Darwin Alone in the Universe

by M. A. C. Farrant

  TEN POINT DEFENSE

  1. A person’s original nature attracts or repels certain wisdoms; hence no expert can with assurance affirm that any particular wisdom is better than another.

  2. The earliest records of wisdom almost uniformly refer to it in connection with religious celebration, i.e., the effect on the brain.

  3. There is no substantial evidence that wisdom has contributed to the corruption of mankind, other than in connection with evangelism, which, being an emotion is a brain by-product.

  4. A frequently asked question: Where does the pursuit of wisdom lead its devotees? A common answer: To laurels and hindsight, most certainly, to the harmless and delightful thrill of a wise and moderate wit.

  5. The combining and manipulating of nature’s more potent thoughts should not be treated as a mere matter of routine. Devils of confusion are lurking everywhere. They’re only too happy to caricature importance and to spoil polite Socratic events.

  6. It is prudent to remember that households in all parts of the world are engaged in their own brand of tragicomedy, all of them excellent.

  7. To the nervous who may seek wisdom without understanding there lurks potential gloom: mal de mer and headache may substitute for a planned and happy affair with life.

  8. To a normally healthy person there is a fair certainty that some wisdom, taken with forbearance and in postmodern fragments, will contribute materially to the health of the species.

  9. It is always a wise decision to suspend definitive judgment on any matter at all.

  10. As an added bonus, wisdom acts as a mild stimulant on the adult orgasm and is a solvent for pasty accusations concerning performance in that sphere, sweetie pie, my beloved.

  THE HOLIDAY

  WE TOOK OUR SUMMER VACATION in a run-down city cottage inhabited by a refugee family from Poland.

  In our continuing attempt to simplify the life process, we’d decided to remain in bed for the two weeks of our stay, fill the void that way, pour in stillness, and make contact with the macro.

  The Polish family camped in the back alley and cooked our meals over an open fire. There was a man, his wife, and three teenaged boys. Every evening the family brought us beet soup from a giant tureen, with generous helpings of Polish sausage wrapped in bacon. The meal was served with ice wine, the newest thing, the grapes, hand-picked then crushed while frozen. The resultant wine was sweet, expensive, cold.

  After several days we grew weary of the macro and invited the Polish couple to join us for drinks.

  But they refused, preferring to remain outside by the fire stirring the beet soup, their sons sitting nearby on upturned plastic buckets, like idle inmates of a refugee camp, reading The National Enquirer.

  The wife wore a headscarf in the peasant style, the husband and boys, black suits, rubber boots.

  THE INEVITABLE, ONCE MET

  IT’S NOT OFTEN that you get to stare the inevitable in the face. But once you do it’s like having a huge dinner guest, one that’s too big for the furniture, one who takes up too much room. An amorphous shape that, stretching, reaches the ceiling and abuts the windows. A shape that is ragged like a skin carcinoma, the bad kind.

  You invited this gloomy presence into your home with the best of wills, bravely, fearlessly. “This big slice of reality,” you said lightly. “It needs to be looked at. Examined. Understood.” So you introduced this presence—somewhere along the way to dessert—to your other dinner guests, your best friends in all the world, and within moments the inevitable was unbound, its presence becoming like black smoke, something burnt, acrid and unwelcome, affecting everyone’s breathing, burning everyone’s eyes.

  One by one your friends were crowded out by the inevitable and left despondently until there was just you and your husband and the inevitable seated at the table. “The inevitable always takes over,” your husband scolded. You realized then that the whole point of life was to defer this meeting, and that nothing good ever came of it, that it was something best left without a dinner invitation, or any invitation at all.

  But you were too curious, too stupid, and now the inevitable won’t leave your home. There are times when you’re gaily playing with your children and you think it is gone only to find it lying like a sleeping fog in another room. The place it likes best is your bedroom at night where it gathers itself in one corner of the ceiling like an ominous cobweb, staring smugly down at you while you and your husband make love. You try to regard it as another pet, like the cat that sleeps on your bed. “Look,” you say to your husband who these days seems to be ageing faster and faster, “The inevitable is lonely, wants company, is cold.”

  But this never works and you’re not fooling anyone. The huge presence stays and stays. It is unlike the tenant in the basement whom you can evict because you’re tired of sharing your house with a stranger. The inevitable, once met, can never be a stranger. It’s there nodding quietly when the cat dies, when the plants whither, when the bad news is delivered at the end of the telephone line. A resident heaviness, just there, to the side of your vision, just beneath the surface of your skin, staring out from your dismayed eyes.

  THE TOWERING SON

  OUR SON MATTHEW began life as a marvelous, blameless thing. But at age five he started complaining. He said it was difficult for him to move with the old thoughts accumulating in the living room, slowing him down. He was speaking about the bookcase, our enormous oak bookcase, the pride of our home.

  “You should call it a book cage,” he told us and we laughed, delighting at our boy’s agility with words. “Smart as a tack,” we told each other, eyes glittering. “A budding essayist,” we said, anticipating a future filled with prizes, honor, giddy regard.

  To our dismay, though, Matthew persisted with his complaint. “That bookcase is a prison and those books are like cages,” he told us, hands planted on his tiny hips, his face huge and scowling. “And the cages smell! There’s dead and dying thoughts in there stinking the place up.”

  “Those books,” we said primly, “represent the sum total of human knowledge and that bookcase is like a museum of thought. Books,” we said from our lofty parental height, “are the most reliable way of transmitting thoughts, mind to mind.”

  We had encyclopedias and novels and Victorian poetry; we had books on psychology, sociology, nature, and metaphysics; we had my husband’s collection of rare first editions, wonderfully obscure novels from the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s.

  But Matthew was unimpressed. “No one ever reads the books, never opens the prison doors and gives the thoughts the light and discourse they so badly need,” he said, dismissing our collection. “Maybe if you did that the thoughts could live! But, no, you prefer to display the books on shelves and show them to your friends like trophies. It’s inhuman and cruel what you’re doing. Don’t you realize you’re torturers? Keeping thoughts chained to words like that?”

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “You’re only five years old. What do you know?”

  “Let me put it another way,” he said mysteriously but with a studied calm, “What I require is roller skates.”

  “Roller skates!” we laughed, relieved and reprieved from a future shocking us with its banal dysfunction. “But you’re too little for roller skates. You might fall and crack your skull and who knows what disturbing thoughts might escape from it then?”

  But the child was insistent. “Roller skates! Roller skates!” he now wailed and kept it up for days; it was roller skates he wanted and nothing else.

  We took him to the doctor. “Roller skates aren’t usually called for until the mid-teens,” the doctor told us, frowning over a twenty-pound medical text. “That’s what it says in here.” He then examined the boy, tests were done and Matthew was pronounced normal in every respect except this.

  “Also,” we added timidly, “the boy is obsessed with the idea that books are prisons for thought.”

  “Harmless childhood whimsy,” the doctor said. “I’m more interested in the skate
s. Why do you want roller skates, Matthew?”

  “I need a leg up to see,” Matthew replied. “I can’t see above my parents outdated ideas unless I’m taller.”

  The doctor chuckled. “An amusing metaphor,” he declared and dismissed us.

  So we gave in, thinking, a mild eccentric is what we have, a small boy enamored of adulthood. He was happy for a time, wearing the roller skates everywhere. That is, until he turned nine and demanded stilts.

  “Stilts!” we gasped.

  “You keep buying those ridiculous books and the dead thoughts keep mounting,” he told us matter-of-factly, nodding towards the bookcase.

  “Some of those books are first editions!” my husband cried, aggrieved. “Do you know what they’re worth?”

  Matthew scowled. “Not much,” he said, grabbing a recent purchase, a novel published in 1946. He turned to the first page and read aloud: “Willie McDermott nestled warm and deep in the dark trough of the vast feather bed, squinting into an aluminum April morning.”

  He tossed the book on the floor. “I rest my case. Dead words, dead thoughts, and those,” he said, pointing at the novel, “house the deadest thoughts of all! How many times have I begged you to rescue the thoughts that still have some life? To bury the ones that are so plainly dead?”

  “I paid good money for that book over the internet,” my husband said, deeply hurt.

  So Matthew, in a deft approximation of an hysterical child, bawled: “Stilts. Stilts. Stilts.”

  We made another visit to the doctor.

  “Stilts are not usually required until middle-age,” the doctor said, alarmed. “Perhaps the boy has a disease—a disease wherein the mind develops insight at an alarming rate.”

  This frightened us. We were in our late thirties and had not yet achieved stilts or even insight and neither had our friends. What did we have here, a galloping guru, insights multiplying at a cancerous rate?

  “Why stilts now?” we demanded, and Matthew said, coolly, “You don’t seriously need an explanation, do you?”

  My husband declared, “He must be a genius!” and took pleasure in this bright new thought, clicking his heels and nodding his head at the neighbors: “My son the genius.”

  We bought the stilts. And elbow pads and a helmet. Now Matthew was taller than us, our towering son. But he was an oddity; there was no denying that, the only child in town living with stilts. He became adept wearing them and could run and play ball like any nine-year-old except that he was always wielding unsettling remarks about the nature of existence that terrified his playmates.

  “Something living, something real is taking place in everything,” he’d stop and thoughtfully pronounce during a ball hockey game. It didn’t take long for him to lose his friends.

  My husband and I lamented—if only he could play the violin or sing arias he’d be called a child prodigy. Acceptance and glory would be his. Ours! A specialist suggested Mental Elevation but we were in the dark as to the practical application of this affliction.

  At eleven Matthew demanded a hot air balloon but we managed to appease him by suggesting he climb the thirty-foot cedar tree at the edge of our property instead. This he did, declaring happily, “From up here there’s no human life! Only distances, shades of green, cloud formations! A world without caged thought!”

  My husband and I stood peering at him from the foot of the tree. Awestruck, I said, “Perhaps he’s the returned Messiah. Or a time traveler.”

  “Or an idiot savant,” my husband replied, “And drop the savant.”

  Briefly, we considered forming a “self-help” group for parents of similarly afflicted children and calling it “Living with Abnormal Elevation” but, alas, it appeared that Matthew was alone in his disease, definitely a queer duck. Then we consulted Tough Luck—a book with the goods on childhood abnormality—and were advised, when confronted with inexplicable behaviour, to persevere until the child turned eighteen and then cut our losses and run.

  Meanwhile Matthew spent many daylight hours in the tree. He now refused to attend school, referring to it as a “tomb of ancient imaginations.”

  At thirteen, he took matters into his own hands and started a roaring bonfire in the back yard, calling the event, “Liberating The Bookcase.” He’d made posters and tacked them to street signs and several neighbours, thinking we were having a community picnic, attended. Hundreds of books went up in smoke.

  “Can’t you hear the free thoughts singing?” Matthew shouted to everyone warming their hands around the fire. The neighbours glanced at each other nervously.

  My husband, who’d come running with the garden hose, cocked an ear and said, “Sounds like barking dogs to me.”

  “That’s because you’re only hearing what’s inside your own head,” Matthew said.

  “I like what’s inside my head,” my husband shouted, mortally embarrassed before the crowd. “I’ve worked hard to fill it with fine thoughts, deep thoughts. Unusual thoughts. Historically interesting thoughts.”

  “A waste of time,” Matthew said, hopelessly. He was about to throw a first edition of The Lasting Affair onto the bonfire when my husband snapped, jumping him and pinning him to the ground. The neighbours fled; I took over the hose.

  “Here’s a very large thought for you,” my husband bellowed. “NO!”

  “No?” Matthew replied from the ground, genuinely perplexed.

  “NO. NO! And NO!” my husband chanted. “Time you were cut down to size.”

  I stood by hovering, wringing with reasons: “His self-esteem? His creativity? His freedom to ‘Be’?”

  “Yeah?” said Matthew.

  But my husband remained unmoved.

  For several hours my husband sat on Matthew out on the lawn beside the dying fire in a deft approximation of an adolescent power struggle. I worried that Matthew would be sat on until he grew up.

  Holding aloft the charred 1946 novel, my husband read to the boy who was pinned to the ground, screaming above the spoken words. Unable to plug his ears, unable to achieve elevation, he writhed in rage beneath his father’s knees.

  My husband read grimly: The lashing rain chased fretful little streams into the March dust which had spread itself thinly over the pane …

  Matthew screamed and screamed.

  I worried that vintage novels would be the death of our son.

  When suddenly we become quiet. Because above the yelling and the reading and the whoosh of the burning books, we could hear a strange new sound like reedy flutes playing, high above the trees, and, yes, it sounded like singing.

  “See,” Matthew said. “I told you.

  My husband rolled off the boy, wiping sweat from his forehead.

  “Where are the freed thoughts going?” I asked, trembling.

  “Who knows?” Matthew said. “Everywhere. Nowhere. It doesn’t matter.”

  THE POET WHO CAME IN THREE SIZES

  IBUMPED INTO LEONARD COHEN in a grocery store late one Saturday in deep November. Leonard Cohen was three feet tall.

  I bent down and said: “Is that you, Leonard?”

  “Yes,” he said, and immediately shot up to nine feet. I heard a metal clanking and noticed a metal brace attached to his back. “Back problems,” he explained. His body then jerked like an old-fashioned elevator and he stood before me at five foot seven.

  “Come to my car,” he said, and led me to the front of the store. It was a specially designed car with pulleys at the driver’s seat that enabled him to operate the car in spite of his harness and back problems.

  “About this harness,” he further explained. “When I’m three feet tall I sit on a special metal chair. It’s comfortable and gives me more maneuverability than a wheelchair. When I’m nine feet tall I travel in a hearse.”

  “Wow!” I said, and then the Leonard Cohen who was five feet seven took me in his arms.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said, stroking my hair as if I wasn’t a stranger at all but someone he’d known in the past, perha
ps the young woman I once was, someone he’d admired from afar and to whom he’d brought flowers and a poem about avarice.

  Now inside the car with him, he kissed me and I was the one doing the admiring. “You’re still a handsome bugger,” I said, and he was so pleased he kissed me again.

  “Ask me about myself,” I said, because I wanted him to know me well. “That beach where you may or may not have admired my young body in a brown striped bathing suit was the very same beach I walked on with my kids only last summer.”

  Leonard Cohen yawned and hastily removed me from his embrace. “I have to leave,” he said, and pulling a lever on his hip with a yanking sound, returned to his three-foot size. He said nothing more and drove off leaving me at the curb.

  Next week I was back at the grocery store hoping for another encounter.

  This time a hearse was parked out front. And Leonard Cohen was there, on his hands and knees, chiseling poems onto the sidewalk. He was nine feet tall and wearing his monk’s robe. Working away at street level he looked like the side of a mountain.

  “Wow!” I said for the second time in seven days.

  Before long a city works employee approached and said, “No poems here,” and slapped concrete over his words. Leonard Cohen laughed but it wasn’t the deep belly laugh of sudden insight, more of a nodding, shrugging laugh as if to say, “Of course, what does it matter?”

  Then he stood up. Fearing a volcano, the small crowd that had gathered to watch, ran for cover.

  But Leonard Cohen didn’t erupt as they’d hoped. Returning to his middle size he simply said, “We do not need words.”

  Because of his reduced height his robe was now spread around his feet like a black lake. Along with the crowd I crept forward to touch it. We were looking to be anointed. But the lake felt coarse, like cloth.

  BRAVE NEW DESIRES