Why?

Jan 10 2015

Small children ask why?, and why? again.
As if those 3 letters
could bore right down
to the essence of things.

Because it's only then, too young to know better
you see the world fresh.
Which, like kissing

your first girl,

or reading a poem
for the first time
you can only do once.

Incessant questions,
like pokes to the head
with a pointed finger
in the same sensitive spot.

Because more often than not
there is no answer,
no prescribed plan, no cosmic sense.
So you improvise, simplify, deflect.
Find yourself explaining
the how, and what, and when,
while the why? must be left to God
faith
tautology.

Luckily, children are easily satisfied
with circular answers.
Children, who will grow to be men
who are sure they possess
the essential truth,
the purpose of living
of life after death.

I hope mine are content
with uncertainty.
Will pick up pens, and express
their angst
and quest for meaning,

write poetry

that goes unread.

While the true believers
will pick up arms;
defend to the death
their infallible gods.

A very serious poem. But it started in a New Yorker article about something entirely different. In The Talking Cure (Nov 24 2014) Margaret Talbot describes a "Head Start" type program in Providence Rhode Island that teaches low-income parents of pre-school kids to increase their verbal interaction: the richness of vocabulary and grammatical forms, the receptivity of their back-and-forth, the favouring of affirmation over prohibition and chiding . The article reminded me of kids' incessant "why's": not only how they try our patience, but how they challenge us to re-examine accepted verities.

Mostly, when we answer "why", we're really saying "how". The metaphysical "why" is too deeply buried, too inscrutable, to interrogate.

The poem touches on my atheism, my nihilism, and some of my frustration. But it's also informed by the immediacy of world news in a week when a couple of Muslim fundamentalists killed 12 (still counting) and wounded several others in an attack on a satirical magazine in Paris. Because when you presume to answer the ultimately unanswerable "why", you become susceptible to orthodoxy and dogma, to self-righteousness and unjustified certainty. While in this case it's uneducated literalists who have hijacked a fine religion (and probably, as well, alienated failures who are seeking validation, identity, belonging) my point is that all religion is, by the very nature of religious faith and received wisdom, fertile soil for extremists. There is something to be said for having more questions than answers.

I very intentionally wrote "the essential truth", instead of the broader (and perhaps more mellifluous sounding) "essential truths". Only the definite article would do, since nothing illustrates extremism better that its insistence on absolutes and singularity, on intolerance for any kind of deviation or original thought.

I try to avoid big ponderous presumptuous words; but "tautology" was essential here. Because any time you attribute something to God, it seems to me you're simply re-stating the question -- moving the goal-line of why? -- without getting down to any real truth: that is, the hand-waving argument of answering the question with the question, which is the definition of (the all too frequently misused term) "begging" the question. I also may have pushed the rhyme (the short "e") a bit too far: because once the reader starts to see the wheels turning and gets out of the flow, she steps out of the poem. I know I have a tendency to be far too clever for my own good, to show-off with word-play; and I may have done that here. (But since I never get to read a poem of mine for the first time, it's hard to tell!)