poem below. It is true that there was ‘a strange meeting’ and also that at some unconscious level I made a connection between the Krebs Cycle and the paternoster lift in the Krebs Building in Oxford, which is an endless belt with small open compartments, onto which people can hop on and off at appropriate floors. One was heavily warned not to try and go over the top, although this is possible, as the dream indicates. How dangerous it is to attempt this no doubt varies according to the precise nature of the installation.

Finally, I have a distinct memory of being with a group of medical students in my first week at Oxford being addressed by a biochemistry lecturer, when he raised his hand and attracted the attention of an elderly person crossing the floor behind us. ‘Sir Hans, good morning. I wonder if you would care to address a few words to our current intake of medical students?’ Which he did. I can remember nothing of what he said, but the enormous impression his presence made on me was somehow preserved in the dream all these decades later.

PATERNOSTER

Hans Krebs Tower, Biochemistry Building, Oxford

Hurrying to be seated before the start

of the lecture, I squeeze an extra place

on the paternoster,

not noticing you, who are there already.

Getting off three floors up, I flail, and lurch

to the left as I step out on air, come

down hard with a jolt,

my balance reflexively corrected.

I’m uncertain where I ought to be going.

The pods climb and fall in linked motion.

‘At last!’ - I know you at once -

‘I was there in the lift, you looked through me.’

You lead the way briskly. I ask ‘A round trip?

Is that how you reached me?’ ‘By transgression.’

You smile. ‘So - up, sideways

back down’ - ‘Yes, motif of rejuvenation’.

We sit near the front. An old colleague of Krebs

expounds the motive power of Krebs Cycle.

You lean closer, at his mention,

‘Pinch yourself, he may be sitting behind us.’

Respiration at the cellular level -

when the organism dies the cycle seizes,

or after a thousand shocks

cells and tissues persuade us to die.

‘An unlikely place to find time together.’

‘We should feel the surprise as a blessing.’

The paternoster was judged

unsound. And later so was the building.