A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America
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| Poetry |
"Shall I Compare Thee to a Backfill Pile?" April 27, 2000 |
| by Walter Fredericksen | |
My career in archaeology extends back in time to the late 1940s, when I was a young man completely taken with ancient times (all of them!). I had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Loren Eiseley at the University of Kansas in the late 1940s, through my mentor professor, Dr. Carlyle S. Smith. Life went on from there to fieldwork in the Dakotas with Professor Smith, doing the archaeology of the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan, primarily at the Talking Crow Site.
The Korean war (and the USMC) kept me in Asia for awhile, followed by a return to anthropology and archaeology at the University of Kansas during the mid- to late 1950s. My wife and I were married in 1957, and we've been partners and colleagues ever since. From there to University of Copenhagen (my Danish background), adventure and archaeology with the Danish National Museum and working with Professor Smith and Thor Heyerdahl in Paris. Later, we worked on the Easter Island research material, returning to the U.S.A. and more archaeology, taking teaching fellowships at the University of Oregon, building an ocean-going trimaran motorsailer and ending up in Hawaii (working for Heyerdahl and others) in 1964. Later, we took professorial positions with the University of Hawaii, Maui, where we had our careers, retiring in 1990 (me) and 1994 (my wife, Dee). We taught anthropology, and I taught more than half my load in ocean sciences.
Throughout all of this, poetry has always been a passion, and I have put much of it to paper, along with numerous research reports, a book, and popular articles. I am pouring this out a bit because I was quite taken with your "The Muse Within Us" piece, and I wanted you to know I appreciated it very much.
Four Fingers and a Thumb
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Before Times Primordial ooze and jungles thick with steaming plants and trees, themselves as different from what we know today as from their times to these. And pulling out from muck and mire amphibians, reptiles, and such, exhibiting peculiar bodies with multi-colors and scales, claws and webs, pivoted eyes, not missing very much of what transpires about them, and what will threaten or appease. Not showing fear (as we think we know it) of falling to some fiend-like clutch, itself escaping for one moment more, one moment more, before it, too, slips and slithers beneath the enfolding swamp, there to wait with fossilized patience the times which are to come. The clashing mountains, scouring beds by lazy, flowing glacial masses, slowly moving, surely making future, awing mountain passes. During all this work the fossils rest, seeing, in turn, Life's strict tests. Which place each life-form on the environmental stage, there to twist, there to turn to Nature's orders, from Her to learn, or else to die, to become extinct, forever more to join the Saber Tooth and Giant Boar. Themselves well-meant and hearty forms that could not keep to Nature's norms for survival, or for lasting place on that Earthscape seen from afar, by whatever essence taking pleasured view of life on this planet, both old and new... Becoming Down through millennia surviving against what? Blindly striving towards new forms, new shapes that tout DNA's promise to a dumb world. Savoring individually what no group could, but driving onwards, onwards, onwards... Till that long ago Pliocene Spring... Matted hair, warm bodies too, quick to move from threatening reptilian approach, agile minds requiring learned response to Nature's requirements, gentle or harsh, reasoning or not... The Process Oh, how many types, antlered or horned, big toothed or beaked sheathed egg or born, from in utero to pouch or crisp, choking air, all of them experiments on what possibly is fair morphic play, for the Cosmic Magician and the amazing DNA... A molecule so astounding it strikes dumb your wits, and watching its maneuvers with elemental form, causes only wonder that Life's special norms can so seldomly be split. Though the chances seem infinite they simply do not occur, unless selective pressure requiring more or less fur present themselves... Or a trait is not lethal, so continues to exist, or one that brings its owner to demise, for reasons more profound than we can properly surmise. But meaningful all the same and incredibly well-working, so very few anomalies are found to be lurking in this marvelously intricate scheme. The Confusion and Wonder If each form could go on forever, forever would not be, since such concepts as these come from what seemingly is but certainly not here to see... The trick played by intelligence on unsuspecting DNA expression is that we, and we alone, are here to play forever in gardens of DNA's delightful manipulation. Such molecular delights, all forms so infinite in spatial abode, and the scene so presented seems so removed from atomic attraction and molecular interaction... If that should confound us, let it not be, for who are we to pretend to know the meaning and essence of the atom and molecule (and the where, how, and why of it), should we care to dwell upon Universal architecture, and relative Time and Space... Though we cannot find our position amid the configuration of the pit We cannot know even if it's there, and despairing after such thoughts and dreams as these can lead into realms that make phantasy mundane. Or perhaps a ploy that even Norse gods like Loki would not have been guilty of such teasing, inimical, quasi-thoughtful traps... Thoughts from our species memory so dim-- yet fixed in ancient, musty portions of our brain. Forever there, but distantly known... Drawn out in deep moments of contemplative dream, to reassure our nature of a place out there, in there around there about there always there, mocking there, and Here Together, as if a whirlwind raged along that soulful continuum, stretching from Archaeozoic to Holocene... The Journey Together culminating in a regulated body temperature that mocked the massive Ice Walls, spelling doom for many life-forms, who could not ride that rage successfully... But who joined the rest in fossilized splendor, awaiting a time to expose, to attest... To what "now" used to be in that present far removed, yet part of the same Time we marvel at, and curse for its swiftness with an hour, a day... and into those decades of Time to come. Of another "present" out there... Preparing to be... Setting a stage on which life will whirl, thrive, ultimately succumb... To that same Agency--Death... Whatever It may be, since we're part of a continuum along space, sky and sea (Earth and water, too). PART II The Essence of a molecule, the re-occurring DNA, spring up and out and then around, the space that fills our Universe. That fills the void that never ends... That has no middle and travels, without bends, unless such exist beyond our ken (and we can only suppose we know...). Or themselves in grandiose style, "...how Earth, Solar system, Galaxy compile a system, mechanical, beguiling--", completely logical in the mammalian, primate terms we call Human, though ourselves protest the anomaly... of what we are.... The Essence One-hundred trillion cells, atoms from a star, composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, too, all inorganic, insensate, none alive, in any true sense (according to our definition)... Yet all together a human make, to live, function, procreate. Cognitive, behaving, believing in dreams that well up from below, where DNA schemes to find what pleases its morphic urges. Scrambling, re-molding, trying again to find that true form... the Initial Egg-- The Passage and Understanding Onward to the present point in histories yet to come, to start again, anew, casting Fate in endless Time... Construing "place" with what is, rather than what will always be-- And somehow knowing the phenomenon of Thought is endless, like a great roiling, dark and mysterious Sea, itself lapping unknown and distant shores, that despoil returning when once explored... By that marvel intelligence, welling up from below the sensate consciousness, ...the Abyssal flow... Emanating from the realm of DNA, though the "how and why of it," our thoughts can't say... Indeed, we cannot comprehend our shape and why we stand on end, instead of going about on fours, well-balanced, neither "tippy," awkward, nor as we often are, compared anew in Primate Lore-- Abyss and Hope On we spin aboard our "dust speck," well employed for so tiny a galactic crumb... Always whirling, always circling, our hale, but aging Sun-- And we shall ponder, studying fossils, who waited patiently for us to come... DNA marvels, molecular offspring-- Bearers of four fingers and a thumb... |
For more on the Pliocene, see "Early Homo erectus Tools in China," January/February 2000.
For more on the Holocene, see "Reburial Dispute," October 10, 1996, and
Ancient Clam Bake," September 23, 1998.
For more on Norse gods, see List of Norse Beings.
 © 2000 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/online/features/poetry/fredericksen.html |
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