Sunday, March 22, 2015

Modernity Is Catastrophe

He woke in the middle of a nightmare.
The terror lay in his room
like the body of a dead animal
covered with flies. Its teeth
shone in the grass.
                                A French soldier,
half-asleep above the stove of a peasant,
turned, restless with insomnia from his problem:
“What can I know, if anything?”
He knew he could doubt; besides that, 
could he know anything at all?

A man raised a tube in Italy
with curious lenses toward the night.
The moon bowed its face toward him.
“What will I see there, if anything?”
To his eye he put the tube and squinted.
“Cara luna, will I see anything at all?”

An Englishman sat carefully writing
a work of indisputable logic
through the night. He raised his eyes, reflected:
“What can a man do, if anything?”
In the darkness he heard someone whisper:
“What if he can do anything at all?”  

A gentleman in Paris totted up figures
in two columns on a smooth surface of calf-skin:
“What can I make, if anything?”
He counted again: the numbers added up, beautifully.
His fingers grasped the quill so hard it split.
“I can make more. What if I can make it all?”

It was nearing midnight in Europe.
A messenger was crossing the mountains,
taking an urgent notice between sovereigns
who had never met face to face.
Nearing the summit, he stumbled,
his boot dislodging a stone
that fell, gathering stones as it went
in a wind of rocks, trees, snow, 
collapsing across the valley
in an avalanche, burying it all.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Love, Faith and Science

The headline read in this morning’s Times:
“There Is No Such Thing as Love.”
It had been scientifically proven.
The selfish gene would not have it.
There was lust,
exquisite as acid on gold.
There was even a lazy pleasure
in a certain body’s company
when it didn’t outstay its welcome.
There was the excitement of imposing one’s obstreperous ego
on another body and mind
and the exquisite satisfaction in inhabiting
another person’s soul:
what else were the joys of tyranny
and art’s wanton thrill?
All of this was adaptive, said the reporter,
quoting a faceless biologist.

And then, of course, there is habit:
the familiar shadow
against the corridor wall,
the silhouette in the garden,
the footfall in the living room,
the musky smell in the sheets.
This reinforces the survival of the species,
and thus of the monster twined in the chromosome
like the Minotaur in his labyrinth.

There is the notorious obsession,
the adolescent psychosis,
that makes life seem a glory,
ineffable, sublime,
with all its suffering meaningful,
and all its emptiness a garden
of almost unbearable enchantment,
and for a brief hour,
the long humiliation of human life
seems actually worth the time.
But even the scientists quoted in the Times
were not yet certain
how something so clearly maladaptive
ever survived natural selection.
(My own, completely unscientific, theory
is that no completely rational species
would ever reproduce
in the prison of matter and time
we call the universe,
so, to be induced to replicate,
we need to go out of our minds.
But I am no biologist.)

And this brings us to the question
that might make an interesting debate for us here
when I have stopped writing and you have stopped reading:

Is human life worth living
if there is no such thing as love,
as the biologist claimed to have just proven scientifically—
if the human race is not (let’s face it) all that lovable
after the first years of childhood,
and there is nothing but dust, gas, stones,
whirling energetically in a space that is
incalculably vast and essentially dark?
(Scientists proved that a very long time ago – see Lucretius.)

No love—and no intelligence either,
since we are blocked from reality by our very minds
(this was also proven by scientists quite recently,
though they didn’t seem to realize
this obviates, renders null and void,
this and all of their other claims: they’re just
deluded fools like the rest of us!).
We are condemned to live in cages
of darkness and ignorance and pain,
mocked and terrified by our own delusions
from the cradle to the office to the hospice to the grave.
Neither love, then, nor faith, nor science,
those tawdry shadows of God,
to console us or to save us—
so, what are we to do?

I told all this to an atheist friend over a beer,
my dark little thread of speculation
(the newspaper I had spread on the bar between us),
to join me in an interesting debate
that might further our mutual enlightenment.
I thought he would appreciate the logic,
so elegant and simple and clear,
that I had spun from the pages of the Times,
the liberal’s bible, the secularist’s book.
But his eyes burned with a fury,
and I thought he would burn me at the stake.

Friday, March 13, 2015

A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Gunfire of Five Cartoonists and Seven Others at Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, January 7, 2015

We shall not weep, shall not rage, shall not lament—
we shall laugh, and not a bitter laugh,
a laugh from the belly, a loud and giddy 
laugh that knows no bounds,
splits our sides, shakes us like jelly,
makes us dizzy, gasp for air,
a laugh that almost makes us want to die--
but we don't die of it, 
we live because of it,
we live in the heart, on the waves of this laughter,
we laugh - chuckle - chortle - giggle - hell we can’t
stop it – STOP IT!
Nope! We soar across the sky, like shrimp shooting backwards,
airborne on shrieks,
hysterical as angels
laughing at those poor devils
who don’t know how to laugh for the sheer cracked fun of it
and never could take a joke,
who turn everything into anger and hatred,
into spite and resentment, who poison life with their hatred,
who are messengers of death, bringers of death
with their terrible pride and hatred and anger,
their refusal to look in the mirror and giggle,
because life and love are wonderfully absurd,
but there is nothing more absurd than death,
and nothing more stupid, beside the point, ridiculous
than murder and its bloodthirsty family, battle and war:
they cannot laugh, so they must kill,
they will never know that laughter is love of life,
is life itself, and whenever we laugh, life
triumphs. No:
we shall not weep, we shall not rage, we shall not lament—
we shall laugh like the angels as they welcome these twelve into paradise.

That deep thunderous sound (do you hear it,
shaking things up in the background?)
is the Old Man undergoing the tickling treatment—
first a grin, then a giggle, then a chuckle, then a chortle,
then a titter, a guffaw, wheeze, sneeze and the bees’ knees –
it’s a hurricane, it’s a typhoon:
hold on to your hats, ladies!
hold on to your heads, gents!
Those guys must’ve just shown him that cartoon
where God’s in a bar, saying to the barkeep,
“Technology! I keep saying, ‘Fiat lux, fiat lux,’
and the goddamn light won’t go on!”