Original Sin - Jan 31 2021

 

Original Sin

Jan 31 2021

I wonder if the original sin

was not Eve's fateful apple,

but the power to name

that God gave Adam.

Our need to categorize,

dividing the world

into kingdoms, phylae, families.

And the taxonomy of man

assigned nation, race, tribe.

Even the tree of life is inaccurate,

the thinning trunk

ascending ever higher,

its branches branching

adorned with Latin names.

Because life does not progress

it merely finds its way.

And what about the roots, hidden from sight?

The great fungal networks

that nourish and connect it?

The fertile soil

teeming with life

that long predated microscopes?

The power of naming

the illusion of control.

When thinking that we know

is the worst kind of ignorance.

In an interdependent world

of complex webs

and mutual relationships

nothing is singular

and boundaries dissolve.

The apple falls

and begins to decompose.

But something new grows in its soil,

creating matter

from sunlight and air,

perhaps even beauty

in the eye of the beholder.

Which is what He did, on the seventh day,

rest

and look out upon His handiwork

and give His blessing to the world;

first pronouncing it good,

then letting nature take its course.

This poem began while I was listening to a podcast (CBC's Sunday Magazine) about David Starr Jordan, a celebrated taxonomist and ichthyologist who dedicated his career to discovering and categorizing fish. (https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-57-the-sunday-magazine/clip/15821959-lulu-miller-why-fish-dont-exist-one-mans) Taxonomy may be an indispensable tool which to organize scientific research. But whether it gives us a complete or even true picture of the world is questionable. The more we learn about DNA and reproduction, for example, the more slippery becomes the very notion of what even a species is and is not.

Prior to that, I had read a fascinating and alarming piece in the Atlantic that beautifully illuminates the complexity and subtlety of this kind of interdependence, as well as our hubris in imagining that the simple act of naming allows us to fully understand the world. Who could have imagined that some kind of ecological imbalance – presumably caused by us – has apparently disrupted the oceans' phytoplankton and resulted in a life threatening thiamine deficiency that is resonating all the way up the marine and terrestrial food chains?

My reading in the Atlantic also included an article about Chloe Valdary's “Theory of Enchantment” (which you have to love just for its name!), in which she challenges the racial essentialism inherent in traditional diversity, equity, and inclusion training, replacing it with a more loving, empathetic, and universalist message that resists the notion of group identity altogether. (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/can-chloe-valdary-sell-skeptics-dei/617875/)

The trouble is, we are inherent taxonomists by nature. Our brains seek patterns. There is a natural human urge to name and organize, to seek order out of chaos. Perhaps we do this for the reassuring sense of control it affords. But this is such a superficial way of seeing the natural world. How interesting that the word “ecology” (although I'm sure such a worldview has been part of many philosophical and religious traditions since our beginnings) was not invented until 1866.

For me, though, the heart of the poem is the short third stanza, beginning with the taxonomy of man. Because I think when I set out to write it was more to address Valdary's insights and this theme of racial essentialism than the environmental message. If even the notion of “species” can be called into question, then race is certainly a myth, a false human construct. So our original sin is not disobedience. It is tribalism, blood and belonging; the personal insecurity that turns us into distrusting and reductionist xenophobes. Readers, of course, are free to take what they wish, as they are with any poem.

I'm an atheist, but as soon as this through-line of naming came to mind, the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden immediately appeared to me. Because the poem began with a religious theme, I felt I was stylistically called upon to end it there as well. And, as an act of respect toward those who do believe, I followed my usual custom of capitalizing the pronouns for God.