Articles & Essays   Book Reviews Creative Writing

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Volume 18 Number 3, December 2017

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Chaotic Cell

by

Brian Glaser

 

1.

I see the hunted faces of boys leaving my daughter’s school;

evolution offers them nothing

to make life happier.

 

 

2.

In my son’s yearbook the principal quoted John Muir:

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

Insanity must be

a consequence of the complexity of the human mind

that evolution favors.

 

Darwin says in The Origin of Species:

natural selection.

 

There my judgment is that he did not understand

 

the depths of his text.

There is no nature to infer from selection.

Competition, the primacy of sex, the advantages of complexity—

they are not signals from some source

about how the world should work

 

any more than

is the altruism of Harriet Tubman or Miep Gies.


 

 

3.

Last night we all went to a Taco Trucks at Every Mosque event

in Garden Grove.

Saleem, a gentle accountant, showed us

 

around the Islamic Center—

the school, the mortuary, the gift shop, the mosque.

We watched the prayer after sundown,

John and I on one side of the room

and Andoe and Melanie on the other,

 

the two of them watching from chairs

while the women believers waited in the foyer outside.

And yet the prayers, sung in Arabic,

were mesmerizing,

as was the rhythm of the men bending to pray.

 

Whatever evolution contributes to the psyche,

it is a force indifferent to our happiness.

We are the orphans of evolution.

 

Tonight we walked in the fragrant riverbed of Santiago Creek,

surrounded by brittle flower stems and holdout patches of light green.

 

I do not believe in revolution.

And yet revolution exists.

 


 

 

4.

To keep yourself pure, if only a part of you, you must be free.

Nothingness is an essential part of the self.

This nothingness keeps you free.

 

Tonight John went with his grandmother to a fundraising backyard dinner

for an organization that trains medics

in Central American villages.

Andoe and Melanie and I

went to vegan restaurant for dinner, just us three

 

for the first time in years.

As he was lying in bed before sleep,

John asked me—

Dad, would you love me no matter what,

even if I committed suicide?

 


 

 

5.

Where are all the radicals calling for the overthrow

of the United States government?

 

In a nature film I saw with my children, Born in China,

a mother leopard is gored to a slow death

while trying to gnaw the neck of a young horned mammal

 

so that she could feed her starving cubs.

Darwin believed that nature favors complexity

and complexity favors

the development of moral sentiments.

He wrote about what he called the war of nature and its beautiful consequences.

 

In the Victorian era heaven was imagined as a domestic space

to be reunited with family

rather than the realm of angels, as it had been seen.

 

Perhaps spirituality is superficial,

like the jail that held Oscar Wilde.

 


 

 

6.

A moral community is held together by acts

of the imagination.

 

It takes the superficiality of the spiritual

to dispel the power of those acts.

My family is a moral community

 

held together by the current of the Merced

in its dark shallows.