Antidote - July 13 2021

 

Antidote

July 13 2021

Does everyone become

this cynical?

Or is a born pessimist like me

bound to be a cynic?

I feel like an old wooden ship,

listing and waterlogged

encrusted with barnacles.

Or a supple plastic figurine,

left to the elements

until it brittles and clouds.

It weighs you down

to be jaded like this.

Motives are suspect

humans too flawed

the future seems lost.

But I can't bear to disillusion

the bright young thing

whose charming naivete

reminds me of my younger self.

And when I see the wonder and delight

of a toddler exploring his world

I can't disguise my envy,

his receptive eyes absorbing

so wholly and uncritically.

So I search for redemption,

grasp at any story

of virtue and selflessness

and open hearts.

The trouble with memory

is how well we remember the bad,

the salience we give

to threat.

So is wilful forgetting

the secret to happiness?

Is this a healthy balance

that acknowledges reality

or is it cowardly denial,

head-in-the-sand

and starry-eyed?

Except ostriches do not bury their heads

avert their eyes.

They simply lie low,

placing their long necks against the ground

and using their beaks to turn their eggs.

A nesting ostrich

keeping the future alive

is clearly not a pessimist

ground down by life.

So tell me stories

of giving and forgiveness

uplift and sacrifice,

an antidote

to my world-weary view.

And I will tend to my own small nest,

keeping the tiny domain of my life

as hopeful as possible,

while ignoring the world

hammering hard at my door.

As I've written many times before, I'm most comfortable writing poems about nature, poems of close observation and microcosm. This is a kind of risk-free writing, in which I assume the persona of a detached – if enthusiastic – observer. Which would be bloodless, except when I indulge my passion for the environment and let my despair at humanity's short-sighted greed come through.

This poem is more personal and confessional. A lifetime of closely following the news has left me cynical to the point of despair. Are humans too deeply flawed for any kind of redemption? Where are the better angels of human nature? So there is a tendency to take refuge in the sturdy bourgeois values of a small domestic life, things like mowing the lawn, sitting down for a cold beer, puttering about and keeping the place in order: ignoring the world, and taking advantage of having sufficiently little time left that I can safely leave the mess to the next generation. Although I sometimes find I gratefully latch on to a good news story, trying to construct my own temporary antidote to the weight of cynicism and the paralysis of despair.

I love a good analogy, but I think writing them is a weakness of mine. So I was pleased to open this poem with a couple of strong images which I hope will pull the reader in and keep her there. Metaphors are clever, but sometimes a little insidious. While analogies are concrete and direct. This is a little like abstract vs. representational art: a good analogy creates a strong image that has staying power.

Evolutionary biology has a good explanation for this quirk of human memory. Survivors remember the bush where the lion hid. Their genes get passed on. While the ones who walked by lost in memories of last night's beautiful sunset became dinner, and their genes died with them. Natural selection favours memories that are sticky for bad experiences, for the negative. Remembering the rest takes extra effort.

The old calumny against ostriches deserves a quick death. Just as does the falsehood about lemmings jumping off cliffs to die. They don't!!