Friday, April 22, 2016

Exiting The Core Dialog (or, Default To Pseudoscience) [Poem for John Hurrell Crook by Clara B. Jones]

Exiting The Core Dialog (or, Default To Pseudoscience)
dedicated to the late John Hurrell Crook (1930-2011)

You were my Guru
sharing an elevator from Toronto to Bristol
Social Ecology's Père.
Restless wife

leaving you imploding, reinventing
a rugged Quelea
a monk of fieldwork.
Did Africa loom?

Did you miss reading journals?
Did your colleagues write?
Did you feel manly
or was that all in the past?

Before the Four Purposes supplanted Science
exceeding Dharma's proscriptions
filling every void
now seeking a different balance

compelled like other stoics to forfeit Natural History
for Moksha manifest as enlightenment
and for the spiritual wealth of Artha
no longer weighed in the currency of papers and books

a domain of joy as intentional Kama
Charvaka appealing to lone materialists
not at ease with magic and gods
switching from fact-finder to spiritualist

alien in the halls of Cambridge.
A wife defined by roles to others
categories like tributaries always moving, changing
sometimes in random directions

or immeasurable and ill-defined
engineering the ecosystem of kin, friends, acquaintances
as the Falémé nurtures soils and microbes
power over living things and things not living

abiotic and biotic
landscapes rugged as the slopes of Kouroudiako
where a wife near Saraya knows abandoning her fate
would mean death or silence

not the freedom felt by your wife leaving Bristol for London
then more popular than Stilton
dancing in halls when once she served port to your peers.
Her agency yanked you from worthy colleagues

no further prospects save surrendering Self
as another form of contract
left by your woman to conquer new demons.
With or without Ego, cause and effect prevail.

The act of writing is a conduit to Truth
that you abandoned for another sort of insight
turning inward to reject the landscapes of probabilities
odds offering few direct rewards

propelling you instead behind a veil of contemplation
seeking your non-self rather than a higher self
a mien without craving
if that state is possible

beyond mere abstinence from pleasure
not pleasure but abstinence from the satisfactions of the unconscious
relief from responsibility
trading arrogance for enlightenment or another quality of knowing

not seeking facts, equations but received integrity
seated alone on a mat.
A body crafted for work
Gramsci built for hegemony

von Frisch built for bees
Strassmann built for microbes
Dickinson built for poetry
wired for thought expansive and novel

Seewiesen encompassing Max Planck and Munich.
Your body performing intentionally
in Morocco and the Himalayas
willing the unity of Science and Buddhism

removed from the certainties of reductionism
leaving you to walk unclothed across ice
at a time when you needed the sun's thaw
striking a bargain with Sheng Yen

to wear the rough robe of celibacy
though you never extinguished desire
recalling craving controlled by midbrain
competing with frontal cortex for control.


Originally published in International Society of Behavioral Ecology Newsletter, 2015, vol. 27, issue 2, pp 10-11


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