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.”

Not Wanting the Stars

An author’s intention is not necessarily what matters to readers of poetry or prose.

I have read that W. H. Auden wrote Funeral Blues as a parody of the mourning of the death of a politician, and yet readers of the poem have mainly read it as if it were a serious lament for someone the poet had loved who had died, or even for the death of God.

I have read the words of scholars who convincingly argue that the books we call “The Bible” were first written as political propaganda, starting in the reign of David to frighten his enemies and justify his sovereignty, perhaps.

In reader’s hearts, parody becomes serious lament and political propaganda becomes scripture.

In his book, How to Read the Bible, James Kugel wrote about the possibility that the ancient world made a connection between stars in the sky and Seraphim, the angels, or flaming creatures, who in Isaiah constantly praise God, saying, “Holy, holy, holy…”

Auden wrote, “The stars are not wanted now; put out every one.”

Imagine the sky filled with sparkling angels.  We put them out.

Another poet, E.E. Cummings, writing about love and stars and death, wrote, “Only the snow can begin to explain why children are apt to forget to remember.”

Auden wrote, “I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”

Do you see?  Love is the problem. It makes us oblivious to parody in poetry and propaganda in scripture.  Or it makes us forget.  And its most troubling aspect is that it does not last.

Love and Evolution

In The Inner Galaxy, Loren Eiseley remembered how much he loved an old seagull who sat near to him on a beach.  Reflecting on this memory he saw that his love for all wild creatures was meaningless in the context of evolution – it was love not concerned with survival.

In Eiseley’s view of life, formed as it was by Darwin’s view, all species are related to each other and to the earth itself through the great struggle for survival that drives evolution.

Many of us recognize Eiseley’s love for wild creatures as our own love for them.  It is an ironic love – we do not easily associate an emotion like love with the great struggle to survive.   Darwin wrote, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature.”  Our love for wild creatures seems to fight the urge that gave us life.

Love is bound up with hope in the human heart.  Love wants to win.  We don’t know where the struggle will lead, but we hope to win, to live.  Loren Eiseley hoped that “we would win, … if not in human guise then in another.”  We can only say that and mean it when we feel we are one with all the species and when we are in love.