Free Will

Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.—Flannery O’Connor

Freedom is always the freedom of those who think otherwise [der Andersdenkenden].—Rosa Luxemburg

Hiking for a hundred millennia

An endless trail, how do we know

What’s true? A snake (or politician) lurks

Behind each equivocating reason;

Those bright berries might be poison,

Intruders face a hunting leopard there.

“We go by signs that change,” said Running Bear.

“Only doubters in the end get to go on,

Who every instant enquire of themselves:

'Might I—might that—not, perhaps, be wrong?'”

Other thinking’s intuition’s alpenstock;

Doubting everything's the gods' physician.

Those who don’t are unwitting shills

Who march to imbecilic wills,

Their spirits too malcontent to survive.

Free will exists within the grumbling hive.

You have to want it, though, to win on through.

Those who reject it—all so sure they know—

Are flotsam in the fleecing current’s flow,

Or jetsam fleeing from a life’s boo-hoo.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Play It as It Lays: A Life in Pictures

So long as machines puzzle—and men can be,

So long lives that; which that makes sense to me.

—"The Fourth Bridge, or, AI" (2021)*

Her name's not really “Diana Lynn.”

Born Dolores Eartha Loehr on July 5, 1926,

Paramount sensibly rechristened her.

Seen first in immortal Billy Wilder’s

The Major and the Minor—it's fluff—

by me, and then as "Emmy Kockenlocker"

In Preston Sturges’ Miracle of Morgan’s Creek—comic genius—

She gets to be female lead in Bedtime for Bonzo. Finally, in 1971, before filming of Didion's Play It as It Lays starts,

She has a stroke, hangs up her hat, and dies.

I seek here but to memorialize

this heavenly creature

Who passed before my eyes,

and then was by me seen no more.

These few reports of her life in pictures

Make about as much sense in poetry

as my own being in cockamamie history.

It’s far too late at night, I fear.

*https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/small-things-remind-me-i-am-mad-and-the-fourth-bridge-or-ai/

A Pleiocene Posy

Earth in the Zanclean Age of the Pleiocene Epoch, five million years ago (Wikipedia)

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”—

Oscar Wilde,The Importance of Being Earnest

"It is more fortunate [mακάριόν] to give than to receive"—Acts of the Apostles 20:35

Oscar couldn't foresee a future

When men like women might become

For want of more lucky nurture,

Extras in the maternal sum.

He was wrong, too, to anticipate

A parental tragedy lying in wait

For all women in inheritance.

That switch, let's face it, makes no sense!

He, with those coruscating sallies

Made naughty cracks at fools' expense.

Grave idiots, seeking recompense,

Nabbed him by the short and curlies.

Spectators shouldn't tease a snake

That rises up to spit its venom.

Idiots are always on the make.

Their law looks out for Number One.

Scientists sequence DNA

From ancient sedimentary samples.*

What archaic dirt has to say

Sheds fresh light on new examples.

We humans need to comprehend

That what drives us round the bend

Serves socially to elucidate

Women's tragedy, and man's fate.

The secret path of where we’ve been

Leads to a private Pleiocene,

And shows us, surely, where we’re bound

If we don't heal our mother’s wound.

Envoi

If you do or if you don't,

If you will or if you won't,

That's the eventual shape of things—

The dirge the Anthropocene sings.

Notes

*On extracting mitochondrial DNA from dirt, see, e.g., https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/hunt-for-the-oldest-dna/

The term "Pleiocene" derives from the Greek πλεῖον (pleion, “more”) and καινός (kainos, “new, recent”), but it was 300 to 500 million years ago—the last time the world got much, much hotter.

Our word "idiot" comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης (idiōtēs), meaning originally a selfish individual who contributed nothing to the public needs of the polis.