On a Bird Feeder

Key West Poet Laureate Kirby Congdon (Photo by Richard Watherwax)
Key West Poet Laureate Kirby Congdon (Photo by Richard Watherwax)

by Kirby Congdon…….

My wireless printer along with prosthetic limbs controlled by the brain lets me consider how living creatures evolve. No bird has the intelligence to have known its bones need to be hollow to facilitate flight. This development of a species can be applied over and over where protective advantages are taken on.

Darwin’s trial and error does not resolve an animal’s survival. By the time all the attempts at an advantageous change have been tested, the species is exhausted beyond existence.

Is there, then, a wireless connection among all the brains of a species that can afford the time to work out protective changes as a group beyond individual control? Inserting God, after the inquires of Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant and Nietsche, only leaves us with the barren conclusion that heaven is a bribe and hell is a threat for individual adherence to proper behavior for the uneducated.

There is much more going on that still is not explicated. Like the drama of the sky itself, it may be incomprehensible. As the essayist, Adam Kirsch concludes (The New Yorker, 5th of September 2016) in his review of the book, The Dream of Enlightenment (Liveright), by Anthony Gottlieb, “We are never quite as modern as we think” after centuries of probing all of our ideas. We can only rely on poetry to cope with it all.

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