The world is made of frozen light Everything connects Nothing in the universe Works like you expect Does a tree know it exists? Does a star know how to love? Look at thirteen blackbirds Listen to a dove Make some room for kindness As you straddle space and time The world is charged with grandeur Everybody shines by Richard W. Bray
From thought and love and rhyme
To frontiers of space and time
From a mosque in Timbuktu
To the Dome of Xanadu
From protecting son and daughter
To industrialized slaughter
From a monkey standing tall
To the beast that wants it all
By Richard W. Bray
‘Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand
When we with Daisies lie—
—Emily Dickinson, If I Should Die
Darker nights than ever
Hearts of shattered glass
Hefting laden caskets
Setting granite in the grass
They will come for all the bodies
Then they’ll come and take our homes
The machine keeps right on turning
And grinding up the bones
When disaster makes you richer
What could ever make you whole?
Is it just the love of Mammon?
Or the absence of a soul?
They will come for all the bodies
Then they’ll come and take our homes
The machine keeps right on turning
And grinding up the bones
by Richard W. Bray
Washing out the spot
That never goes away
How many children
Did you kill today?
Staring at the basin
In all your distress
What happens in your head
Is anybody’s guess
Now you’re making speeches
Reciting practiced lies
I wonder what’s behind
The empty in your eyes
Where does it come from?
The hunger that devours
Destroying whole countries
For a little taste of Power
by Richard W. Bray
.
It’s time to have another drink
Might even take a little toke
Look for some women and some song
Until my sorry ass is broke
Life’s a second hand store
It’s a box of loose ends
I’m gonna feed my bloody heart
Dance like it’s never gonna end
The numbers don’t add up
And the figures don’t compute
This crazy old world
Is just a big crap shoot
Life’s a second hand store
It’s a box of loose ends
I’m gonna feed my bloody heart
Dance like it’s never gonna end
by Richard W. Bray
From natural selection’s point of view, the whole point of perception is to process information that has relevance to the organism’s Darwinian interests — that is, to its chances of getting its genes spread. And organisms register this relevance by assigning positive or negative values to the perceived information. We are designed to judge things and to encode those judgements in feeling.
—Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Enlightenment
Like any paradigm, evolutionary psychology is an extreme oversimplification of our multifarious existence. Even if we accept the premise that human beings are shaped by evolutionary pressure, which I do, it does not automatically follow that everything we are is the direct result of “natural selection.” Many mutations and alterations in our genes are merely coincidental.
If, for example, a parrot with an efficient nutshell-crushing beak happens also to be blue, its descendants are likely to be blue despite the fact that their blueness does not foster their success like that marvelous beak does.
Human beings are not “designed” by evolution; we’re the product of happenstance. And nobody can say for certain what the “whole point of perception” is. But you needn’t be a natural selection determinist to appreciate Wright’s picture of human consciousness.
Wright is certainly correct to say that human beings automatically assign “positive or negative values” to “perceived information.” Every thought we have is wrapped inside a feeling. These feelings often had the benefit of keeping our Hunting Fathers alive long enough to pass along their DNA. That’s how we got here.
Determining the difference between berry and toadstool, lamb and lion, or friend and foe is an essential survival skill. Our ancestors survived and prospered thanks to the happy associations they made with the delicious berries that sustained them and the painful associations they made with frightening beasts that killed their friends and relatives.
It’s natural for human beings to constantly analyze and reevaluate the world we live in. And, as social organisms, we evaluate ourselves in relation to others. That’s why we’re forever recalibrating our opinions of one another.
How we feel about others is a function of how they make us feel about ourselves. The world is our mirror, as W.H. Auden notes:
A friend is the old, old tale of narcissus.
Severing how we feel about others from how we feel about ourselves is not possible — we don’t exist in a vacuum. But we can examine our natural tendency to “judge things and to encode those judgement in feeling.”
Jesus commands: “Judge not.” But judgement-free perception simply isn’t possible. What we can do is listen to our thoughts and examine the feelings that ignite them.
Don’t squander your precious time on Earth trying to figure out who deserves to be happy. There’s always going to be people you can point to as undeserving of the gifts life has bestowed upon them. Should it really be your task in life to figure out who’s to bless and who’s to blame? By fixating on the unfairness of it all, you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of misery and masochism.
I’m not suggesting that we should accept the world the way it is. On the contrary, fighting injustice and trying to make the world a better place is one of the best ways to find meaning in this crazy old world.
by Richard W. Bray
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart
—W.H Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening
Anger and resentment
Will fill your heart with sand
Allow yourself to care about
Somebody you can’t stand
There’s a part of you that tries to love
Everyone you see
Pretending that it doesn’t
Makes you angry sad and mean
It’s a crooked crooked world
Filled with crooked souls
Love can make it meaningful
But nothing makes us whole
By Richard W. Bray
Anthropologists tell us* that “some time between 75 thousand and 60 thousand years ago” homo sapiens underwent a remarkable change (194). This event occurred “somewhere on the African continent (most likely somewhere in its eastern or southwestern regions)” (193). Suddenly, our already impressive brains developed the capacity for symbolic thought. Our ancestors, who heretofore merely consisted of roving bands of uppidy carnivorous weapon-wielding bipeds, were transformed into artists, shamans, scientists, and engineers. World-domination was now only a matter of time.
These new-and-improved brains rendered representational art, handicraft, metaphor, music, dance, language and poetry essential to our existence.
As Kurt Vonnegut notes, this spectacular transformation gave us not only the capacity and the inclination to produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; it also gave us the capacity and the inclination to
burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities.
I’m seriously into words. I have argued that it’s ultimately impossible to separate language from poetry because our ancestors began playing with words as soon as they began to invent them. Uttered phonemes are automatically poetic just like every basket and every arrowhead homo sapiens produce is a work of art.
Death and disruption at an early age hurt Theodore Roethke into poetry, as W. H. Auden suggests “mad Ireland” hurt W.B. Yeats into poetry. And oh what prodigious poetry Roethke did make! I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about how to say the third line of a villanelle Roethke wrote called “The Waking” because my brain spends a lot of time thinking about such things.
A villanelle is a nineteen-line Italian form in which the first and third lines are each repeated three times. (I’ve written a few of them myself.) (A smartass once wrote on this blog that “the cool thing about villanelles is that once you’ve written the first three lines, you’re 42% finished.”)
Here’s the first stanza of Roethke’s “The Waking.”
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
I told you the dude was prodigious, right? Anyhow, the first and third lines of a good villanelle must be firm and flexible as much heavy lifting is expected of them. Here are some examples:
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
(First line of Auden’s “If I Could tell You”)
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
(Third Line of Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song”)
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(Third Line of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”)
Now back to “The Waking.” If a reader must read the same lines four times in a nineteen-line poem, the poet should provide her with options about which words to stress. Here are seven ways to say line three of “The Waking”:
#1 I learn by going where I have to go
Learning is about destination rather than free will.
#2 I learn by going where I have to go
The essential lesson is in the destination
#3 I learn by going (pause) where I have to go
The journey, so to speak, is the destination.
#4 I learn by going where I have to go
The lesson is in the doing.
#5 I learn by going where I have to go
The important thing is that the experience is educational.
#6 I learn by going where I have to go.
It’s imperative to take a certain route that is nonetheless educational.
#7 I learn by going where I have to go.
I find out what I’m supposed to do only by doing it.
by Richard W. Bray
*Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
—W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening
Walking down the street
Going nowhere
Nothing to look forward to
Nobody to care
Big cloud of empty
Hanging in the air
Life is just
A rotten stupid
Maggot-breeding scam
I’m tired and I’m sick
Of everything I am
Can’t stagger through
Another dragging day
None of my plans
Ended up this way
Days bleed into weeks
And life drifts away
Life is just
A rotten stupid
Maggot-breeding scam
I’m tired and I’m sick
Of everything I am
by Richard W. Bray
I have never hunted animals. And I used to wonder how hunters walking around lugging heavy guns could ever get close enough to their prey in order to shoot it. Most animals can easily smell/see/hear humans long before the hunters get into firing range and then they could simply run away. Meaty mammals tend to be much faster runners than humans. What I didn’t realize is that human beings are designed to walk and walk and walk until our prey is too exhausted to continue. Then we use our weapons to kill it. And then we cook it and eat it.
In Masters of the Planet, an excellent introduction to human evolution, Ian Tattersall describes how the ability to walk great distances was key to the hunting prowess of homo ergaster, “an extinct ancestral form on the evolutionary scale of the genus Homo” that “lived in eastern and southern Africa during the early Pleistocene, that is, between 1.8 million and 1.3 million years ago.” Tattersall explains that “although homo ergaster would hardly have been fast compared to four-legged predators, its newer slender hips and long legs would have made members of the species exemplary distance runners.”
This evolutionary innovation gives homo sapiens a huge advantage over our prey because, unlike humans, “most mammals do not have the capacity to shed the heat load acquired and generated during sustained activity in the tropic sun, except by pausing in the shade while it slowly dissipates, largely through panting.” That’s why hunters will eventually catch their prey. “In the heat of the day, the human ability to simply keep going would have allowed these lucky bipeds to single out, say, an antelope, and to keep chasing it, until it fell from heat prostrations” Or we can just kill it with our weapons when we get close enough.
Our ancestors made the remarkable transition from prey to predator. Human beings are designed to vanquish by walking and running after animals until we get close enough to kill them. This evolutionary history remains a major component of our collective psyche whether we like it or not. And we should never forget this, even in an age when, for most of us, meat comes from the back of the supermarket.
So, Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare, in addition to being a marvelous parable on the efficacy of slow and steady diligence, is also the true story of how Our Hunting Fathers survived. Human beings are designed to “simply keep going” and going and going.
And simply trudging along is how our species came to inhabit and dominate so much of the planet.
I’m really glad that I exist as a human being; I wouldn’t trade in this particular vehicle of consciousness for anything in the world. But our evolutionary success has had ominous ramifications for many of our fellow inhabitants of planet Earth.
As novelist Kurt Vonnegut notes, the human tendency to simply keep on walking and consuming has a dark side:
humanity itself had become an unstoppable glacier made of hot meat, which ate up everything in sight and then made love, and then doubled in size again.
Soldiers drilling, refugees fleeing, shoppers shopping, children strolling to school. Walking. It’s what we do and it’s one of the most essential things that makes us who we are.
Final word to Fats Domino:
By Richard W. Bray
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