My Mind Will Wander

A poem can only be ten lines long
Unless it’s very good
And then it can only be eight.
My mind will wander. The better
The verse the more the images will cling
To the cells of my brain like little viruses
Steering their way in. I read Engles
On Vivaldi and before the girl looks back
I’m in another autumn on a narrow lake
Flecked by short white brushstrokes of light
With that cold wind pushing at my face
The sound of a little outboard motor, some birds
Behind me before I can look up
Almost never a splash that might be a fish.
I know.

Literacy's Downside

I understand that according to the story Eve ate first and that she tempted Adam to eat and that according to some this makes her sin greater than his which justifies the whole history of misogyny. We may know now that this story is itself an effect of that misogyny, not a justification of it, if that interpretation is an organic part of the story, or that this interpretation is just added on by the history of a misogyny that would shock the story’s author who could not more have intended such an effect than the author of the gospel could have foreseen the Holocaust because of his line about the guilt of the Jews. But let’s say Eve’s sin is the bigger sin. In what way is it true that women have a larger share in that sin than men by the fact of their ovaries? Does THAT make any sense? The claim is makeable. But it’s no more makeable than the claim that it is her humanity not her breasts that are at issue. Yes, we have to note that God in the story has to take some of the responsibility for this method of generalization, making labor hard for all women because of Eve. But he could hardly have made labor in that sense harder for men, could he? And he did make labor harder for all men—the labor of farming. I don’t know if the pun works in Hebrew. But it doesn’t need to. The leap of making Adam all men and Eve all women rather than both all people is not required by the text. I comes from the desire of all subsequent civilizations to use the text in order to impose their own gender notions on themselves, to maintain. So much effort goes into maintenance so little into thoughts of improvement in literate cultures that we can only wonder at those advantages that nonliterate cultures have. They too have their stories, their myths. But without paper and monks to Xerox their stories are more susceptible to change. I wonder how much of the craziness of myths all over the world is due to repeated transmission alone. Our easy prejudice is that writing is simply good. But as in all things, writing has advantages and disadvantages. The effects the kind of memory writing implies and creates and celebrates may seem on balance worth the costs. But the costs must be analyzed and weighed and looked at without undue prejudice. Certainly if not for writing human beings could not by any means deliberate or accidental (climate change or nuclear war) destroy all life on the planet. That’s a sizeable entry for the con pile.