The World According to Martha

Reading Russell McLendon's recent piece about the anniversary of the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, made me think about animal histories. I had been thinking about the way humans consider their past--issues of inheritance, family ties, legacies that are passed down through generations, and how those are both good and bad for people. How there are things our ancestors did that we're still on the hook for; things our ancestors suffered that still ripple out into our own lives. The way that people born to a place feel connected to it and will defend it, and how animals are (at least in theory) separated from that kind of thinking.

People have whole stories of how they belong in a place and how it belongs to them, a version of history that adds up to an explanation of how we came to be where we are, and often a story of why we control what we do.

When you visit the Alhambra in Granada, for example, or the cathedral in Seville, you're walking through spaces that have been Christian and Muslim and Christian and Muslim for centuries, based on the battles for control that went on there. The bell tower in the Seville cathedral, La Giralda, used to be a minaret. So much of the architecture is like that, a sort of structural palimpsest on which one thing was written and then written over and then written over again, but pieces of the original thing still show through.

While I was at the Alhambra years ago, I noticed not just the architecture, but the swallows who were flying in and out of one of the main courtyards, swooping for bugs, occasionally dipping into one of the fountains. It made me think about their ancestors: Had this swallow's family lived here for long? Did this line of birds go back centuries, so that their great-great-great-great grandfathers might have witnessed the fights between religious devotees, each trying to claim the land for their own vision?

And if animals were inclined to record their history in the same way we keep track of ours--the wars, the treaties, the grudges that are held and echo for centuries--what might they have to say about the primates who left the animal kingdom and became something else?

(I should note that I'm actually a dog lover, but that the parasitical nature of our favorite slobbering companions has always made me wonder how other animals perceive them--whether they're considered the Benedict Arnolds of the wild kingdom. And also that the thing I liked best about the process of writing this poem was discovering that a group of apes is called a "shrewdness"--probably the best herd term ever.)

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This draft went extinct.

What We Talk About

The nameable sources for this draft: a rather unusual sonnet by Ernest Hilbert, the work of Rene Magritte (most specifically, "The Treachery of Images"), and one of my favorite Paul Simon songs.



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This draft was annulled.

We Parse, Therefore We Is

It's an old joke: What does the dyslexic agnostic think about when he lies awake at night? The existence of dog.

Without getting overshare-y, over the past months, I've had some major sources of worry. I've occasionally found myself talking to myself, arguing with myself. Sometimes out loud. (Usually not in public, though at least once or twice I've caught a stranger's eye and thought, whoops, another person who thinks I'm shellacking the waxed egg.) When I am struggling with a difficult question or decision, I often become two debate teams. I let them argue with each other, and see which side I end up believing.

This is not the same as prayer. Prayer is different, and as an agnostic and lapsed Catholic, it's not my typical mode of problem solving. But a few times in the past few months, I have also caught myself uttering, quietly, phrases that could be taken for prayer. As in, Please, great entity I'm not at all sure I believe in and usually pay no attention to, help me out with this one.

What I'd like, at such moments, is for the clouds to part, and a large mouth to appear and deliver instructions in a clear voice, preferably Samuel L. Jackson's. Thus far, that has never occurred. I'd conclude that the lack of a clear response is due to my own failures to attend to God on a day-to-day basis, but from what I understand, even those who pay a great deal of attention to God get some confusing messages. (Perhaps God needs to work on his penmanship.)

Sometimes, though, I worry that answers come, but I miss them. For example, a while back, I was sitting quietly on a rock in Great Falls Park during a moment of crisis and pain, when the word please formed in my brain. And as it formed, the nook of gray rocks across the Potomac, the exact spot my eyes had fallen upon, seemed to shift and blur and a heron flew out of them, the same color as the stones, and passed over my head.

So what was that, exactly? An answer? Or did that heron just randomly remember its manicure appointment?

I can never make up my mind about these things. I'm never able to believe they're really signs, but I'm also never able to believe they're entirely coincidence, either. I suffer from a more agnostic version of the illness that afflicts the son in Nabokov's brilliant "Symbols and Signs" (which seems to me the point of the story: all humans both suffer and benefit from our tendency to interpret the world).

Thinking about this issue reminded me of an old poem I wrote about dogs and their fear of mailmen, which has long seemed to me a decent metaphor for humanity's problem with God. Specifically: We sometimes sense there's something out there. It sticks notes through our door slot, but we can't read them because, well, we can't read. And our attempts to read them lead to, well, theories about intelligent design and, sometimes, mass suicides. Sometimes doubt itself seems to me like the best product of the mind -- the capacity to hold a thought or opinion and all the while also hold the thought: I may be wrong.

Then again, of course, maybe some of us read divine messages correctly. In which case, can I snag a spare key to your bunker sometime before October?


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This poem was eaten by the dog.