Something From Nothing - Sept 8 2020

 

Something From Nothing

Sept 8 2020

In the beginning,

but after the stars

and the greening of earth

and the creatures who dwell in the sea

there was the accident of birth.

Which we tend to forget

while living out our lives

with the conceit of agency.

Of self-determination

mastery

and will,

as if contingency

coincidence

luck

were not repeatedly tossing the dice,

like tipsy gamblers

placing all-night bets.

The year of the polio vaccine

was the year of my birth.

So I grew up

free of the scourge

of children forbidden to play

and mothers wasting away

and hard-working men

confined to iron lungs.

Healthy

to a good family

in a first world country

in the middle of the 20^th century.

So I began

by winning the lottery,

and after that

any sense of entitlement

is churlish at best.

While my gratitude

is also tempered by fear

for the children born of hope

in this chilling 21^st,

our poor stewardship

and malignant neglect,

the future we have left to them.

1955

will not be remembered for me

and my paltry life.

But what a singular year

for that one in millions of sperm

to have found its egg

and persisted to birth.

The cosmos, with its trillions of stars

seems incomprehensible.

Yet we are no less.

In the beginning, the earth

was formless and void,

there was darkness

upon the face of the deep.

As we too were born;

something from nothing

in the year of our Lord.

This is something I've often thought, and frequently spoken of and written about. It's a very useful reframing device. When you feel hard done by and entitled, recalling the accident of birth can be a sobering corrective: you won the lottery from the get-go; everything from then on is gravy. (I know, I know; not only an unforgivably mixed metaphor, but two lazy cliches!) I call these the five basic things: born healthy, to a good family, in a first world country, in the middle of the 20^th century. Not to mention the astronomical odds against conception in the first place.

Philosophical poems like these are the hardest to write, and generally not my favourites. Because complicated and nuanced ideas are probably better expressed in prose. But then, it's the constraints that make writing poems challenging, and make reading them pleasurable: appreciating how the author navigates that fine line between, on the one side, argument and linear thought, and on the other, prosody, musicality, whimsy ...and an economy of words. (The latter usually being my greatest test!)

The Biblical references may seem odd, coming from such a fundamentalist atheist. Perhaps it's the irony of this that appeals to me. Or perhaps it's a kind of reaching across the philosophical divide, a token of respect I offer to believers. Or perhaps it's simply an acknowledgement of the influence and gravitas not only of Judaeo-Christian thought and mythology in our culture, but of scriptural language itself.