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Three poems from Peter Manos' To the Survivors:
To the Survivors
“Wait without hope….”
TS Eliot
I stand in front of the museum’s diorama
looking at the exact replica of footprints
the two of you made in the mud
while walking away from a volcano.
Fossilized in the eruptions’ ashes, they
show the path you took in Tanzania
thirty-five thousand centuries ago
and your footprints let us know
that the two of you walked side by side,
away from the volcano, standing upright.
We have no idea, as a factual matter
how accurately the scientists’ statues
represent what you looked like,
and your hairy ape-like nakedness
makes group after group of kids giggle
as they pass by on their class trips
but in the silences between their passages
I imagine we inhabit a sacred sanctuary
where I’m praying thankfully through
your statues, seeing past abstractions
and past scientific whys or wherefores
and past the volcanic calamity
to find something iconic
through this diorama.
I want to give you praises and thanks
and want to ask you many questions.
Thank you for standing upright
in the face of that vast calamity!
Thank you for your having passed!
Did doubts surround you, or reassurance
from feeling something resembling hope?
Whether it was hope or fear, what you had spans
Vast expanses after you, past eons
interlaced with successions of successes—
past millions of years of other unimaginable
calamities, and past stone-on-stone banging
and impossible accomplishments
like inventing the wheel or discovering fire—
past back-filling such acts as if the endless
train of painful failures were not in play—
as if unexpected successes were intentional
or stemmed from selfless efforts of inventors
or went with ongoing over-the-shoulder-
goading from some neolithic Jiminy Crickets
rather than passionate adamant irrationality
as the key to our species having adapted
we opt for optimism versus pessimism instead
or customary dichotomies to wallow in
not knowing what we owe you—
you who found or misplaced hope or fear
and, having never given up on waiting,
passed as we passed, and pass, and will pass.
***
Pinnacle Point, South Africa
In the past if you had asked me which aspects of human nature I’d take to be the main keys to our species’ survival, I’d have highlighted high-minded ideals of certain men and women from our last couple of millennia. But that’s not enough for me anymore. Now, I would also include a view further back, because of crucial clues to who we are as human beings, given how close our species came to being completely wiped out around 160,000 BC, during an ice age.
Studies of Pinnacle Point, on Africa’s southern coast, show where our forebears may have taken safe haven from the glaciers’ devastation, in caves by the shore, near dense, edible vegetation, and clam beds. Evidence showing that better weapons were invented at Pinnacle Point has led to the theory that cooperativeness and competitiveness evolved to higher levels in us together, when our ancestors learned to defend their settlement’s precious, denser food supplies, by fighting in ruthless unison, better than the scattered nomadic hunter-gatherers of the past. Our great-great-grandmothers and grandfathers bridged this difficult gap back then, surviving the crisis and expanding beyond Africa by dominating all other hominids and then decimating predators on every continent.
We now cooperate and compete at high levels in how we buy and sell and work and go at it with games and sports and wars with each other, since with our conquests of all our competitors having ended, we are left competing against each other. And we are left with a certain human mind, a mind that finds it hard to bridge the gap back and see our species’ being here at all may have always been closer to impossible than certain.
Yet the word “certain” itself bridges this gap back, given what we are saying when we say the word “certain” this certain way: “Specific but not specified.”
Bridging this gap back in our species’ history, I specify the most uncertain ones. Before those who survived in one cave or another, I especially specify those who gave up the ghost before people had names. I specify them because they saw something our species lost when we wrapped ourselves up in our comfortable claim of dominion.
After Africa, we abandoned the Unfathomable. But our ancestors survived unimaginable calamities and catastrophes, standing upright in the face of ages of ages of uncertainties, shamelessly unaided by any explanation greater than their own naked existence. They survived life on a precipice—the same precipice which we’ve been unsettled over ever since. Restless. Owing to their settlement.
I mean we may only start to settle up, once we stop calling what we have been calling awe “awe,” when we only experience convenient, known, low, doses of it, between now and the moment before we give up the ghost. I mean the moment in which each of us may see that our being here at all may have always been closer to impossible than certain. I mean at a certain uncertain point. Like Pinnacle Point. The pivotal point.
________________________________________________
Inspired by the July 2015 article in Scientific American, "Clues to How Homo sapiens Conquered Earth Emerge from Digs in South Africa," by Dr. Curtis Marean
*
Sandpiper Surmise
Along the shore
a sandpiper
scuttles back and forth
with each set of waves
and each group
of humans going by.
My mind
along for the ride
is unduly self-satisfied
conjecturing
for a documentary
nobody but it is in:
“She survived
from the time
of the dinosaurs.”
At this pointless point
I finally stop trying to see
what tiny things
she might be eating
with her pointy beak
so fine
I see I
only surmise only
survivors make survivors.
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