EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION?
for T. S. Eliot

What else is there for us but to advance,
Defining progress as our end and aim,
Unless we view our history as a dance
Moving through complex patterns like a game.

The case for progress claims we shall evolve
And though we’ll wreak great havoc on the Earth,
We know that growing wisdom can resolve
Our wicked waywardness and prove our worth.

The other way of seeing us reveals
That souls recycle through their worldly rounds,
Life after life, and play the hands Fate deals
Within a pattern of fixed rules and bounds.

The end of all our revolutions shows
The place where we began is where we’ll close.

*

LIKE THIS, FOR INSTANCE

A sonnet is a pearl surrounding grit,
A crystal coalesced about a seed:
It takes the smallest irritant to feed
A process that provokes the play of wit.

A question, observation, urge will sit
Amidst the mind then generate and breed
A brood of new ideas that proceed
To intertwine till sound and sense both fit.

But just as pearls can be irregular
In shape, their color lusterless and dull,
So sonnets only rarely make the grade:
Most prove insipid, lame, and fail to stir
Emotions in the soul, rhetorical
But not poetical, and doomed to fade.

*

INDETERMINATE, I

Yesterday, a friend of mine recounted a two-part question that his philosophy professor had long ago posed to his class: (1) If you could know now exactly when you would die, would you want to know? (2) And if you would, then would you also want to know the cause of your death?

Would you like to think about this for yourself for a moment? Go ahead. I’ll put my own speculations (yet to be written) in the post below.

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INDETERMINATE, II

Immediately, I’d answer No to both questions.

No, I don’t want to know now exactly when I’ll die; nor would I want to know the cause of my death. Why?

Because I don’t want to be trapped in such a degree of fatalism. Simply knowing that I’ll die someday before I’m 120 years old is sufficiently deterministic for me. But it leaves me a lot of latitude for supposing and exploring many possibilities of how I might use the time remaining, however long or short.

True, though, facing a deadline does usually focus my mind and make me more productive, and it is likely that knowing exactly my checkout time would push me to be more efficient and effective in pursuing goals that were more sharply defined.

But that, I think, would make me too goal-oriented, always checking my watch and calendar and measuring my progress. I could never kid myself and go easy on myself saying, “Oh, well, I can do that later, I’ve plenty of time, so right now I’ll just relax and look into something new or fascinating that’s not on my agenda. Knowing just when I’d die would be too narrowing, too regulating, too stifling.

Knowing also what I’d die of would at least be frustrating since I’d know it was futile to try to prevent it: a car, a window, a boat, a disease—what will be, will be. “Born to be hanged, you’ll never be drowned,” an old saying goes. Yet, given Fate’s legendary taste for irony, I might think it perfectly safe to go boating and then find myself strangled by a halyard or a waterski tow rope.

At least, knowing the certain cause of my death would shut down part of the adventurous uncertainty, the open-ended possibility of my life: maybe this, maybe that, who knows?

It would be a psychological infringement on my freedom, and the sense of freedom and possibility is essential to my humanity.

But even if I were told when and how I’d die, what would make me believe it? I would “know” it, but would I trust the truth of that prediction? Might I not even try to prove the prediction wrong? Common human orneriness might just push me to do that, as well as a desire not to be controlled, not even by Fate.

At the least, certain and undeniable knowledge of this kind would limit my pleasures of imagining something other, or simply the pleasure I take in options and open-endedness. And that’s enough to make me decline the offer. Thanks, anyway.

*

PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR

“Behave yourself!” our mothers used to say,
Though how could we do other than behave,
Behavior being whatever we might do,
As anthropologists define mores?

“And act your age!” we’d be admonished, too,
As if our way of living were a role
And life a play in which we’d act a part
With predetermined lines fixed in a script.

But things are different now, and we’re equipped
To live more freely than was once allowed,
Since existentialists have cracked the door
That leads us to explore new ways to be.

Though this has bred behaviors some deplore,
We’re free now to grow better and be more.

*

THE SONNET

There’s magic in the very web of it,
This tissue woven of just fourteen lines,
Within whose borders sundry wonders fit
Accommodating infinite designs.

The glory, wonder, awe and mystery
Of the vast universe itself plays out
Within its microcosmic imagery
As it devises certitudes from doubt.

Somehow it weaves its way to clarity
While it reveals itself upon the page,
As, rhyme by rhyme, new meaning comes to be
Like incantations of a cunning mage

That spell out of thin air a spectacle
Which at its best will prove a miracle.

*

SUPERSTAR

However we’ve arrived here—here we are,
Composed of matter from a distant star,
Assembled by some universal laws
To wonder, of ourselves and all, our cause.

How did we come about, and for what reason,
And why are we so full of flaws and treason,
Unfaithful to ourselves and cruel to others,
Though knowing in our souls we are all brothers?

Is Being but a hapless accident
Or made with some mysterious intent
We’re charged to comprehend and realize
In theories that our heads and hearts devise?

I say we’re here, invested as we are
With love, to be the Kosmos’ Superstar.

*