Wormholes

Really? Okay. They come in two varieties. Do you want the fact first or the fiction?

Fact: There are over 3,000 species of worms globally. Of these, earthworms - 27 known species in the UK - serve a vital purpose by making wormholes (systems of tunnels) in the soil. These wormholes help to aerate and drain soil as well this keeping it healthy. Earthworms have been called the living, breathing engineers of the underworld, and no lesser a figure than Charles Darwin afforded them this accolade:

"It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.”

wormholes on earth (assuredly)

As important as the structural impact of their tunnelling activity (known as bioturbation, my word of the week), is their agency in recycling nutrients through their diet of dead plants, leaves, fungi and bacteria, breaking down organic matter and converting it into rich, friable soil. Bravo earthworms, without whom et cetera et cetera.

Fiction: It is posited by theoretical physicists that tunnels in space-time may be possible, and if they were to exist they would allow rapid movement from one region to another without the need to travel thousands of lightyears to get from a to b; a nip through or short-cut in the convoluted fabric of space-time, if you like.

wormholes in space (allegedly)

That's great as a premise for imaginative flights of science-fiction, but the hard physics of it suggests that even if such wormholes exist, matter may not exit the tunnel in the same state it entered, if it even emerges at all. Not for the faint-hearted. Leave it to the Time Lords.

And then there's Marilyn Monroe, at which point you're possibly wondering how we got here. Think of it as an imaginative wormhole.

For all her (dumb) blonde bombshell sex-appeal persona, Marilyn loved reading. There are over 100 published photographs of her reading books, and these were not simply staged shots. She was a bookworm with a personal collection of over 400 titles, ranging from fiction (novels, plays, poetry) to biographies, philosophy, psychology and art history. She read some of my favourite American authors like Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernard Malamud and John Steinbeck. She also liked James Joyce (she read 'Ulysses'), D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Emile Zola.. Many of her books include annotations she made. Her favourite poets were Rilke and Yeats and she even possessed a copy of 'Max' by Giovanetti (reference my Laugh To The Max blog of a couple of Saturdays ago). 

Marilyn Monroe (bookworm)

I found that quite heartening, given a recent report into literacy in the USA suggests that 21% of the adult population is illiterate (can barely read) and 50% have never picked up a book since grade school. 

Maybe it wasn't so surprising that she married one of the leading playwrights of her era, a better proposition than a retired baseball player.

I have an idea for a poem about Marilyn Monroe as a bookworm. Peterborough performance poet Mark Grist has already written the excellent 'I Like A Girl Who Reads' (not about Monroe, I hasten to add), so I'm not going to try and emulate that. Instead, I give you...

Book Your Sexy

The Art of Loving, not a manual for the bedroom,

at least not in that way. It was on my reading list

at university and I consumed it one summer lying 

in a tent at the fringe of a Greek beach. Of course

Marilyn never went to university, but that didn't

stop her from reading it, and many other books

that were on my syllabus, Homer and Aristotle, 

Euripides and Kazantzakis. As far as I know, she 

never went to Greece either, unless the town near

Rochester in New York State. I visited there once

but didn't get a sense of her. Never mind, back to  

The Art of Loving, a treatise by a psychoanalyst

of German descent. It was a big hit in the fifties 

and I can imagine her drilling deep into its ideas, 

thrilling to the challenge of learning how to love, 

not just with passion as a trophy, but individuated

and ethically. In theory great, in practice difficult,

and loving yourself as a first step maybe too big 

a leap for one both fatherless and serially fostered. 

A pity, as she looked so happy pictured reading it. 

Thanks for reading, S ;-)