Hardwired: Morning Pages — Late May
From my desk just in front of two double-pane windows, a good bit of the view of the world out there is blocked by my monitor, both physically and metaphorically. Far too much of my present-day consumption of what used to pass for the “real world” comes from within the bezel of the glass window that frames the digital truths of life — or their alternative truths.
That, I suppose, is beside the point. I do manage to peer past the edges of the iMac and consume the occasional detail from this verdant redoubt we call home. And I even occasionally manage to escape this room, such that valley floor and sky above are my window on the third rock.
It is first light and there is motion, just right of the screen, always in the same place: the locust gargoyle — the craggy Entling roots we perched on the railroad ties that step down our yard as it levels towards the foundation of the house. The spike makes a great pointed perch for the phoebe whose splattered nests adorns the “return” at the corner of the roof, just above the gargoyle.
He or she appears on that spike multiple times a day, every day for the past few weeks. Earlier, I could clearly see (perhaps 10 feet from my office chair) that the bird held an insect in its mouth as it launched itself up toward waiting mouths, again and again.
In the past few days, that pattern has changed. It sits atop the gargoyle, insect in beak. But the babies must have fledged; or the other parent has taken over feeding duties. I suspect this, because now, the insect still wiggling in the pincer-grip of the beak is eaten on the spot.
And at the same instant that the mouthful is swallowed, the second the bug goes in the front end, an equal or greater amount of weight leaves via the other end. Stimulus-response: the gastro-colic reflex. No thought, no judgments, no decisions required. Eat. Poop.
It’s common for most vertebrates, but in the case of the tiny bird, conservation of weight is vital. Every gram counts in the energy economy of a feeder-on-the-wing like our phoebe. No time is wasted on its thinking about what ought to be done. It just happens by virtue of the built-in animal directions that come pre-installed.
As I mentioned, in defense of my desk-potato lifestyle, I do leave home from time to time (often, actually) and this is especially true, April through November. The garden is an unrelenting tyrant, from pre-planting until post-harvest.
I was scratching idly in the mulch with a broken hoe we use as a single-handed grubbing tool. Out of the top inch or so emerged a striking high-domed, bejeweled orange and black beetle — one I had seen before but had no name for. I watched it, just emerged from an earlier molt, finding its way across the surface of organic bits and small clods of dark loam.
As I watched, it moved with seeming purpose in the direction of one of the stockade timbers, an 8 x 8"x 8' post, that provides support for the cattle panels of the gulag garden — a concentration camp for carrots and cabbage, I call it.
And at about the time that beetle number 1 reached the base of the post and begin climbing it, a second lacquered beetle emerged, looked around and moved, by chance or design, in the same direction as the first, not quite reaching the post when beetle number 3 appeared from under the mulch.
If it too showed the same taxis towards the prominent and only verticals in its new hundred-faceted view of the world, I was onto a behavior pattern that was part of the cosmic consciousness of this particular beetle species over perhaps a million years of its life on Earth.
By the time beetle #3 reached the bottom, #1 was near the top — some 8 feet above the level of the soil where it dug its way into the light.
Like baby turtles immediately find “downhill” because it means “where the water is” these new-to-daylight beetles instantly recognize “vertical” being “out of harms way” or “the high place you jump from on your first flight after getting your wings.” They, like the pooping phoebe, are hard-wired in ways beyond thought or memory or reason. They do what they do because they can do no other, and such ways of metabolism or behavior help insure survival.
And yet, in all of these instincts and programmed behaviors, they are not capable of doing evil. They do not lie. Or cheat. Or covet.
“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” There’s a lot in that pithy wry humor from Mark Twain.
Are we alone, among all cosmic creatures, capable of choosing to be a naked ape, living lives that are nasty, brutish and short AND at the same time capable of earning the position as the paragon of animals, a benevolent creator of art and music, poetry and kindness, cooperation and empathy? What hath God wrought?
Our basest, most animal selves seem all too conspicuously programmed for self-serving, for gratuitous violence, selfishness, greed and the other vices long noted as untoward behaviors for our kind over the eons. You’d think by now we’d have overcome our inner baboon. We say we aspire to better than that.
Most societies and almost all religions posit that man has the potential to stifle those pre-determined animal ways of doing the convenient thing, instead to do the right thing; to turn from the easy thing for self to the hard thing for others; to give a life for the greater good; to act in the knowledge of risk or loss to ourselves for even those who are strangers and with whom we do not share selfish genes.
And yet, entire and powerful nations take, despoil and hoard for me, for here; for now. It’s all about our comfort in the moment. And our power — over nature and over others.
We are capable of putting that old self, that animal-acting part of us, to death, the wisest among us have said. We can focus our energies for them; there; then. For generations yet unborn. For coral reefs, rainforests; for the beasts and the children of tomorrow.
I look harder and harder each day to find that vanishing capacity in the news of my fellow creature each morning on my computer screen — with coffee, about the time the phoebe comes to the gargoyle for breakfast.
I won’t find it in the news of the world, but do see glimpses of a human and humane ecology in the slow pace, human scale and authentic generosity of my neighbors in our tiny county with its single traffic light. That’s where I will look and that is where I will place my hope. Perhaps we can be better, nobler animals in small caring groups than we are seen to be in the aggregate whole of us.
