Meeting Metaphysics; Lines Modified by (and read to) attendees at a History of
Science Conference in the San Juan Islands
Snoring is proof that god exists.
I know this because I cannot understand it.
Why, when you get up to pee or wander, would your partner be silent but then
when you are ready to fall back into the deep would she,
relaxed by your presence,
begin to snore?
You love the woman;
she has born you children;
she says you snore too,
and this only deepens the mystery.
Why have I never heard it?
I mean the case with most crimes is easy--
though the jury can be bamboozeled--
you either did it or didn’t.
Unless you were asleep.
Science isn’t exactly helpful at this point
mumbling up its sleeve about apnea
and suggesting you might like to wear a mask...
as if the lack of tension in your face muscles were not disguise sufficient to
bamboozle.
“Yes, officer, that’s the man, I recognize his sleep mask."
This may be a step too historical and cute for most of you,
referring as it does to humans' fascination with how folk looked at the moment
of death,
and, before photograph,y the efforts we made to preserve a look that portrait
painters
with their desire for art
were not real enough to tell,
were too devoted to aspiring and social climbing and so on
to report,
were too worried in re. who would kill them or not pay them if they accurately
represented.
So there were lies painted!
Yes, now the truth can be told and death masks were an attempt to circumvent,
to get at a truth straightway or roundabout.
All generals know there are but two routes to victory:
straight up the middle or circling in some fashion,
with diversions,
and from their understanding we built general principles of everything.
There are meetings which get right to the point
(how rare these be)
and there are more normal ones
in which you are tempted to snore.
Remember snoring?
This is our subject...
knowledge
things we know
can be teased out
patterned from data
addressed obliquely
or one can attack straight up the middle.
“What,” one asks
"is the purpose of making noise at night?"
Immediately hypotheses occur.
Could it be,
one wonders,
that feeble people needed to fend off wolves and so on?
In many ways silence for eight hours, or four and four,
as the pattern may have been...
silence for a period of sleep
while the fire died
is not a good idea;
better one might think
would be that when alertness fades silence is replaced by warning noises,
noises that no partner
but also no predator
can ignore.
This though is not an argument for god;
this is a confirmation of Darwin
the stronger snorer is really quite fit.
"How then,” you ask, "do you get from snoring to proof of god’s existence?
God may have a role
but he’s an understudy here to Darwin, surely?"
I concede that much
but hear me out,
if you will.
We once had atavistic urges to kil,
to maim,
to live the lawless life
to regard everything that was not of the tribe as outside
and by this way
we finally arrived at defences which rendered snoring an obsolete weapon
we developed walls,
feudal lords,
rotten boroughs,
promises,
crusades,
democracy,
referenda on equality and leaving the Union and whether or not jean shorts
should be allowed in the pool.
And meanwhile, lurking in every bedroom,
ready to attack the weak and the feeble,
there was this atavistic sound,
breaker of relationships,
grand mucker of the night watch,
the very air we breathed turned against us all,
in our most private space...
the snore!
What else could explain such a poxy thing,
such a wacker at the knee,
such a hubris underminer,
such a wobble in the time-space continuum,
such a hamster wheel night irritant,
such a warthog in the forest,
such a shark in the break,
such an irritant in the oyster,
than?
Well if you sense that the universe has meaning left in it
and that if you only go to the right romantic places--
cathedrals and mountain tops and spots where humans either congregate in great
numbers or are entirely absent from--
if you sense that at this or that particular vortex electricity or
nausea in the Sartrean sense
is possible,
because it’s all good,
well then what is left beyond sense
is the drain grating,
the sound,
breathe in,
breathe out,
a wash like waves on rounded stones,
Aztec stones or cobblers.
The ocean and we
both snore,
and that surely
has to be
god’s fault?
David Ritchie,
Portland,
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
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