Another Kind of Anti-Evolutionist

I think somehow what is called human evolution is actually its devolution. At some point, being able to plan for the future, store data about danger and communicate with others were all good things, and adaptive. Then these tricks of the mind became recursive; we began to look at ourselves with the same judgments we applied to the world, and as with the world we evaluated so assiduously, we found ourselves wanting. Then we looked at others too, and our failures became their fault. A day became a struggle not just for survival, but to please oneself or others, or to fight them. And after a while in devolutionary time, a world that was nothing like the one with which we began, the relatively simple one with physical dangers and undefined beauty, became cluttered with feelings, failures, confusion, and an explosion of words that managed to cut off most of the reality of any single thing except as it was useful. This has made most of us irremediably unhappy, and it has destroyed the world as we have known it.

In one of my morning free-for-alls I was warming my face with the coffee mug and wandering about in my head when I became aware of the incredibly melodic song of the much-maligned song sparrows just outside, the Canada geese landing for their morning float and feast on the pond, and then the fox tipping by just on the other side of the fence—all of these lives going on just outside the windows. Every one of them had roots in this piece of ground that went back hundreds of thousands of years, and I sat there thinking they had to have the names I gave them. How sweet they are. But where do I get off? 

I think no other form of life, nor rocks or water and air, have had the evolutionary backslide we have. Somehow, I don’t get the feeling any creatures or the water in the pond feel driven to be good or to contribute; I think they live out a path of existence that is set forth by their anatomy, instinct, needs, and the world of which they are an inextricable part: the wind of the day, the rain, waterlogged seeds, bright sun too hot in the middle of the day to allow much besides sitting in the shade. I don’t think they don’t like me; I think they move when my shadow falls nearby, or they see movement in my window, because they aren’t stupid.

People say a bird sings to define its territory or attract a mate. But I am not sure the bird singing thinks, “I’m a damned good singer and it’s a good thing I am, so that jerk in the other tree won’t try to take over.” I wonder if he says, “I” am here, or, “This is my territory,” even in bird language. Maybe he just sings, though he doesn’t call it that. He doesn’t even define himself as “he,” or “a bird,” or I can’t see why he would want to.

I am so stubborn that I don’t think I would have let myself ask those questions had I not fallen into the answers before the questions came to mind. Do birds evaluate themselves or us, or not? Do they live in fear, or just make sure to watch for danger?  The answers are there as clear as the rocks in my driveway, when I stop doing the human thing of putting my reality first, as if it were the only one. In saving ourselves, we separated ourselves from the world itself, the world that doesn’t need to ask such questions, nor answer them.

This falling into the answers has not been a matter of grasping intellectually that a frog from his perspective in and near the water doesn’t see the same world I do. It’s a growing feeling of my heart developing tiny fissures, cracking slowly as it swims into the stream: how many different worlds there must be: one for every frog, every mayfly, dog, human, cell, and atom in the universe, yet stitching together, playing the notes, becoming the entire universe constantly.

That considering the bird, for example, there is no birdly “I” singing, but instead a whole constellation of reality, even the whole universe, including the trees, the air rushing by, the forest of birds, the directions in which the sound is moving, the weight of the bird on the branch, the internal measurements some elements inside its body make of territory and space, the sun, the dirt beneath the tree into which the trees sink their roots, the individual leaves, molecules, atoms of the leaves, the sunbeams that bounce of their leathery surface—all of them with their own awareness rising and falling with his singing, as it too rises and falls from sound to silence and back. There is me looking, and listening. I am part of that grand net, too.

It’s simple if you let it be: In the case of the bird, how could there be only one thing, or even a few—just the bird and its territory? If you begin with the forest it sings in, and the notes, where do you stop? When does something just end, unborn? Or begin? What if the whole of creation makes itself at the same time except without time, just looping, winding, popping, and submerging into a tissue of energy that throws form out and takes it back? The bird is not a bird, but the entire universe.  Even the smallest, unfathomable instant is the universe emerging completely whole. And my breath as well. And yours. Watch the steam rise from the cooling coffee.