June 13, 2012

Shadowy morning, lots of clouds, deep shade all over the back yard.  Two blue jays are chasing each other through the trees, making the little branches bounce with their takeoffs and landings.  It's daylight but the kind of daylight that has no bright sun, clouds all along the bay this morning delaying the sunlight.  Before dawn, the mourning doves were out with their owl like mantra, and the mockingbirds were serenading the world with stolen song.  Last night after the sun went down, there was some little frog outside the window, crooning the same two notes over and over like a rough heart beat.  I couldn't see it but heard it until I fell asleep, imagining it was one of those tiny black frogs with a big voice.

Most of the time when I read a poem, I get some sense of where it is going, but this morning's poem surprised me into laughing out loud!

Origin

The first cell felt no call to divide.
Fed on abundant salts and sun,
still thin, it simply spread,
rocking on water, clinging to stone,
a film of obliging strength.
Its endoplasmic reticulum
was a thing of incomparable curvaceous length;
its nucleus, Golgi apparatus, RNA
magnificent. With no incidence
of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit,
no predator nor prey,
it had little to do but thrive,
draw back from any sharp heat
or bitterness, and change its pastel
colors in a kind of song.
We are descendants of the second cell.

Sarah Lindsay

Well, I guess we would have to be, yes?  But just saying it brought in a whole wealth of conclusions besides the obvious one.  Could we exist without conflict, without the concept of predator and prey?  If we did, we wouldn't be . . . us.  We would be some other species all together.  I would like to think we could get out of that rut, but I imagine it's cell deep and there is no getting around it.  We can choose how we react, how we modulate those influences, that's what civilization is . . . an attempt to moderate the "second cell" influence, to be more than just an organism responding to its environment.  When you see hummingbirds at a feeder, you realize that those beautiful jeweled birds are mean!  They fight over access to the feeder, over territory, but they can cooperate as when you see one lead the most aggressive off so the others can dash in an get a drink, and they take turns doing that.  So descendants of the "second cell" can cooperate even on such a small scale as hummingbirds.  This year in our yard, the cardinals and the blue jays both have nests somewhere in the yard and pretty much leave each other alone, only occasionally having a squabble.

Also, reading it again made me think of how many times in the old Star Trek that the crew found a planet "paradise" like the one worshipping Vaal, where everyone was virtual immortal and happy but not progressing at all and rejected it, found it unappealing, even though to ancient civilizations it would have been the equivalent of heaven.  I guess we just have to deal with our heritage and make the best we can of it, use the conflict, the influence of predator and prey to make our own response, our own way in the world.  Conflict or competition may be responsible eventually for getting us off planet, open new worlds, even drive changes to solve problems right here.  While we might sometimes like to deny it, Sarah Lindsay is right . . . we are human, and definitely descendants of the second cell with all its trouble and glory.