Subliminal enough to explain how incommunicado authors
Could go through identical stages of development of plot and characters.
But who dare provide a mechanism to account for parallel convergence?
Easier to ignore it, like Darwin,¹ draw the tree of species divergence
From common ancestors, put man on the primate branch, to flatter
Most his intelligence and liberate reductionism for determinist patter.
Wisdom of self-knowledge is mocked by reductionists who look back to see
Whatever our animal antecedents suggested that we might be,
And is not repealed by the yen to make speculative generalizations,
Like Lorenz, Ardrey and Morris, from their animal observations
Of angry birds who swoop to strike off the crown from Homo,
Of or fighting Lorenzian fish who say only ‘I told you so’,
While imperatives of territory and survival float like an extended metaphor
On the current of Darwinian genetics, o’er the Freudian volcanic rumbler,
Making militant enthusiasm plausible, blood-letting the letting off steam.
I’m a holist, not a reductionist: I look first at what I became
And then look back to see what my ancestors might have been -
And confess I feel an affinity with the organically creative scene.
No mere projection of feeling is my deification of nature
But based on animal studies, of which Lorenz is undoubted master,
Who viewed the mythical ‘beast’ as a hypothesis to be investigated,
Not a dogma to be defended by the brute who exterminated.
Spare us no detail of criminalizing of animals by hunters’ pride
And shame the viewers of Jaws by a guest appearance of Hyde -
But vice is not constitutional, but on the menu with good
And Jekyll had been a chooser, till he lost his taste for food.
The occasion of losing one’s cool may ring like the echoes of rage
Down whispering caves of the heart,² on which candour levies a wage
In guilt no behaviourist would pay (who holds all others responsible