Noone Loves Anyone

Noone loved anyone.  She did.  “She laughed his joy, she cried his grief … Anyone’s any was all to her.”  E. E. Cummings wrote that.

It feels good to be loved, to know that we are loved.

But that feeling, that knowledge is hard to keep.  Harder and harder.

Darwin showed us a different knowledge: natural selection is at the heart of life, nothing more.  Feelings cannot be trusted, not if we want to know the truth.  Love and hate:  they are the same to the author of life.

“Busy folk buried them side by side, little by little … noone and anyone,” Cummings wrote.

In the beginning there was no plan.  In the end there is no peace.  In the middle, noone loves anyone.  It is impolite to say that.  Teleonomy is jealous of teleology.  I know.  We must laugh our cryings and do our dance, like the “someones and everyones” in Cummings poem who “said their nevers” and “slept their dream.”

The Secret of Life

The pond in this photograph has been erased from maps by a government distrustful of “the public.” The pond’s name has been censored on the local hiker’s discussion board. Knowledge of the pond is given in whispers only, friend to friend.

In such secrecy, the pond, a vernal pool born of melting snow in Spring, dries slowly over the warm months of Summer giving life to grasses and wildflowers, to insects and birds. Its water slowly recedes into nothingness in Autumn.

I think about the beginning and ending of life when I go there.

In The Secret of Life, the last essay in The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley wrote about our efforts, so far futile, to find the secret of life, meaning how life emerged from inorganic matter. He remembered that “Darwin, in one of his less guarded moments, had spoken hopefully of the possibility that life had emerged from inorganic matter in some ‘warm little pond.’”

I know that hope, imagining life beginning on the bank of a warm Summer pond high in quiet mountains.