OUR Times, Virginia, of which you are a doctor
Scholar and therapist of the wishing nerve
Whose balance is our sanity, whose rebuff
Hides in the intricate corridors of madness
Until a healing understanding reach
The memory of a loss and draw it back
From the neurosis of its retreating wish
Our Times, announced in scientific journals,
Where to be lay is largely to be wrong,
Publish man in a scholastic tongue.
The gnomic notions of man’s self-invention
Wither by dial and gauge, and we arrive
Ascending or descending—to begin
A recognition of necessity.
I think what ages tortured at free will,
Or paused at the divinity of madness,
Looking forever from an inward eye
Across the deserts of man’s ignorance
To search a theological concern
From the ambush of midnight, and from space
The starry outline of a father-face.
Virginia, our commonplaces keep
A native notion of the native’s need,
But love, which is intelligence or nothing,
Knows nothing surer than the rule of change,
Where man, who is the product of his tools
–A plowmind from the plowman, speed from the fier,
And tribal gods sprung from the tribal fire
Changes his vision with every change of dress
Yet keeps his native motives and address.
Till man, whose earliest passion was his soul,
Shall be seen steadily and be seen whole:
A target for environment, the rhyme
Of all his memories from his earliest time.
We sit our maps a continent apart,
The evening paper open to dismay
All that we love from its prosperity,
While all our fears grow richer than Oklahoma
On the combustible sediment of our past
Tapped from the rock to run a hot machine.
Deeper than oil we drill for recognition,
To reach the total measure of our past.
I dream a billion years from cell to sight
On the distilling heat of evolution,
And think no fish has ever measured man,
And think how in one season of the womb
Eras from cell to blastopod, gill to lung,
Claw to prehensile hand reel once again
Down the whole traffic of our ancestry
To be the foetal child, redfaced and hungry.
Is it a forced analogy or a law
That all of, us must move through all our past
Down all the species of unfamiliar terror
And so at last survive the mastodon
To be the measurement of what we were?
-Thinking again, no fish has measured man.
And too few men themselves, nor any until
They had evolved beyond the mental gill.
We who believe our half-emancipation
From legend to necessity, and believe
By diagram and dendrite that we shape
An accurate measure of the wishful mind;
And you above all, who daily diagnose
The symptoms of the retreating mind’s confusion,
Treating the curable and incurable
By the slow prescription of a learning process,
Tracing the mechanics of the mind,
Succeeding, failing, learning not to fail,
Learning to measure and at last be right
Shall be the measure of man’s improving sight.
Our Times, that are an end and a beginning,
Have closed the Age of Faith, and need by need
Moved out of heaven through the Ionosphere,
Believing man is prodigy enough
To be the measure of his own intent,
Believing the cavalcade to eternity
Starts gorgeously, but stumbles at the end
Into the courtroom of the laboratory
Where, measured and confirmed, the question stands
As it has always stood: Man versus Time,
But now with Man the judge, by need and reason,
The Age of Evidence in a natural season.
The jungles of our childhood where the tiger
Was always silent as a superstition
Through thickets of wonderment and the dangerous caves
Whose mouths, like the cross sections of a nerve,
Issued a menagerie of monsters
Into the swarming gardens of the brain
– Until you spoke a charm, spit over your shoulder,
Conjured an omen on the livid air
And ran at last, your terror unashamed
For mother’s refuge from the thing un-named …
That was our past with the invertebrates
Practicing our failures of recognition
To document a textbook summary:
“Ontogeny repeats phylogeny”
(That dark Bob Nichols dramatized for us
Through his Neanderthal hair, his arms awry
With something like an astronomer’s excitement
When love and mathematics coincide
In one perfection of calculated silence
That brings the comet punctually down the lens.)
Man, in the province of his ignorance,
Where sun and rain were theological matters
Ruled by magicians, priests, and medicine men,
Defends his past with a patriot’s nostalgia
For the assurance of a familiar law,
The comfort of his first inaccuracy
In solving the invading mystery
That tracked him where he went, lost and alone
On the vertical abyss of swallowing stone,
While lightning threatened in a personal tongue
Whose fearful mutterings drove him to be wrong.
By a semantic confusion of the thunder
The cumulous throne of energy flung down
A fiat to man’s ignorance and God A
(A sort of filing cabinet for the unknown)
Became God B (an answer to all questions)
And by a nerve’s dynamics rose
On nature above nature, till at last
The thunder-that-was-prayed-to (a face like father’s)
Strode from the cumulous door down a mountain stair
To scatter the hooligan fates that pulled your hair.
Until the fates came faster than the rescue
(Rickets is a darker fate than Satan)
And a single moving century of the mind
Stuck telescopes into the eye of space,
Threw fossils at creation, reset the clock
From Israel to lead-uranium,
And found a paramoecium in Paradise;
While priests and poets juggled and abstracted
An Emersonian last line of defense,
And God became a sort of thinning vapor:
A memory Wordsworth had, quiet Arnold wept,
And Hardy lost in a bitterness of Fate
Until the high nostalgia for the infinite
Fell from the vision of natural tragedy
And brought him home to social necessity
An exercise of centuries arrives
From all the parallel bars to its exhaustion,
And from the high trapeze of consequence
Man’s aerial parabola from the ape
Merges with a jet’s trajectory
Where rocket ships expand the universe
Into a calculus of the calculable.
The thunder closes like a symphony
And reason is the silence after strings.
The skies are empty through every telescope
Of everything but arithmetic and hope
That opens man to a final recognition:
A dendrite with a losing premonition
Caught in the natural storm of chance,
A cortex and a circumstance
With neither freedom nor integrity
Until he recognize necessity
And by a studious decision
Be the mechanic of revision,
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