#233 Cantatrice

Misunderstanding, misunderstanding, misunderstanding.

Are we stationed here among another thing?

Sometimes I wonder.

After the lightning, this afternoon, came thunder:

the natural world makes sense: cats hate water

and love fish. 

Fish, plankton, bats’ radar, the sense of fish

who glide up the coast of South America

and head for Gibraltar.

How do they know it’s there? We call this instinct

by which we dream we know what instinct is,

like misunderstanding. 

I was soft on a green girl once and we smiled across

and married, childed. Never truly did we take in

one burning wing.

Henry flounders. What was the name of that fish?

So better organized than we are oh.

Sing to me that name, enchanter, sing!

 

How does the monarch butterfly know to head south for Mexico in the fall, several generations removed from the ancestor who first flew north from there? It doesn’t know. It just goes, turning toward Mexico with the same level of rationale that makes a corn plant spread its tassel and concentrate its seeds in a ring around a central cob, or that makes a moonflower open at night. There are new theories about plant intelligence out there, and they’re amazing, but they’re pretty esoteric. Plants—at least for the present literary purpose—just are. They just do. They don’t think. Same with most fish. Behavior follows from instinct like thunder from lightning: We don’t expect anything like control. It’s all bound up in a natural pattern immeasurably greater than any individual creature. Annie Dillard is all over this kind of thing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: get some caterpillars following one another around the rim of a bowl, and they just keep filing in circles until they wear out and die. It’s a bizarre and amazing phenomenon, the mindless biological machines that insects appear to be. It’s highly doubtful that any fish understands anything about what lies beyond the straits of Gibraltar, but when it’s time to migrate, they go. But I know B. well enough by now to know that he’s not even remotely interested in why fish swim to Gibraltar from South America. (Bluefin tuna do this. Maybe other fish.) The nature imagery has a purpose: The implied question that hovers over this poem is, Why in the world do we do what we do? Do we chalk it up to instinct? Of course we do! B. doesn’t even care about that per se. Instinct matters only if he can ask the question about it in defense of his own mistakes. Then instinct takes on meaning in that narcissistic context. But in the end it’s still an appropriate question: What drives us? Can we call it instinct, ever? Why did I marry this girl, have children, and we never really loved one another? Love being the culturally sanctioned emotion that pushes or pulls us, often against our will, or sometimes even our knowledge, toward a mating behavior. Hmm—thought experiment. Let’s say you’re a priest, and that adolescent boy over there looks pretty scrumptious to you. There’s the instinct. Sure. We understand that. You can’t help that, or at least your controls on what you think are tenuous. But, do you let your social conditioning against pedophilia stop you from acting? Does your fear of censure, shame and humiliation, imprisonment stop you? Does recognition of the damage you would do to the child stop you? Is there empathy for the disgust, shock, disillusionment in the kid that stops you? Turns out not always. You’re not allowed to chalk it up to instinct, though. We expect our higher reasoning functions to take control of our behavior. We expect to cultivate emotions other than lust—affection, admiration, pity—to influence our behaviors. We know though that it’s complicated. Fail in your self-control and you’re rightly judged a criminal. Unlike, say a burglar, though, once your prison sentence is over, you don’t just get turned loose. You’re branded a sex offender for the rest of your life—a permanent stigma—and the reason for this is that we recognize, legally, that the instinctual drive for sex with children is often more powerful and more motivating than the psychological and societal controls. Sex offender. They’re statistically likely to repeat, which puts children in danger. You may not live within a mile of a school, you can’t hang around the playground, your neighbors with children will be notified of your instinctual propensities and your (legally acknowledged) inability to act in a way that is not pedophiliac and criminal. It’s a bad stigma, but there is understood to be a basis for it. There is a lot more swirling darkness beneath the social and psychological veneers of propriety than we care to admit. On a less criminal level, I’ve heard—lots of times—people in the throes of some kind of passion, like love or anger, say things that they weren’t aware of, that just slipped out. Emotional instinct took the upper hand, maybe for only a moment. But these things are powerful.

B. was no legal sex offender, although he did write about noticing his young students fairly often. That’s not so bad as it sounds, really, though if you want to call it creepy to admit to it I wouldn’t argue. But this kind of thing is pretty normal in middle aged men. Most keep it to themselves and develop coping strategies. We call this being well adjusted. It’s what we expect. B. has never struck me as all that well adjusted, but at least he had drives that steered him toward women of legal age, and he could summon adequate enough compensating behaviors to keep himself out of jail. Not enough to keep him from getting busted in the mouth by an angry husband now and then, or to keep him faithful to his wife of the moment. We also need to add to his lack of broader coping strategies the concept of entitlement. He knew he could get away with it, so why not? Screw principles, I want to screw her. It works at that base of a level. So all this question of bats and fish and misunderstandings? Yeah. Except you don’t get off that easy. Not in 1964, not ever. Sorry. I see what you’re up to, and it’s not gonna work.

One other thing: Addiction motivates us, often, from far beneath our ability to make choices about our behavior. That hovers over this poem as well: I drink because I am, because the hand I was dealt features drink as motivation and solace. I can’t help it.  Me, there’s nothing to argue about here. You just have to accept that this was how it was. The only difference from him and most junkies and drunks is that he wrote about it, a justifying activity. Not buying it here, but I grant that booze is an infamously tough addiction to shake. In the end, we’re often not as smart as we wish we were. Instinct gets the upper hand. Still no excuse...