The End of The World

Here is a poem by Archibald MacLeish

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

Until I read this poem I had never heard so perfectly expressed my own fear of extinction - a fear born from rationality yet failing ultimately in irrationality, which made it all the more horrifying for a time.

The Intellect's fear of extinction, fearing that it itself is all there is, and knowing that it is temporary and so no matter what it perceives all about itself, no matter that the dead leaves of the winter tree form fertile ground for spring buds, no matter that the shark eats the minnow is eaten by fisherman is eaten by the bear is eaten by the worms and bugs are eaten by the hummingbird is eaten by the tomcat is subsumed into the earth and made fertile for the tree where the hummingbird lives and flies over the sea of the minnow and the shark - no matter any of that, an end comes nonetheless that the poor, chained, obedient intellect can see only, rationally, as nothing, nothing, nothing - nothing at all.

It was the same extinction feared by the Great Bomb, which poised and hovered over my childhood and two decades worth of childhoods before mine, which William Faulkner referenced in his Nobel Speech:

"There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?"

Because the intellect, father of reason, stepfather of justice, the intellect which took us out of the cave and the hut and put up high strong walls against the wind and snow, and taught us to wash our hands before we cut one another open, that taught us to irrigate, to heat our homes in the winter, to cool them in the summer, taught us to use this computer and land a man on the moon - the intellect, which necessarily severed ties with a monarchical overseer so we could be free, also, in a baby-with-the-bathwater moment, abandoned the home of the soul, the eternal sovereign soul, because, it seemed to us in the great roaring, climbing, shining, warring, bombing, explosive, expansive twentieth century, that the intellect and the intellect alone was going to keep us safe.

Only the intellect had built these walls and these cars and these bombs and these everythings, the intellect, stepfather of justice and creator of democracy, the intellect must be free, must not be servant to anything it cannot see or measure of argue against. All the rest that could not be seen or measured or argued with was superstition, and superstition is the end of justice and therefore the end of equality and so a return to hut and the cave and a return to fast and certain death.

And yet without the home of the soul, death becomes nothing, nothing, nothing - nothing at all. The brain will end. It will be subsumed. It is tissue and change comes to everything and the brain will no longer be the brain and all the intellect it held will in fact be gone forever. And yet even at the height of all the post modern irony, and brainy irreverence, even in the middle of all of this, Thomas Pynchon wrote a book called Gravity's Rainbow, a book about a group of people in WWII London, the war that birthed The Bomb, a book about a bunch of people waiting to be blown up, and yet in this book about people worried about rockets from Germany raining down on them, worried about when their end will come, this book begins with this quote from Wernher von Braun, father of modern rocketry:

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."

and ends with the following ditty:

"There is a hand to turn the time,
Though thy glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret'rite one . . .
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road
All through our crippl'd zone,
With a face on ev'ry mountainside
And a soul in ev'ry stone . . .

Now everybody—"