A Difficult Birth

March 23 2020

We were condemned, after all, to a difficult birth.

Was it a vengeful God, punishing Eve?

Or simply posture,

two-legged animals, with too big heads

walking erect?

So  . . . either disobedience

or precocity.

And memories

that are blessedly short.

Because who remembers being born?

And how to explain

big families,

if women weren't forgetful

and pain didn't mercifully fade?

How some babies look like old men.

Fat as Buddha

and badly balding.

Incidentally wetting themselves

diapers or not.

And too weak to hold up their heads,

lumpy bodies, slumping floppily

dribbling saliva

chin on chest.

While old men

regress to childhood,

taking pleasure in the little things

and saying what they think

and refusing to sweat

the small stuff.

So life goes on,

one generation

handing-off to the next,

the pain of birth

the fear of death.

Wondering

if it's karma, resurrection, rebirth

or eternal nothingness?

If souls persist

but are somehow wiped clean,

and whether heaven exists

or if death really is

the end?

All we know

is that pain is last and first.

That it cannot be weighed, contained, preserved.

That while matter transforms

into energy

and energy's in turn conserved

pain vanishes.

To its own dimension, perhaps,

some parallel universe

or the dark side of ours.

The immense weight of a suffering world

extinguished utterly.

An immaculate birth

and a peaceful death.

If only

He were not so mysterious

so quick to condemn.

We were made in His image

instead of He after us.

I surrendered a bit to stream of consciousness in writing this poem, and the initial result was a jumble of roughly connected stanzas which I then had to shoe-horn into some kind of coherent whole. So I'm surprised it ended up making as much sense as it does! Not as linear as my usual style. But then, my usual style tends more toward the prosaic. Non-linearity is not only acceptable in a poem, it's often its greatest strength. 

But still, the sum may be less than its parts.

And one part I particularly like is the immense weight of a suffering world / extinguished utterly. It's this idea of pain being such a subjective experience; yet so potent and universal and ubiquitous: that it doesn't really exist – not in the same consistent quantifiable way as matter or energy – and yet is so powerful and determining. When you imagine the sum of all pain among all living creatures, it becomes overwhelming and incomprehensible. Yet, if you try to quantify it, you end up with nothingness. Where does subjective experience exist? Can it be real and unreal at once?

I also like the entire stanza While old men / regress to childhood, / taking pleasure in the little things / and saying what they think / and refusing to sweat / the small stuff. I like it because it captures in three simple observations both the wisdom and the freedom of aging.

And finally, the end: If only ... / We were made in His image / instead of He after us. Because this is the essence of the atheist's world view: that we are not God's creation, but rather that God is a creation of ours. God ...or gods. The Bible says we are created in His image. But it seems we have actually created Him after us. Which perhaps explains the all too human fallibility of those quarrelsome Greek gods; or the short temper and need of constant praise and Old Testament retribution of the God of the 3 great monotheisms. How solipsistic is this? Because we flawed humans are susceptible to feelings of vengeance, do we lack even the rudimentary imagination to create a god who is better than us? Apparently not!

The origin of this poem is far removed from the end result. It actually began as a commentary on spring: how the transition to spring is this difficult on/off process of freeze and thaw ... of 2 steps forward and 1 step back ...of a blizzard as bad as any winter white-out, followed by a warm sunny day that turns the drifts to mush. I thought the metaphor of the birth process – which, we are told, is uniquely painful and difficult in humans – might be interesting. But instead of leading to a seasonal poem, difficult birth led to a rumination on birth and death and uncertainty; on pain, suffering, and belief.

My nephew wrote me with some questions about the closing stanza. Here is part of my response:

A few disjointed  thoughts, in answer to your question. if only / He were not so mysterious  I was hoping it would resonate with "God moves in mysterious ways; His wonders to perform", which I always thought was biblical, but in checking it out just now realize that it's taken from a Christian hymn written in the 18th century by a guy named William Cowper. But the idea still stands:  that we give God a free pass by simply proclaiming that He is ineffable; that His divine plan is inscrutable to us mere mortals, and so we must simply consign ourselves to both faith and fate. And so quick to condemn calls back to the opening stanza:  the condemnation of Eve; the sins of our fathers (or mothers, in this case!). And the final two lines are as the blurb suggests:  my self-indulgent critique of religion, which is the atheist in me saying that we create our gods, not the other way around. Who needs mythology to explain the pain of birth when science already has an answer?