physicists of project Osma plan to listen for messages
emitted with intelligent intent
from tau Ceti or epsilon Eridani.
A million men on a million nights, heirs of a
million generations, ponder the proliferation of their millions to the
millionth power till
multitude bursts into nothingness,
and numbers fail.
I feel the gravel underfoot, the starlit night about me. The nose smells, the
ears hear, the eyes see. “Willfully living?” “Why not?” Having survived up to now at least the death-dealing hail of cosmic particles, the interpreting mind says “I am here.”
In the underbrush under the pines my dog yelps in hot chase. Furry bodies
jostle in the dark among the broken twigs. Fangs snap, claws tear; barks, growls, snarls, panting breath as jaws close on the soft hairs under the throat. A shriek, not animal not human, a shriek of unembodied agony rips the night.
In the silence my dog panting drags a thick carcass through the brambles out
on the road
and places at her master’s feet
in the starlight
a beautiful raccoon
that was alive and is dead.
This much is true.
Man is a creature that builds
institutions
out of abnegation of lives linked for a purpose
the way the flowerlike polyps, the coralmakers of the warm salt seas
build
from incrusted layers of discarded careers:
niggerheads, atolls, great barrier reefs
and coquina benches forming the limestone basements of peninsulas where
civilizations flourish and flower and fall frazzled to seed.
Man’s institutions fashion his destiny,
as the hive, the nest, the hill, the sixsided cellular comb of the honeybee,
serried, tiered,
grouped according to impulses
inherent in the genes,
fashion the social insect, his castes and functional diversities:
the winged males and females, the blind workers, the soldiers, the nasuti,
the alternates of the “fourth caste”
of the pale termites,
dwellers in dark,
whose complex society has so astonished the naturalists.
Institutions, so the sociologists tell us,
shape man’s course.
as the comings and goings of the hardshelled ants — their diligence since the
dawn of philosophy has delighted the makers of fables and the pointers of morals — are
predetermined by instinct.
Institutional man,
like the termites and the social insects among the hymenoptera, must, we
are told, sacrifice individual diversity for diversity of caste. (Already in his bureaucratic form, with a diligence which would astonish any uncommitted naturalist, institutional man accumulates
in vaults and cabinets and files,—
paper,
the same paper the polistes wasp builds his
house of
and the termites of the tropical uplands
their towering castles.)
Lecturing on “Social Insects” the late Professor Wheeler of Harvard used to point out with some malice to his students
that the ants,
too,
in spite of the predestined perfection
of their institutions,
suffered what he called “perversions
of appetite.”
Their underground galleries and storied
domes
are infested by an array of lethal creatures, thieves and predators, scavenger
crickets, greedy roaches and rove beetles, and one particular peculiarly plumed little bug
which secretes in its hairs an elixir so
delectable to antkind
that the ants lose all sense of self- or
species-preservation
and seek death in its embrace.
What man can contemplate the aardvark without astonishment?
Who, should he be happy enough to have the zoo attendant hand him the
little creature, can feel in his hands the odd ambiguous body,
between fur and feathers,
of the duckbilled platypus
without a catch of the breath and awful wonder (suppose you were me and I
were you): what impulses,
wakened by the intake of the soft fluvial eyes,
trigger the cells of that small brain.
Or the spiny anteater?
what dreams, when he curls in the dark of his box, luminesce inside the
wedgeshaped skull? The variousness of life
as if in whimsy
constantly cracks the dogmatic mold
which man the classifier laboriously constructs to ease the pain of sorting
out diversities.
In man himself there are more variants
than in the animal kingdom or the vegetable
or the crystalline realm of minerals; sometimes, when
man the classifier slackens under the endless drudgery of arguing away
complexities; man, the curious viewer; the other man, the naive,
the astonished child
looks at himself in a mirror or lets his fingers explore the dissymmetries of
his uneven carcass or maybe, taking a peep through a fiuoroscope,
discovers enough aberrant factors to outdo the bestiaries from aardvark to
zebra.
“Did you know,”
asked Dr. Roger J. Williams the biochemist from Texas, of a tableful of
punditry at a symposium at the Princeton Inn,
“that the size of the human stomach has a sixfold variation
or that the small intestines of men and women have measured out
anywhere between eleven feet and twenty-five feet nine?”
Eleven different patterns have been plotted for the muscle that controls the
index finger. The blood’s path through vessels and arteries flows in courses as various as the earth’s
great river systems. Cell chemistries and the matching
electrical impulses vary from individual to individual. We none of us smell
alike. (That’s how the bloodhound earns his kennel ration; the bloodhound can tell.)
And when you try to chart the convolutions of the brain, each one’s a
universe where the layered cells multiply a trillion interactions into infinity.
“Can it be?”
Egghead inquires of Doubledome,
“that variety instead of uniformity
is nature’s law?”
SENDOFF
Musing midnight and the century’s decline
man walks with dog,
shuffling the roadside gravel where sometimes we used to find among the
quartzy riverpebbles,
spent arrowheads of the Powhatans.
Overcast blots the stars. Not even a glimpse of impudent Echo, America’s toy
balloon the radio man said go out and see. The fall’s too late for lightningbugs, only a chill hint here and there of a glowworm in the wet grass.
The dog trots eager, sniffing the night, proud of her man’s steps behind. The
man,
shamed drags beaten strides, drained of every thought but hatred
of the tinpot pharaohs whose coarse imprecations the impartial transistors
have been dinning in his ears. Evil is indivisible. By hate they rose to flashbulb glory and the roar of cowed multitudes, police sirens shrieking how great the leader, how little the led: the abject mike ever waiting to receive
the foul discharge of their power to kill. The lie squared, the lie cubed, the lie
to the power of x deals death like a tornado. By hate they live. By hate we’ll see them die. We’ve seen them die before. The hate remains
to choke out good, to strangle the still small private voice that is God’s spark,
in man. Man drowns in his own scum.
These nights are dark.
In the light of the carriagelamps on the brick steps of the sleeping house