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.