CLIVE JAMES—NATURAL SELECTION

EXPLAINING SUFFERING

Natural Selection

The gradual but inexorable magic

That turned the dinosaurs into the birds

Had no overt, only a hidden, logic.

To start the squadrons climbing from the herds

No wand was ever waved, but afterwards

Those who believed there must have been a wizard

Said the whole show looked too well-planned for hazard.

And so it does, in retrospect. Such clever

Transitions, intricate beyond belief!

The little lobsters, in their mating fever,

Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff,

And swept inland as scorpions. But if

Some weapons freak equipped their tails for murder

He must have thought sheer anguish all in order.

Source of all good and hence of evil, pleasure

And hence of pain, he is, or else they are,

Without a moral sense that we can measure,

And thus without a mind. Better by far

To stand in awe of blind chance than to fear

A conscious mechanism of mutation

Bringing its fine intentions to fruition

Without a qualm about collateral horror.

The peacock and the tapeworm both make sense.

Nobody calls the ugly one an error.

But when a child is born to pain intense

Enough to drive its family all at once

To weep blood, an intelligent designer

Looks like a torture garden's beaming owner.

What struck me about this poem was the poet's ambivalence about what human suffering looks like. I make the distinction between pain and suffering, just as the Zen Buddhists do. They teach that all of us humans will experience pain. They call that the first arrow, one we can't control and one that often surprises us. Then there is a second arrow, one we inflict upon ourselves. It is the second arrow that causes suffering. The challenge humans have is to avoid the second arrow or, at least, make an attempt to remove it. The distinction between pain and suffering has been a good teacher for me over the years but especially in my later years when pains show up more often and second arrows are more difficult to remove. I don't make the distinction between physical and mental pains, believing that they are equally uncomfortable and relate to the entire body in which all systems are connected.

This poem raised many questions for me, ones I have for the poet. In the first stanza, he is entertained by what he calls “magic” and this refers to what cannot be discerned by human observation but which occurs over millennial time spans, what Darwin described in his provocative work on the evolution of species changes. The poet is unsure that such “magic” of change is a result of some “hidden logic” but, altogether, too steady and determined to be attributed to chance. This establishes one point of ambivalence.

In the second stanza, he introduces the idea that the “delicate transitions,” while clever and beautiful in their intricacy, also include what might be seen as malevolent intentions resulting in what we might interpret as murderous effort, all part of the hidden order of change. This stanza relates to what is observed in the natural world as part of the evolution that changes lobsters of the sea into scorpions of the land.

In the third stanza, the poet introduces what might be the force behind all the intricate details of evolutionary change. An ambivalence here is whether or not to refer to this force as a “he” or “they,” not an unusual question for us who are observing the miracles of natural changes. Because the changes include all good as well as evil, he can't assign to the changes any force with a “moral sense.” Now, with it settled for him that good and evil are all part of the picture of evolution, he rejects any planning or intent that he considered at the beginning. Now, he is willing to invest in chance as the moving force behind the changes, for who would consciously design a system that involves pain and suffering? This is another instance of the poet's ambivalence. Good and evil rendered by design or chance? An additional ambivalence in this stanza is to wonder how such a powerful force in nature can't be “measured.” Our lives are shaped by the technology we experience and by the mindset that technology can deliver to us explanations for all phenomena—and solve all problems we encounter. The poet is ambivalent about the possibility that such a force as powerful as evolution might be the result of some unseen and immeasurable force.

What happens in the fourth stanza is to equate what happens in nature to peacocks and tapeworms are the same things we as humans experience as pain. The ambivalence here is that the poet is able to understand the good and evil among nature's creatures but he is unable to explain human suffering. He ends his thoughtful poem with the idea that if the force governing all things can inflict pain and suffering on its creatures then surely it must smugly exult in such power.

But we humans don't have much evidence that the prevailing force actually wishes us pain and suffering. If we conjure up a Prime Mover, then how do we define its powers? Another valuable question is to ask: What do humans believe they deserve from this life? Are we looking for ways to escape the human fates of disease, disability, depression, depravity, addictions, and death even though most of us would admit that those are common conditions of our individual lives. We are to expect such conditions just as a matter of being human and I doubt anyone would argue their occurrence. It is very common for those afflicted to look for some reason, some meaning, to the pains to which we are subjected at one time or another. The poet's example of a child born with pain is especially poignant, in that we understand that conditions will appear as we age, but we can't imagine pains of such magnitude being delivered to a child. This is another ambivalence that equates pain with age but can't include the pains and suffering of children.

In some ways this poem addresses the idea that we can attribute good things and a steady and happy life to a Prime Mover when all is well but we answer the question about what we deserve when we blame that Mover with what we see as unwarranted pains and suffering. The natural selection of organic changes implies that species will evolve over time subject to the vectors and forces operative in the life we and other species share. If a Prime Mover is involved, then it seems reasonable (logical?) that everything a living creature might experience can happen, whether perceived as desirable or abominable. If a Prime Mover is not imagined, then human pains and suffering are borne free of intention and, perhaps, malevolence or indifference.

It is my impression that this poem is asking us readers to consider what ambivalences we entertain when we think of human pain and suffering (do we even imagine such things for other sentient beings?). I can speak for myself when I say that I have had pains and their attendant suffering. It is remarkable to me that often the pains (the first arrow) can be healed, leaving suffering (the second arrow) behind to linger and fester and debilitate. I now trust my physical/mental body to heal according to the mysteries and miracles of all the organ systems contained in my skin bag. I am now more aware of the presence of the second arrows of suffering and I am getting better at avoiding them but, short of avoidance, better at removing them as soon as I know they are there. I am not always successful at this.

Interestingly, thinking in this way about pain and suffering does not challenge me to posit a Prime Mover or, in contrast, to eliminate one from my thoughts. I do believe in one but I don't expect such a force to coddle or rescue me in my life and I trust such a force to encourage me and give me strength to work with the conditions that are essential and inevitable just because I am human and subject to the same conditions that have visited hundreds and hundreds of generations preceding me. The poet seems to accept an “intelligent designer” but places blame and experiences anger and frustration as each of these different arrows pierces his heart. He is willing to view his Mover as conniving, lacking in morals, punitive, petty and capricious, perhaps a plotting and indifferent force (is this payback for our “original sin” in the garden by the Mover?). Perhaps the “selection” of the poem's title refers to what agency humans can exercise in choosing how to manage both first and subsequent arrows. I believe we do have a choice to select what we will do with the second arrow that comes at us as an accompaniment of our pains. This is not to say such effective action is easy. It is to say that we must in some fashion be awake and accountable to our own conditions, to see them as part and parcel of the miracle of our species and not as catastrophes delivered upon us by some unseen and incomprehensible force. We do not need to assign blame anywhere. I believe this perspective allows for bearing witness and for greater compassion for self and other. And, if we have such compassion, who is to say it does not come from the Prime Mover itself? Do we manifest the conditions we perceive in the Mover?

Clive James's ambivalences are good for us as readers. They are good because they cause us to consider how we see the world and how we see our roles as an interdependent species. It might cause us to wonder what unseen and immeasurable Force might be operative in our lives and the lives of all sentient creatures with whom we share a planet. Ultimately, such considerations might make us more aware of how time passes and we are subject to a state, death, in which all pains and suffering cease here in our earthly realm. In some way, we as humans have been naturally “selected” to experience birth and death and everything in between, everything that defines us as one species among thousands, a species with profound capacities and deficiencies, the whole catastrophe of living as we do. 

7-3-24,  A. R. AMMONS--GRAVELLY RUN AND HYMN

A RIFF ON MYSTICISM

GRAVELLY RUN

I don't know somehow it seems sufficient

to see and hear whatever coming and going is,

losing the self to the victory

of stones and trees,

of bending sandpit lakes, crescent

round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self

as to know it as it is known

by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:

the swamp's slow water comes

down Gravelly Run fanning the long

stone-held algal

hair and narrowing roils between

the shoulders of the highway bridge:

holly grows on the banks in the woods there,

and the cedars' gothic-clustered

spires could make

green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air's glass

jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:

I see no

god in the holly, hear no song from

the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter

yellow of trees: surrendered self among

unwelcoming forms: stranger,

hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

HYMN

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go out

over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

I am never sure when I am ready to tackle a poem, as it is never clear to me when I have collected my thoughts about what the poet has presented. That is the case with both of these poems by A. R. Ammons. I get a certain feeling about the poems from the beginning but then further considerations make me want to know more about what might be said in them. I am tempted to know more about the poet and how he might have created some slice of autobiography in the poems. But there is something to be said for letting the poems engage the imagination just as they appear.

To engage my imagination is to see where the poems reflect back at me something I have experienced in my own life. I suppose this is an act of affirmation, something that seems to be very human but also something that allows even the most esoteric or opaque work of art an opportunity to breathe as we breathe. I think this is true for all works of art that attract my attention, be they poems or paintings, art installations, dance, or music.

Both of these poems are grounded. By that I mean that both contain references to nature and to a more specific biological state of living things. Ammons seems ensconced in nature and that might reflect his own background as one who majored in biology in his formal education. But it is not necessary to know that. What is important for me to notice is that he observes nature in its macro- as well as its micro- manifestations. His interactions with natural phenomena in “Gravelly Run” and “Hymn” make them the object with him as the observer. I think of this stance as having one foot in the realm of nature/worldly life and the other foot placed in whatever stands against that as a place where spiritual ideas and feelings are present and alive and may even be the destination for a journey through nature's abundance.

I think Ammons wants us to see that observations of nature's beauty and mystery are more than an escape from worldly experiences but are a source with which one in a world of calamity and noise can merge as a participant or even a receptacle of whatever might be considered divine grace. He says in “Hymn”: “You are everywhere partial and entire/ Your are on the inside of everything and on the outside.” “You” in this poem is God to my way of thinking. He reaches this point of insight having observed lakes and clouds and even single-celled organisms (coelenterates—jellyfish and corals). But this is more than just describing them. It is about finding their existence as portals to the realm in which mystery and human destiny cast shadows. The poet finds these connections, not despite the natural phenomena set apart from spiritual matters, but because of them. And it is the mystery and beauty of them that stir something in his soul. Still, he returns to his worldly state among the phenomena:

“no use to make any philosophies here:

I see no

god in the holly, hear no song from

the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter

yellow of trees: surrendered self among

unwelcoming forms: stranger,

hoist your burdens, get on down the road.” [“Gravelly Run”]

No, what he observes are only evidence of things not seen, those things being what interpenetrates the life we lead (yes, he calls himself a “stranger”, a stranger to what can be experienced only from quickenings of the heart), the burdens we bear, the emotions and feelings that emerge within us on a daily basis, based on what the world offers in distractions and desires. Time and temporal existence are part of our existence but timelessness is also an imagined state of knowing. He puts it this way in “Gravelly Run”:

“for it is not so much to know the self

as to know it as it is known

by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:”

This is not a solipsistic poem. It is not really about the observer but only as the observer is another of the phenomena of nature. And the reality of being human sets one apart from whatever one can imagine as the Creator, the spirit that interpenetrates all things and beings. In “Hymn,” he uses the phrase “I know if I find you I will have to ...”, using it three times as follows:

“I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go out

over the sea marshes and the brant in bays”

“And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes”

“and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves”

The journey the poet is describing is a progression from what might be a desire to escape the earthly beauty to a final stanza realization that he “must” remain on earth, perhaps to continue what amounts to worship of the mystery and beauty ingrained in natural phenomena (and, as in “Gravelly Run,” to “hoist your burdens, get on down the road”). It is these phenomena that are the only visible evidence of what lies behind the veil of the spiritual life. But the poet seems comfortable with this arrangement: “and praying for a nerve cell/ with all the soul of my chemical reactions/ and going right on down where the eye sees only traces” [“Hymn”].

In her own way, Mary Oliver, another poet exploring heaven and earth, once said about how to approach one's life:

“Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

That is the poet's charge, one poet to another and one person's formula for engagement with earthly life. I expand this admonition to include all beings and things that we might encounter in our own personal journeys through life. It is no mystery in these days that there are forms and forces in earthly life that present great challenges at a time when many of us feel unprepared to manage the waves of change and the threats we might perceive from those changes. I do not think poetry, or any art form, can offer an escape from what arrives at our doorsteps on a daily basis. But I do believe in what the Zen Buddhists propose and that is to use art forms as a way to confront and live through what seems most threatening and fearful. It is no challenge to enjoy the joys, beauty, and the moments of happiness and successes. The challenge that poetry, for instance, can answer is the encroaching unknown of a world built on consumerism, on pleasure as an end it itself, on extraction, on technology designed to blur and manipulate our personal and communal lives. Poetry as one art form can be a portal for reestablishing right balance in a world that seems out of control. It is also a portal for right action in our personal lives, reigniting personal connections and communications over time that feed kindness and compassion. I think imagining a better life for everyone is realistic if we can imagine our own inner lives as active and engaging and the source of spiritual health. “Telling about it” beckons others to share in what we have noticed and what we think about those things. Art forms can do this. Art in the form of deeper listening, considered speech, shaping a life of ethics and morals, and supporting the less fortunate are all examples of artful action. One can be an artist within the constraints of this earthly life, just as Ammons is suggesting to us in his two poems. It is what we notice (what we pay attention to) and what meaning we make of them that makes everyone a potential artist.

Several more ideas come to mind as I think more deeply about these two poems. One is to wonder about the vocabulary we use all the time with some words falling out as obsolete and others being added or even invented to get closer to something whose expression seems inadequate. Here is Ammons with his background in biology using nomenclature for describing natural phenomena, a vocabulary that makes communication universal among the interested. Because he mixes into his poems references to natural phenomena using universal nomenclature that is understandable by those interested as well as references to the more mysterious realm of spiritual life, I wonder if words we no longer use to refer to what might be heavenwardly oriented could be revived and help more of us understand what that realm and those words mean in the context of our worldly lives today. I am not sure that inventing new words for what previous generations could name in their orientation to the spiritual life would be helpful. This brings those experiences and the words used to describe them back into the light of our curiosity. Perhaps this would depend on a greater degree of reflection on what shape the spiritual realm actually takes for us. So many citizens are leaving formal church/synagogue/temple affiliations that it is no wonder that the words that sustained the faithful in the past have fallen out of daily use. I am thinking of words like: sin, forgiveness, redemption, devotion, sacrifice, penitence, atonement, heaven and hell—all solid words with meanings that might or might not challenge us in our lives today. But they might also open up more nuances of meaning that deepen our relationship with nature as well as one another.

Another idea that strikes me about these two poems is that Nature (as in Mother Nature) has no pretenses. The truth in nature, while incompletely explored and described (thus, its mysteries), is its basic formulation, open to us to observe and relate to. Nature is also neutral when it comes to knowing or acting on behalf of human beings. Our efforts to control nature have met with mixed results, not all of which are successes by any measure. But my sense is that nature will manage her own processes in spite of what humans do to them. This is humbling and valuable in that regard for us humans, as we have begun to believe we humans are the controlling agents in all things when, in fact, what we have hoped to control with our technology is beginning to control us. We could use more humility.

All of these ideas have been spurred by how Ammons has shaped these poems. He presents dichotomies with the option of interpreting them as unities. He suggests this as much in his relationship with both nature and the spiritual realm. He invites the reader to form whatever meaning those relationships generate, as all poets attempt to do, I think. It is all about thinking—and paying attention, as Mary Oliver shouts to us.