(for William Gray)
Wide though the interrupt be that divides us, runers and
counters,
from the Old World of the Plants, all lapped in a tolerant
silence,
where, by the grace of chlorophyll, few of them ever have
taken
life and not one put a sceptical question, we nod them as
neighbours
who, to conclude from their friendly response to a gardener's
handling,
like to be given the chance to get more than a self-education.
As for the hot-blooded Beasts, we didn't need Darwin to tell
us
horses and rabbits and mice are our cognates, the double-
voiced song-birds
cousins, however removed: unique as we seem, we, too, are
shovelled out into the cold, poodle-naked, as male or as
female,
grab at and gobble up proteins, drop dung, perform the
ungainly
brute-with-two-backs until, dared and doddered by age, we
surrender,
lapse into stagnant stuff, while they by retaining a constant
visible shape through a lifetime, accord with our human idea
of
having a Self. They also, we cannot but fancy, are peering
at a horizon as we do, aware of, however obscurely,
more than they must be concerned with, and vaguely elated
at being
someone who's up and about: yes, even their humblest have,
surely,
nosed a few steps on the hazardous foreright to courage,
utterance, joy and collateral love. That is why, in our folk-
tales,
toads and squirrels can talk, in our epics the great be
compared to
lions or foxes or eagles.
But between us and the Insects,
namely nine-tenths of the living, there grins a prohibitive
fracture
empathy cannot transgress: (What Saint made a friend of a
roach or
preached to an ant-hill?) Unrosed by a shame, unednorsed
by a sorrow,
blank to a fear of failure, they daunt alike the believer's
faith in a fatherly providence and the atheist's dogma of
purely
random evetns. To begin as a crawling insatiable eater,
then to be buried and mortify, then to emerge from the cere-
cloth
winged and mateable, brilliantly coloured, a sipper of juices,
yet a compulsive hunter and hoarder, must do havoc to any
unitive sense. To insert them, excuse those unamiable towns
where
sex is reserved for the Few and the many animate tool-kits
perish from overwear, one is tempted to cook up a Gnostic
myth of an earlier Fall, preceding by aeons the Reptiles:
Adam, a crab-like creature who'd just wriggled out of a
steamy
ocean where he had failed at making a living and now lay
moribund, choked, on a shore without song. Unto whom the
Seducer,
not our romantic Satan but a clever cartesian Archon,
coaxingly thus: Not doing very well, are you, poor deathling,
no, and unlikely to do any better, thanks to the schemes of
We-Know-Whom. (He's a Precious but logic was never His
forte.)
Freedom may manage in Heaven with Incorporeals, but for
ghosted extended matter the consequence is to be doomed to
err where an error is mortal. But trust me and live, for I do
know
clearly what needs to be done. If I programme your ganglia for
you,
you shall inherit the earth.
Such a myth, we all know, is no
answqer.
What they mean to themselves or to God is meaningless
question:
they to us are quite simply what we must never become.
-- W.H. Auden