84th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

The Periodic Table and Primo Levi.

Primo Levi, research chemist, writer, and a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote his classic book ‘The Periodic Table,’ as both a biography and a book about science. Each chapter is dedicated to a chemical element relating to a particular experience in Primo Levi’s life and to observations that range beyond the chemical elements he describes. The book’s concluding chapter is an imagined but possible history of a carbon atom.

In the opening chapter concerning Argon, writing of his family’s migration from Spain to southern Italy as an alien population around 1500, and the wall of mutual suspicion that kept them substantially separated from the Piedmont population, Primo Levi makes a connection with the six noble gasses of The Periodic Table. He writes:

‘There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean “the New,” “the Hidden,” “the Inactive,” and “the Alien.” They are indeed so inert, so satisfied with their condition, that they do not interfere in any chemical reaction, do not combine with any other element, and for precisely this reason have gone undetected for centuries… They are also called the noble gases—and here there’s room for discussion as to whether all noble gases are really inert and all inert gases are noble. And, finally, they are also called rare gases, even though one of them, argon (the Inactive), is present in the air in the considerable proportion of 1 percent, that is, twenty or thirty times more abundant than carbon dioxide, without which there would not be a trace of life on this planet.”

Pertaining to the Pure and the Impure…

As a young university student in General and Inorganic Chemistry, Primo Levi’s first day assignment was the preparation of zinc sulphate, which he describes in the chapter entitled Zinc. In this chapter Primo Levi makes observations regarding the pure and the impure in matter and also in human societies:

“The course notes contained a detail which at first reading had escaped me, namely, that the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered to consider the second, which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable. So take the solution of copper sulfate which is in the shelf of reagents, add a drop of it to your sulfuric acid, and you’ll see the reaction begin: the zinc wakes up, it is covered with a white fur of hydrogen bubbles, and there we are, the enchantment has taken place, you can leave it to its fate and take a stroll around the lab and see what’s new and what the others are doing.”

Relating to the above, Primo Levi reflects on his Jewish origins, which he had once considered merely as a negligible and curious fact but living under Fascism, he sees as a significant part of nature’s living process. He writes:

“I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt or mustard. Impurity, certainly, since just during those months the publication of the magazine Defence of the Race had begun, and there was much talk about purity, and I had begun to be proud of being impure. In truth, until precisely those months it had not meant much to me that I was a Jew: within myself, and in my contacts with my Christian friends, I had always considered my origin as an almost negligible but curious fact, a small amusing anomaly, like having a crooked nose or freckles…”

The Conqueror of Matter…

In the chapter on Iron relating to when Primo Levi was still a student of chemistry and to when Hitler had occupied Prague and Fascist Italy occupied Albania, just a few months before racial laws had been proclaimed, Primo Levi felt himself becoming a loner, like another loner in his class, Sandro, a student who never ever wore an overcoat, had the slow stride of his peasant forebears, and spent his free time climbing mountains or skiing in remote places.

The two became friends:

“We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo …

And finally, and fundamentally, an honest and open boy, did he not smell the stench of Fascist truths which tainted the sky? Did he not perceive it as an ignominy that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? Was he not filled with disgust at all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, all the imperatives? He did feel it; so then, how could he not feel a new dignity and majesty in our study, how could he ignore the fact that the chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidote to Fascism which he and I were seeking, because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness, like the radio and newspapers?

Sandro listened to me with ironical attention, always ready to deflate me with a couple of civil and terse words when I trespassed into rhetoric. But something was ripening in him (certainly not all my doing; those were months heavy with fateful events), something that troubled him because it was at once new and ancient. He, who until then had read only Salgari, Jack London, and Kipling, overnight became a furious reader: he digested and remembered everything, and everything in him spontaneously fell into place as a way of life … At the same time, out of unconscious gratitude, and perhaps also out of a desire to get even, he in turn took an interest in my education and made it clear to me that it had gaps. I might even be right: it might be that Matter is our teacher and perhaps also, for lack of something better, our political school; but he had another form of matter to lead me to, another teacher: the authentic, timeless Urstoff, the rocks and ice of the nearby mountains. He proved to me without too much difficulty that I didn’t have the proper credentials to talk about matter. What commerce, what intimacy had I had, until then, with Empedocles’ four elements? “

Sandro seemed to Primo Levi to be made of iron and Sandro says that he has an affinity with iron, that his father’s fathers had been tinkers and blacksmiths, pounding iron plates, making nails on charcoal forges, and when he is rock climbing and comes across a red vein of iron, he feels like he is meeting a friend.

He takes Primo Levi mountain climbing and skiing, not on guide book routes but on his own paths and always to the limits of his endurance. Primo Levi describes how Sandro “climbed the rocks more by instinct than technique, trusting the strength of his hands and saluting ironically, in the projecting rock to which he clung, the silicon, calcium and magnesium he had learned to recognise in the course on mineralogy. “

Primo Levi tells us that Sandro was the first man to be killed fighting in The Resistance with the Piedmont Military Command, Sandro Dalmastro, captured by the Fascists and shot for failing to surrender in April, 1944.

Survival in Auschwitz, a Chapter on Cerium…

Primo Levi, also arrested for taking part in The Resistance, was deported to Auschwitz in the last year of World War 11. He describes life there as a desperate crisis of existence in the daily presence of death, while at the same time infected by a frenzy of hope brought on by the presence of Russian liberators fighting only eighty kilometres away. Primo Levi says that these alternating feelings that might have destroyed any normal person, were pushed aside, driven by the prisoners’ prime stimulus, their need for food – every prisoner was driven by such overwhelming hunger that it over-ruled other concerns.

He recounts how he was set to work in a chemical laboratory where he learned to steal in order to eat. He stole everything he could, other than the bread of his companions, anything that could possibly be eaten or sold to non-prisoners in exchange for bread. Primo Levi stole fatty acid obtained from the oxidation of paraffin and ate some of it to take the edge off his hunger, but the taste was so unpleasant that he gave up the idea of selling the rest. He came across some mysterious grey rods about twenty-five millimetres long, in a jar that was unlabelled, unusual because this was a German laboratory. He took three of them back to the camp, that night to show to his friend, Alberto. Alberto took a pen knife out of his pocket and scraped one of the rods with the knife. From the rod they saw a spray of yellow sparks that told them that the rod was iron-cerium, an alloy from which cigarette lighters were made.

But why were the rods so large? Alberto, who had once worked with welders, explained that these had been made to fit oxyacetylene torches to ignite the flame. Primo Levi felt pessimistic about the rods’ commercial possibilities, but Alberto, who was never disheartened, told him to steal the rest of the cerium rods and Alberto would find a way to turn them into an article with commercial value.

Obtaining the rest of the rods during an air raid, when Primo Levi brought them into the camp, Alberto was ready with a metal plate with a hole the right calibre for a cigarette lighter. They would scrape down the rods to fit through the hole and transform them into flints and sell them for bread.

They did this work by night in the wooden hut where they slept, hiding under the blankets and on top of a pallet full of shavings, running a risk of starting a fire and more realistically, of being hanged if they were caught. But life, said Primo Levi, had given them a crazy familiarity with danger and death, and risking the noose to eat more seemed to them a logical, indeed an obvious choice. He describes how they made the flints:

“While our companions slept, we worked with the knife, night after night. The scene was so sad you could weep: a single electric light bulb weakly lit the large wooden hut, and in the shadows, as in a vast cave, the faces of other men were visible, wracked by sleep and dreams: tinged with death, they worked their jaws furiously, dreaming of eating. Many of them had an arm or a naked, skeletal foot hanging over the side of the bunk, others moaned or talked in their sleep.

But we two were alive and did not give way to sleep. We kept the blanket raised with our knees and beneath that improvised tent scraped away at the small rods, blindly and by touch: at each stroke you heard a slight crackle and saw a spray of yellow sparks spurt up. At intervals we tested to see if the rod passed through the sample hole: if it didn’t, we continued to scrape; if it did, we broke off the thinned-down stub and set it carefully aside.”

They worked for three nights: nothing happened, nobody noticed their activity, and that is how they earned enough bread to kept them alive until the arrival of the Russians.

But Alberto did not survive the War. Before the Russians liberated the camp, the Germans marched all the prisoners who were fit to travel to Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps. Alberto left with the majority of the prisoners as the front drew near. Primo Levi remained at Auschwitz because he was ill at the time. The Germans made the prisoners walk for days and nights in the snow and freezing cold, executing all those unable to go on, then transporting the ones who were left on open freight cars to a new chapter of slavery. Only a few prisoners survived.

A story that’s essentially true…

Carbon, Primo Levi says, is not one of those elements of the Periodic Table that has specific memories for a particular chemist but rather, as Adam is the non-specific ancestor of us all, carbon, the element of life, is the element that says everything to everyone. Primo Levi had long wanted to tell the story of an atom of carbon, and this is the last element he writes about in The Periodic Table.

Primo Levi tells the story of an atom of carbon…

”Our character lies for hundreds of millions of years, bound to three atoms of oxygen and one of calcium, in the form of limestone: it already has a very long cosmic history behind it, but we shall ignore it. For it time does not exist, or exists only in the form of sluggish variations in temperature, daily or seasonal, if, for the good fortune of this tale, its position is not too far from the earth’s surface. Its existence, whose monotony cannot be thought of without horror, is a pitiless alternation of hots and colds, that is, of oscillations (always of equal frequency) a trifle more restricted and a trifle more ample: an imprisonment, for this potentially living personage, worthy of the Catholic Hell…

But, precisely for the good fortune of the narrator, whose story could otherwise have come to an end, the limestone rock ledge of which the atom forms a part lies on the surface. It lies within reach of man and his pickax (all honor to the pickax and its modern equivalents; they are still the most important intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between the elements and man): at any moment—which I, the narrator, decide out of pure caprice to be the year 1840— a blow of the pickax detached it and sent it on its way to the lime kiln, plunging it into the world of things that change. It was roasted until it separated from the calcium, which remained so to speak with its feet on the ground and went to meet a less brilliant destiny, which we shall not narrate. Still firmly clinging to two of its three former oxygen companions, it issued from the chimney and took the path of the air. Its story, which once was immobile, now turned tumultuous.

It was caught by the wind, flung down on the earth, lifted ten kilometers high. It was breathed in by a falcon, descending into its precipitous lungs, but did not penetrate its rich blood and was expelled. It dissolved three times in the water of the sea, once in the water of a cascading torrent, and again was expelled. It travelled with the wind for eight years: now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds, over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice; then it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure.

Carbon, in fact, is a singular element: it is the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance: but its promotion, its entry into the living world, is not easy and must follow an obligatory, intricate path, which has been clarified (and not yet definitively) only in recent years. If the elaboration of carbon were not a common daily occurrence, on the scale of billions of tons a week, wherever the green of a leaf appears, it would by full right deserve to be called a miracle.

The atom we are speaking of, accompanied by its two satellites which maintained it in a gaseous state, was therefore borne by the wind along a row of vines in the year 1848. It had the good fortune to brush against a leaf, penetrate it, and be nailed there by a ray of the sun…. “

Says Primo Levi, “this refined, minute, and quick-witted chemistry was “invented” two or three billion years ago by our silent sisters, the plants, which do not experiment and do not discuss, and whose temperature is identical to that of the environment in which they live. Every verbal description must be inadequate, and one will be as good as the next, so let us settle for the following description.

Our atom of carbon enters the leaf, colliding with other innumerable (but here useless) molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. It adheres to a large and complicated molecule that activates it, and simultaneously receives the decisive message from the sky… in the flashing form of a packet of solar light: in an instant, like an insect caught by a spider, it is separated from its oxygen, combined with hydrogen and (one thinks) phosphorus, and finally inserted in a chain, whether long or short does not matter, but it is the chain of life… Carbon dioxide, that is, the aerial form of the carbon of which we have up till now spoken: this gas which constitutes the raw material of life, the permanent store upon which all that grows draws, and the ultimate destiny of all flesh, is not one of the principal components of air but rather a ridiculous remnant, an “impurity,” thirty times less abundant than argon, which nobody even notices. The air contains 0.03 carbon…”

A small amount in the sum of Periodic Table chemical elements. Back to the carbon atom….

“Once again the wind, which this time travels far; sails over the Apennines and the Adriatic, Greece, the Aegean, and Cyprus: we are over Lebanon, and the dance is repeated. The atom we are concerned with is now trapped in a structure that promises to last for a long time: it is the venerable trunk of a cedar, one of the last; it is passed again through the stages we have already described, and the glucose of which it is a part belongs, like the bead of a rosary, to a long chain of cellulose. This is no longer the hallucinatory and geological fixity of rock, this is no longer millions of years, but we can easily speak of centuries because the cedar is a tree of great longevity. It is our whim to abandon it for a year or five hundred years: let us say that after twenty years (we are in 1868) a wood worm has taken an interest in it. It has dug its tunnel between the trunk and the bark, with the obstinate and blind voracity of its race; as it drills it grows, and its tunnel grows with it. There it has swallowed and provided a setting for the subject of this story; then it has formed a pupa, and in the spring it has come out in the shape of an ugly gray moth which is now drying in the sun, confused and dazzled by the splendour of the day. Our atom is in one of the insect’s thousand eyes, contributing to the summary and crude vision with which it orients itself in space. The insect is fecundated, lays its eggs, and dies: the small cadaver lies in the undergrowth of the woods, it is emptied of its fluids, but the chitin carapace resists for a long time, almost indestructible. The snow and sun return above it without injuring it: it is buried by the dead leaves and the loam, it has become a slough, a “thing,“ but the death of atoms, unlike ours, is never irrevocable…

The carapace, with its eyes by now blind, has slowly disintegrated, and the ex-drinker, ex-cedar, ex-wood worm has once again taken wing. We will let it fly three times around the world, until 1960, and in justification of so long an interval in respect to the human measure we will point out that it is, however, much shorter than the average: which, we understand, is two hundred years. Every two hundred years, every atom of carbon that is not congealed in materials by now stable (such as, precisely, limestone, or coal, or diamond, or certain plastics) enters and re-enters the cycle of life, through the narrow door of photosynthesis. Do other doors exist? Yes, … but until now their quantitative importance is negligible… man has not tried until now to compete with nature on this terrain, that is, he has not striven to draw from the carbon dioxide in the air the carbon that is necessary to nourish him, clothe him, warm him, and for the hundred other more sophisticated needs of modern life…”

Carbon and the great chain of being …

“It is possible to demonstrate that this completely arbitrary story is nevertheless true. I could tell innumerable other stories, and they would all be true: all literally true, in the nature of the transitions, in their order and data. The number of atoms is so great that one could always be found whose story coincides with any capriciously invented story. I could recount an endless number of stories about carbon atoms that become colors or perfumes in flowers; of others which, from tiny algae to small crustaceans to fish, gradually return as carbon dioxide to the waters of the sea, in a perpetual, frightening round-dance of life and death, in which every devourer is immediately devoured; of others which instead attain a decorous semi-eternity in the yellowed pages of some archival document, or the canvas of a famous painter; or those to which fell the privilege of forming part of a grain of pollen and left their fossil imprint in the rocks for our curiosity; of others still that descended to become part of the mysterious shape-messengers of the human seed, and participated in the subtle process of division, duplication, and fusion from which each of us is born. Instead, I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.

It is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one that concerns us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream: it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the carbon which was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.”

Some tentative observations regarding the above…

Wise Socrates was said to have said: ‘I only know that I do not know.’ How, then, can a mere serf be more confident than Socrates? So herewith, the following tentative comments relating to Primo Levi’s book…

Central to the book’s insights, concerning his work as a chemist and his responses to political events of the of the time, in his chapter on Iron, Primo Levi reflects on the importance of Matter in human exploration of the elements and processes of the physical world, exploration which involves trial and error…

“We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves … did he not smell the stench of Fascist truths which tainted the sky? … Was he not filled with disgust at all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, all the imperatives? He did feel it; so then, how could he not feel a new dignity and majesty in our study, how could he ignore the fact that the chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidote to Fascism which he and I were seeking…”

The trial and error that Primo Levi advocates is nature’s own evolutionary process, a blind guess and test process through mutations that, if they work in a particular environment, pass the Darwin Test, whether long term or merely short term. Some philosophers deny there is an objective, natural reality but serfs think that we can take cross references that show otherwise, for example, via the trial and error discovery of glass making, humans have made lenses, leading to the creation of telescopes and microscopes, independent testimony that enables us to learn something of the depth and complexity of the world despite the inadequacies of our human sense organs.

Hume’s Paradox.

One of the most rational of men, David Hume, while studying the nature of human learning, was led to believe that humans were irrational. He formulated what came to be known as Hume’s Paradox, two theories of induction, one involving logic, the other involving human psychology.

The logical problem, Hl, he formulated is -‘whether we are justified in reasoning from repeated instances which we have experienced, ‘ All swans are white,’ to other instances, (conclusions) of which we have no experience.’

The psychological problem, Hp, Hume raised is – ‘why, nevertheless, do all reasonable people expect and believe that future experiences, of which they have had no experience, will conform to those which they have experienced? ‘

Hume’s response to the logic question is ‘that no rational justification can be found for H1.’ His response to Hp, is,’ we act in this way because of blind habit, habit conditioned by repetition is the main force that guides our actions,’ concluding that induction is an irrational epistemology.

According to Bertrand Russell in his ‘History of Western Philosophy,’ (1946) this paradox of Hume’s is responsible for the schizophrenia of modern man. Unless Hume’s paradox can be solved, there is no justification for preferring one opinion over another. Relating to Russell’s view, Hume’s paradox, in the 20th/21st centuries, has enabled post- modernist denial of real-world truth to flourish.

Philosopher of science, Karl Popper argues convincingly, or so serfs’ think, that he has solved Hume’s paradox. In his book of collected discussions on language and philosophy of science, ‘ Objective Knowledge,’ Oxford Clarendon Press. (72) Popper says that Hume is correct about the logic problem but not about the psychological problem, that Hume is ascribing to the bucket theory of human learning, a passive process, whereas humans are active searchers for regularities in the natural world, we couldn’t survive otherwise.

Popper says he first discovered that the psychological problem of induction is a myth when he observed the powerful need of young children, later also adults, to seek for regularities, sometimes even experience regularities where they don’t exist. Popper calls this a searchlight theory of learning, we frequently act in response to unspoken theories, expectations or questions that we ask ourselves… ‘ Is this safe?’ ‘Is this edible? Our focus on repetition is not so much habit, but rather, a way of testing our tentative theories.

Our most reliable investigation of the world, that Primo Levi wrote about, is via our human creation of critical language and the scientific method, guess and test, where our unspoken theories become stated, even written down, to be tested, and falsified if they fail the test. This method, as Popper says, advances objective knowledge by a process of elimination, not by way of proving a theory, which can only be held provisionally, we can’t know that it is true, but it is a theory that still holds up where others do not.

The antidote to Fascism and other isms…

Our flawed human senses are unable to objectively comprehend the physical world but our trial and error tests can help improve our guess work.

Post-Modernism doesn’t do this. While Post-Modernists share Popper’s view that humans necessarily construct their own version of the physical world, they also maintain that no objective world exists, trial and error testing does not apply, no laws can be posited where there is no real world – Oh, correction! There is a Power Law, power is the only reality. Logical inconsistency? No, anything goes in a PO-Mo land.

Anything goes in Post-Modernism, providing it suits the political agenda, even some sepulchral voice pronouncing that there are no biological truths regarding living things, or that female glaciology is a legitimate study. Gender fluidity’s a must. There was a time in tolerant societies, when a man could say that he felt as if he was a woman and could choose to act as if he was a woman. In today’s virtual reality world, now he can say that he identifies as a woman and therefore he is a woman.

As in the fascist context of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, when political imperatives rule over conjecture and refutation, schizophrenia reigns. Primo Levi’s book is a testament to honest enquiry.