Heartless - Dec 20 2020

 

Heartless

Dec 20 2020

Even without muscles, blood

a beating heart

some trees are able to warm themselves,

in the cool morning mist

helping to vaporize

the volatile scents

that attract their pollinators.

The way a woman applies cologne

to the thin skin of her wrist

and lifts it to her nose.

Who knew trees could be so clever,

that a green succulent tree

rooted firmly in place

could be so self-determining,

aware of temperature

independent of weather.

Or failed to credit

the exigency of sex

as the mother of invention.

So now, I wonder

if lacking axons, neurons, brains

they also think in some way

we will never understand.

How we can live out our years

beside something so familiar

yet alien,

parallel lives

that never intersect

or comprehend the other.

What else have we missed

in our human centeredness?

Homeothermic trees

and rats who laugh when they're tickled,

birds making tools

and packs of wolves who mourn.

Warm trees

and heartless men

who are cold and dead inside.

When things are often less than they seem

and sometimes so much more.

The problem with the question posed in the poem is that the nature of “thinking” is left undefined. We imagine sentience when we see that word: that is, self-awareness that includes a sense of personal boundary, individuality, and a kind of psychological insight; agency (or at least the illusion of agency); and biographical memory as well as an ability to imagine the future. The trouble is, a living thing can think without sentience: perform complex acts that adjust to circumstance and demonstrate memory and learning without the need of a sense of self; that is, without sentient consciousness. Trees demonstrate memory, they process complex information, they communicate, and they alter their behaviour according to changing conditions. All this is thinking. But it happens without a central nervous system. And who knows if there is sentience/consciousness or not. Since we could never have imagined “thinking” without a nervous system or brain, perhaps we also aren't capable of understanding a different valence of consciousness.

I was surprised to learn this about trees. But then, nature is always surprising us. We under-estimate nature and often have too high an opinion of ourselves and of our exceptionalism.

Apparently, one doesn't need a heart to be warm. Conversely, there are those with hearts who remain cold. (And writing this 30 days from the official end of the Trump administration – thank God! – this is particularly salient!)

What follows has nothing to do with this particular piece, but I wrote it to a friend after sharing the first draft. It helps explain why I write these commentaries (or, as I like to all them, “blurbs”), which some others may be wondering as well:

“One of the people in your (our?) contact thread questioned why a poet feels the need to write something to explain the poem. He should know that this is not what I do. The poem stands on its own, and readers are free to see in it what they want. There is no correct way to read it. Rather, my prose and poetry represent completely different ways of thinking and different approaches to the same topic. Prose is my natural form. I think and write in a very logical, sequential, linear way. While poetry's strength is allusion, misdirection, and ambiguity. Prose says as much as possible; poetry leaves space. So I find the poetry frustrating, in a way. I write it because it's a challenge for someone like me. And since I can't say what I want to say clearly and directly and comprehensively, the prose blurb lets me get it out of my system. I also use it to remind myself of how the poem came about, and because I sometimes think these curious and circuitous origin stories might be of interest to the reader.”