A Long Uncontrolled Impulse

If one were to read about Paul Valéry,
Slim lyricist obsessed with perfection

Who quietly composed on the side
A massively imperfect and sprawling

Notebook of intellectual exercise,
Which his latest translator has suggested

Was the real work of him—how
Does one understand the frustration

Of such an organism? Field researchers
Capturing insects—many species of ants,

Caterpillar larvae, adult butterflies,
And dragonflies from India to Mesoamerica—

Have noticed that often their microbiomes
Are nearly nonexistent, evanescent, transient.

Human microbiomes, when healthy, are never
This way—are huge, blossoming, jungly

Ecosystems of settled-in microbiota, but
Not always so human minds. Here, species

Of thought may be monocultured, clonal
And rigidly controlled, or as fleeting

And ghostly as the few gut bacteria inside
Pseudomyrmex or Zygonyx iris. Anything

Done to them seems to have little or no effect
On the hosts’ feeding and development.

In those insects, this is the wild norm,
But how have human minds, unlike

Human guts, so often become simplified
As hosting devices? Garden varieties.

The clue is in the guts as well. Kill enough
Bugs or pre-process the diet enough,

And even human digestive systems
Simplify—but then they more easily sicken

Or die, like fields of monocultured wheat
Blasted by rust, rice paddies blackened by blight.

Maybe human minds were more complex,
Not simpler, before we domesticated us.

In any event, it seems now that a feral host
Like Valéry’s mind is rare among the moderns,

A mind incapable of enclosure, however
Much it yearns to accomplish formal unity.

Valéry, or anyone like him, anyone who writes
And writes weedy varieties gone to seed,

Ideas that bear only little bitter fruits best
For their own hasty, small-plot propagation,

Nothing cultured enough for mass reproduction,
Suffers for wanting to will any genre perfection.

Willpower is only another human symptom
Of our self-domestication. You can train

A dog to wait, to contain its trembling,
In anticipation of your command,

Before it lunges for the next treat. Would you
Say a well-trained dog has more autonomy

Than a feral stray who would bite your hand?
Would you say the evidence of impulse

Control that we so value and inculcate
In our children proves their greater freedom?