Articles & Essays Book Reviews Creative Writing
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 18 Number 3, December 2017
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Chaotic Cell
by
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.