Stranding

April 20 2015

There is always the kid we know
who won't amount to much.

Even 10 year olds
see this unerringly.
The animal cleverness of boys,
weighing station, and status, and strength,
deadly accurate with shame,
and expertly trained
to strangle at birth
all fellow-feeling.
The pack dictates,
and we circle our prey
with the certainty of birthright.

He slouched in the back row.
Wore the same clothes, day after day.
Started to shave
long before the rest of us.
His future was fixed,
because even he
never doubted it.

I have no idea what became of him.
You lose track
of 10-year-old friends,
let alone
the scorned, and the laughed at.

Back then

he was not "exceptional"

but merely "dumb".

Yet he could have been a genius
in his own way,
some specialized intelligence
we had no inkling of.
Good with his hands?
Perfect pitch?

Like a sleek inquisitive dolphin
stranded at low tide.
His high-pitched squeals
inaudible,
his brilliant speed
impossible,
a beautiful creature
wrenched from of the water
in which he thrives.
A desperate eye
looking out on this dry inhospitable place,
searching vainly
for help.

The recent National Geographic (May 2015) had a story about dolphin communication. I loved this line, a quote from comparative psychologist Stan Kuczaj: "The question is not how smart are dolphins, but how are dolphins smart." It raises the question of multiple intelligences. And also the impossibility of truly knowing another -- not only across species, but within out own kind as well.

Back when I was in school, of course, no one thought about multiple intelligences. If you weren't good academically, or were slow to learn, or had some disability, there wasn't much help or concern. The system rewarded only academic ability. It was more competitive than touchy-feely, and more boot-strap (as in "pull yourself up") than caring. But in those days, you could have a successful life without even a high school education: an able-bodied man with a reasonable work ethic could always get a pretty good job.

One of the key things we've learned since then is the power of expectation. If you're thought of as promising, you respond. And if you're labelled as the dumb kid, you live up -- or down -- to it. It's sobering how early in life these things get fixed, identity imposed. In the poem, this comes through not just in His future was fixed,/ because even he/ never doubted it, but also earlier on, in the single word birthright. Anyway, I remember a particular kid. I think his last name was Sutton. I recall we called him "Sutpea"; or was it "Sutpee"? (Probably the latter!) I suspect he had an impoverished home life -- that is, impoverished emotionally and intellectually as much as financially. Today, he might very well be diagnosed dyslexic, and would not have graduated 8th grade functionally illiterate. So he probably could have been helped; but no one expected much -- him, least of all. And going back to the original idea -- the inscrutability of dolphin intelligence -- I wonder if he too might have had hidden talents that went unrecognized; if he could have been great with the right encouragement and opportunity. Of course, I have no idea how things went with him. Perhaps he's now a successful politician, or master of the universe on Wall Street. (Two arenas of life where surprisingly incompetent and unworthy people seem to do very well!)

Another thing this poem alludes to is the cruelty of kids: the fellow-feeling we don't fully get. Don't we all think back with shame and guilt on some horrible thing we did back then, and the only excuse with which we console ourselves is that our moral sensibility was not yet fully developed: our ethical compass stuck, our powers of empathy rudimentary? And conspiring with this is the power of group think, conformity, social signalling, and mutual reinforcement: the pack, from which we fear exclusion.

I hope that the dolphin analogy, dropping in at the end, doesn't seem to come out of nowhere. Because I think it's foreshadowed by the animal metaphor in the second stanza. And I like that the poem ends on a high note of empathy: as if the shallow child of the poem has grown-up to be its more thoughtful author.