Philip Appleman

The social instincts ... naturally lead to the golden rule. —CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man 1 Holding her steady, into the pitch and roll, in raw Midwestern hands ten thousand tons of winter wheat for the fall of Rome, still swallowing the hunger of the war: the binnacle glows like an open fire, east-southeast and steady, Anderssen, the Viking mate, belaboring me for contraband, my little book of Einstein, that “Commie Jew.” (So much for the social instincts, pacifism, humanism, the frail and noble causes.) I speak my piece for western civ: light bends ... stars warp ... mass converts ... “Pipe dreams,” says the Dane, “pipe dreams.” “Well, mate, remember, those Jewish dreams made nightmares out of Hiroshima, and blew us out of uniform, alive.” He stomps down off the bridge; some day he’ll fire me off his rusty liberty: I read too much. The ocean tugs and wrestles with ten thousand deadweight tons of charity, trembling on degrees and minutes. Anderssen steams back in with coffee, to contest the stars with Einstein, full ahead. We haven’t come to Darwin. 2 Freezing on the flying bridge, staring at the night for nothing, running lights of freighters lost in a blur of blowing snow, we hold on through the midnight watch, waiting out the bells. With Einstein in our wake, the tricks are easier: liberty churns on, ten knots an hour, toward Rome. One starry night we ride at last with Darwin on the Beagle: endless ocean, sea sickness, revelations of Toxodon and Megalonyx—a voyage old as the Eocene, the watery death of Genesis. The going gets rough again, the threat of all those bones churning the heavy swells: Anderssen, a true believer, skeptical, and Darwin trapped in a savage earthquake, the heave of coastal strata conjuring the wreck of England, lofty houses gone, government in chaos, violence and pillage through the land, and afterward, fossils gleaming white along the raw ridges. “Limeys.” Anderssen puts his benediction to empire: “Stupid Limeys.” After that we breathe a bit and watch the stars and tell sad stories of the death of tribes, the bones, the countless bones: we talk about the war, we talk about extinction. 3 Okinawa, Iwo Jima: slouching toward Tokyo, the only good Jap is a dead Jap. We must get the bomb, Einstein writes to F.D.R., waking from the dreams of peace, the noble causes: get it first, before the Nazis do. (The only good Nazi is an extinct Nazi.) At the death of Hiroshima, all day long we celebrate extinction, chugalugging free beer down at the px , teen- age kids in khaki puking pints of three-point-two in honor of the fire: no more island-hopping now to the murderous heart of empire. Later, in the luxury of peace, the bad dreams come. “Certainly,” Darwin broods, “no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants.” 4 Off somewhere to starboard, the Canaries, Palma, Tenerife: sunrise backlights the rugged peaks, as Darwin, twenty-two years old, gazes at the clouds along the foothills. Longitudes ease westward; it’s my birthday: twenty-two years old as Tenerife falls into the sunset, I’m as greedy for the old world as Darwin for the new, Bahia, Desire, the palms and crimson flowers of the Mediterranean, clear water dancing with mines. Ahead of us a tanker burns; the war will never end. 5 “You talk a lot,” says the melancholy Dane. “You sure you’re not Jewish yourself? You got a funny name.” “Well, mate, I’m pure Celtic on one side, pure Orphan on the other: therefore half of anything at all—Jewish, Danish, what you will: a problem, isn’t it, for Hitler, say, or the Klan, or even Gregor Mendel, sweating out the summer in his pea patch?” The fact is, I know those ancestors floating through my sleep: an animal that breathed water, had a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, undoubtedly hermaphrodite

After the steaming bodies swept through the hungry streets of swollen cities; after the vast pink spawning of family poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies; after the gamble of latex and diaphragms and pills; I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge of Increase and Multiply, made affirmation:Yes, deliver us from complicity. And after the precision of scalpels, I woke to a landscape of sunshine where the catbird mates for life and maps trace out no alibis—stepped into a morning of naked truth, where acts mean what they really are: the purity of loving for the sake of love.

Out of heaven, to bless the high places, it falls on the penthouses, drizzling at first, then a pelting allegro, and Dick and Jane skip to the terrace and go boogieing through the azaleas, while mommy and daddy come running with pots and pans, glasses, and basins and try to hold all of it up there, but no use, it’s too much, it keeps coming, and pours off the edges, down limestone to the pitchers and pails on the ground, where delirious residents catch it, and bucket brigades get it moving inside, until bathtubs are brimful, but still it keeps coming, that shower of silver in alleys and gutters, all pouring downhill to the sleazy red brick, and the barefoot people who romp in it, laughing, but never take thought for tomorrow, all spinning in a pleasure they catch for a moment; so when Providence turns off the spigot and the sky goes as dry as a prairie, then daddy looks down from the penthouse, down to the streets, to the gutters, and his heart goes out to his neighbors, to the little folk thirsty for laughter, and he prays in his boundless compassion: on behalf of the world and its people he demands of his God,give me more.

(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap, like furry mittens, like childhood crouching under tables) The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black outside our window: clattering cans, the whir of a hopper, shouts, a whistle,move on... I see them in my warm imagination the way I’ll see them later in the cold, heaving the huge cans and running (running!) to the next house on the street. My vestiges of muscle stir uneasily in their percale cocoon: what moves those men out there, what drives them running to the next house and the next? Halfway back to dream, I speculate: The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old Bloomington a cleaner place to live in—right, men?Hup, tha!” Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys, let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes on truck thirteen!” Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can, another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’ three kids through Princeton?” Or something else? Terror? A half hour later, dawn comes edging over Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green, and over that the black-and-blue of night still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave their silhouettes against the red, and through the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men, like windup toys, tossing little cans— and running. All day they’ll go like that, till dark again, and all day, people fussing at their desks, at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all things that are Caesar’s. O garbage men, the New Year greets you like the Old; after this first run you too may rest in beds like great warm aproned laps and know that people everywhere have faith: putting from them all things of this world, they confidently bide your second coming.

(Kyoto) CONFIDENCE (after Bashō) Clouds murmur darkly, it is a blinding habit— gazing at the moon. TIME OF JOY (after Buson) Spring means plum blossoms and spotless new kimonos for holiday whores. RENDEZVOUS (after Shiki) Once more as I wait for you, night and icy wind melt into cold rain. FOR SATORI In the spring of joy, when even the mud chuckles, my soul runs rabid, snaps at its own bleeding heels, and barks: “What is happiness?” SOMBER GIRL She never saw fire from heaven or hotly fought with God; but her eyes smolder for Hiroshima and the cold death of Buddha.

In Indianapolis they drive five hundred miles and end up where they started: survival of the fittest. In the swamps of Auburn and Elkhart, in the jungles of South Bend, one-cylinder chain-driven runabouts fall to air-cooled V-4’s, a-speed gearboxes, 16-horse flat-twin midships engines— carcasses left behind by monobloc motors, electric starters, 3-speed gears, six cylinders, 2-chain drive, overhead cams, supercharged to 88 miles an hour in second gear, the age of Leviathan ... There is grandeur in this view of life, as endless forms most beautiful and wonderful are being evolved.

I heard a child, a little under four years old, when asked what was meant by being in good spirits, answer, “It is laughing, talking, and kissing.” —CHARLES DARWIN, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 1.   WALDORF-ASTORIA EUPHORIA, THE JOY OF BIG CITIES Joy, when intense, leads to various purposeless movements—to dancing about, clapping the hands, stamping, etc.

PROLOGUE Animals tame and animals feral prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral: the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile, rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile. Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride—every peril was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural, while Courage, Devotion, Thrift—every bright laurel crowned a creature in some mythological mural. Scientists think there is something immoral in singular brutes having meat that is plural: beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral. Yet between the lines there’s an implicit demurral; the habit stays with us, albeit it’s puerile: when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel. 1. THE ANT The ant, Darwin reminded us, defies all simple-mindedness: Take nothing (says the ant) on faith, and never trust a simple truth. The PR men of bestiaries eulogized for centuries this busy little paragon, nature’s proletarian— but look here, Darwin said: some ants make slaves of smaller ants, and end exploiting in their peonages the sweating brows of their tiny drudges. Thus the ant speaks out of both sides of its mealy little mouth: its example is extolled to the workers of the world, but its habits also preach the virtues of the idle rich. 2. THE WORM Eyeless in Gaza, earless in Britain, lower than a rattlesnake’s belly-button, deaf as a judge and dumb as an audit: nobody gave the worm much credit till Darwin looked a little closer at this spaghetti-torsoed loser. Look, he said, a worm can feel and taste and touch and learn and smell; and ounce for ounce, they’re tough as wrestlers, and love can turn them into hustlers, and as to work, their labors are mythic, small devotees of the Protestant Ethic: they’ll go anywhere, to mountains or grassland, south to the rain forests, north to Iceland, fifty thousand to every acre guzzling earth like a drunk on liquor, churning the soil and making it fertile, earning the thanks of every mortal: proud Homo sapiens, with legs and arms— his whole existence depends on worms. So, History, no longer let the worm’s be an ignoble lot unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Moral: even a worm can turn. 3. THE RABBIT a.   Except in distress, the rabbit is silent, but social as teacups: no hare is an island. (Moral: silence is golden—or anyway harmless; rabbits may run, but never for Congress.) b.   When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit, kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit. (Moral: to thine own self be true—or as true as you can; a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.) c.   He populates prairies and mountains and moors, but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors. (Moral: to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles; to understand purity, ponder your freckles.) d.   Survival developed these small furry tutors; the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters. (Conclusion: you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.) 4. THE GOSSAMER Sixty miles from land the gentle trades that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay sift a million gossamers, like tides of fluff above the menace of the sea. These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean; the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging, small aeronauts on some elusive mission. The Megatherium, done to extinction by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson: for survival, it’s the little things that count.