e.e. cummings, Robert Frost's "Design" and Politics 2013

Design by Robert Frost        

Robert Frost’s Italian sonnet, “Design” is somewhat similar to e.e. cummings' English sonnet, “When Serpents Bargain”   (when serpents bargain for the right to squirm... (22) - Poem By E. E. Cummings - Read Classic Poetry Online) in asking questions about the nature of animals, humans, and the possibility of order in the universe. “Design” tends toward philosophy while “When Serpents Bargain” is a satire on the legal and commercial dealings of humans.

Strangulation in High Places

But both poems convey dark themes softened by lightness, innocence, playfulness in language and tone—more so in “When Serpents Bargain” than the grimmer study of animal behavior and the possibility of cosmic chaos in “Design.”

In my October 2 post on cummings’ “When Serpents Bargain,” I mentioned that I’d been a little cantankerous about the poem back on April 7, 2011.  (No pressure, but it’s here if you’re interested: 

(http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=when+serpents+bargain).

Although I share cummings’ dim view of human wheeling and dealing, in which every serpent-of-a-person is trying to sell a used car in bad repair, it might be childishly romantic (reverse narcissism?) to think we’re crazier than critters in nature. 

Congress

We might be trying and failing to deal with complex matters of morality and law (witness our present situation in the U.S. Congress), 
but animals solve their diplomatic problems by eating each other. 

Gunboat Diplomacy

Also, when an animal fails, he dies alone in the field for lack of medical care or food. Birds fall out of the sky. The philosophizing, lawyer-izing verbiage that cummings mocks in “When Serpents Bargain” is our spastic effort to avoid eating each other or dying alone in a field. 

Maybe the animals’ free-market way is good for Republicans, Libertarians and anarchists, but me, I’ll take the modified welfare state, yes, the Nanny state. What’s wrong with nannies? They’re paid to like us when our parents are too busy or too mean for liking. They're paid to be kind. When we get a haircut, we don’t bellow about The Barber State, do we?

I prefer the limited version of Nanny State that encourages earning our victuals and our pleasure, but let’s not go all Tea Party and dump people on the curb to bleed out if they fail or get sick. Alone. Except for the Tea Partier, who is the stranger standing over the fallen man and chanting Bible verses or Christian rock music. The guy on the curb needs macaroni, not a parable. 

Maybe the heroic cardinals have it right. A couple of years ago I mentioned here my cardinal couple, who, for about a week, adopted and fed, beak to beak, an orphaned white-crowned sparrow chick, in my back yard.

Steadfast but Pondering

Tom, my most hard-core evolutionist friend, thinks I’m lying about that. He said, “But John, I don’t see the evolutionary advantage in [the cardinals’] behavior.” As gently as possible, I said, “That’s the point, Dumbass!”

I restrained myself from going all Hamlet-and-Horatio on him, but I was on the verge of reminding Tom that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Tom, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Everyone should have a friend named Horatio. Look what he did for Miami forensic investigations). 

By the way, my friends and I regularly refer to each other as Dumbasses or worse. That’s one thing I like about us. We tell the Truth on those rare occasions when we can find it. On the other hand, each of us thinks he’s found Truth way more often than he has. I suppose that makes us pretty Tea Party-ish. Once again, irony thrives, even in a world full of blinders and misguided faux earnestness.

Self-Strangulation

The fact remains, I witnessed those cardinals for several days as they fed the Other, the alien, who might grow up to compete with them for food. I called the local Audubon Society, which confirmed that such charity happens in the animal kingdom, and yes, cardinals are among the chief do-gooders. Nanny Cardinals. Baby sparrows.

*

COWBIRD, WARBLER, POLITICS, and the Labor of Labor Day

Cowbird








Warbler

Intelligence is amoral; so is deception. Everything political is personal (Gloria Steinem). Remember good old George Goebel’s refrain?—“Well, I’ll be a dirty bird.”

A recent Nova Now program included a segment on the brown-headed cowbird, which/whom we all love to hate because the female lays her eggs, one at a time, by means of 10-second sneak-deposits, in the nests of other birds.

This tricks the host birds (we’ll say “warbler” here, to stick with the Nova show, though cowbirds exploit other species, too). The foster-parent warblers hatch, feed, and nurture cowbird chicks. Often the warbler young starve, or are at least malnourished, and their numbers decline.

Maybe to prevent the corny likes of me from becoming overly anthropocentric about the antics and ethics of the bird world, Nova Now took a light–hearted approach to the subject, calling the cowbirds the mafia of the avian world, and so on. Mama Cowbird becomes Tina Soprano. After dropping off her bundle of joy at the foster home, she stands guard from about 50 feet away, checking on the warbler nest to make sure the cowbird chick receives proper attention from its surrogate parents.

Scientists performed the experiment of removing the cowbird egg from the warbler nest and making the entrance hole to the nest too small for a cowbird to enter. But Tina Soprano consistently got her head in far enough to poke the warbler eggs into runny yolks. The pattern has all the appearance of revenge and enforcement by a cowbird mafia. Raise my chicks or else.

You can watch the show here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0407/03.html

It’s feel-good Science-Lite for folks like me, though I wonder what the evolutionary advantage is for cowbirds. I’d guess the strategy means more viable chicks than any couple could raise on their own.

But Nova doesn’t go into that. It might upset the Intelligent Design folks, at least those who refuse to let their children hear their president’s encouragement to stay in school, work hard and succeed. Go figure; I thought that Work Hard and Prosper biz was a right-wing mantra. And surely it was a similar culture of parents who accepted such talks from Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Maybe they now think the president is a cowbird, coming like the Pied Piper of Berkeley to steal their golden babes away and waltz them over Engels Hill.

Or maybe it's the right-wingers who want to be sneaky cowbirds; they have cowbird-envy. But they can't pass the entrance exam. Maybe they want to be sure their children don’t get smart either. If you have enough guns, you don’t need brains. “Clean your shotgun, Ralphie. Here comes another damned cowbird.”

* *

FINCHES AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Okay, I’ve gone a couple of blogs without talk about birds, and you’ll yelp if I don’t keep you posted on finches. Sunday I bought two new net socks and another small feeder, the old kind that forces the bird to eat upside-down, which finches weirdly do.

Problem is, you see too much of their white rumps. What is the evolutionary advantage of a white rump, when the rest of you is electric yellow, a lit-up target for near-sighted cats?
Another factor about the upside down finch-prayer to gravity: they look a little dead, hanging there that-a-way.

Speaking of which, my window has felt the impact of two drunken pilot deaths in the last three weeks or so. I’m attributing that to teen or female drivers—because both little cadavers were olive, not yellow. (You thought you had me on misogyny charges, didn’t you?).

Here’s one more series of events. By far, the majority of my finches lately have been female (I thought). What’s up with that? Did the males go on bloody skirmishes against each other, concerning territory? What kind of irrational creature would do that to others of his species? Over a some air space? Over some dirt?

Then I half-remembered, and then confirmed in The Books, that juvenile finches look like the olive-ocher female, weenie or no weenie. So I’m apparently teaching a ton of finch teens to come back here, or never leave.

But shouldn't I then worry about inbreeding? And in a finch version of Deliverance, who would play the banjo?

Cardinal Notes Continued

Two years ago, Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal adopted an orphaned white-crowned sparrow chick. Below is the adult version of a white-crowned sparrow. The young have less white, but there's certainly no resemblance to a cardinal. Even so, for about two weeks, I watched Mr. and Mrs. C feed the sparrow, which was almost as large as the they were.

As a minor league birder, I didn’t trust my own eyes, so I googled the subject and found confirmation. Then I called the local Audubon chapter: “Oh yes, cardinals are one of several species that adopt orphaned young from other nests, other species.”

The other evening, Mister sat alone on a wire, where he called and called. He faced away from me, and for the first time I saw the back of his neck swell and recede to create each cluster of notes in one long, descending solo after another. It didn’t sound like panic, but why did he keep going and going like that for fifteen or twenty minutes?

I decided that Mrs. was supposed to be home from the movies long ago, and he was worried, maybe a little cross. I worried with him for a while, then gave up—CSI Miami was coming on, a different version of brilliant color.

I have friends who argue about the possibility of altruism in animals—or humans, for that matter.

What’s the evolutionary advantage of feeding a child from another team?

My friends in high evolutionary places tell me that the Mr. Cardinal’s red or the gold finch’s yellow amounts to a double-edged sword: females have apparently found color attractive, so these seeds of brightness are spread farther abroad; however, a colorful Mister is also a brighter target for raptors and cats. What if raptors and cats are color-blind? Do we know?

As for the missing Mrs. C, she was back the next day. If they’d had nasty words at home or if they’d thrown vases at each other the night before, I couldn’t tell. They presented well as usual, with nonchalance. And as usual, they were the last to leave.

To leave a comment go to the end of the post and the end of visitor comments, if there are any. Click the underlined word, "comments" or "post a comment." A white box will appear, where you can type in your comment. Below that, click "Name/URL" to create a name for yourself (if you do not have a Google account).