Evolution
Music came first, an unbroken pure tone
passing over the smooth surface of clay, how long
no way to count, until ripples
ridged the clay, and the music found them
and began to rise and fall, billions and billions
of times (call them years), until buds
extended, became digits, pushing
up from the clay, wriggling,
swaying side to side, all moving together,
a metronome, marking the rising
and falling tones, billions upon billions,
highs growing infinitesimally
further from lows. Then four
fingers, as they had become, held back
behind the tone, waved response
to another four, neither a hand yet.
The waving fingers began to break
ranks, waggle to each other. New patterns
made for shifting air currents; the tones changed,
more rapidly now, a million years, now half
a million, more, less, with rapid
irregularity, and the second group
of fingers began to tap the clay
they had sprung from. The tones absorbed the taps
for a while, then moved with them,
propelled by them, pushed this way and that,
and rhythms came into the void,
four fingers tapping, four dancing,
contrapuntal, infinite variety
which needs nothing more than itself, and could have
gone on forever, but that the fingers
pushed further out of the clay, a new nub appeared,
became a thumb, and pushed against the fingers
sounding a snap in air: a beat.
The dancing fingers loved
the beat; they moved with it,
around it, against it. Mostly,
it propelled them, they stretched upward,
pushing through clay, they became hands,
then wrists, then arms that jointed, and would have
jointed again, but that shoulders
grew out and stopped them. But the beat
went on, and the hands were drawn
back to the clay, the music pulsed
around them, the notes were blue,
the rhythms syncopated, and this
was happening all over now, shoulders,
arms, hands from the clay,
back to it, and the clay growing soft
and malleable where the hands
and the music touched it. The hands
began modeling, some pulling it up,
and up, some making finger-width grooves, fingers
probing inside the grooves, until the music
and the hands and the new shapes
made the clay moist and fecund, and
algae grew, and sporangia.
Tad Richards |
levelheaded: Evolution
At its simplest, this poem weaves together two separate processes: the evolution of music and the development of a human arm.
The first line of the poem tells us, “Music came first.” From this beginning, the word “music” and a description of music as “an unbroken pure tone” present music as fully developed concept. For the speaker, music’s existence is not reliant upon human ability to create it; it precedes us. Then “[n]ew patterns” develop. The same music that exists while we’re just a “smooth surface of clay” is supplemented by “four fingers tapping, four dancing, / contrapuntal.” The very clay from which we are created can be molded, “growing soft / and malleable where the hands / and the music touched it.” Music may come first, but by the end of the poem, by the time the poem’s increasing complexity leads to “algae” and “sporangia,” music and the creative clay hands have become interdependent. The “beat” from the end of the second stanza can only be heard after “a new nub appeared, / became a thumb, and pushed against the fingers.” The new “grooves” at the end of the poem are, unsurprisingly, “finger-width.” The big picture here is that music (and all art, really) is inseparable from human physiology. Even if “an unbroken pure tone” existed before humans, it developed alongside us into true music.
All this is handled quite deftly. There are some nice touches, like the rhythm and rhyme of “But the beat / went on, and the hands were drawn” in which the language simulates the actual beat while playing on the word “drawn.” The phrase, “The tones absorbed the taps,” similarly uses the sounds of “tone” and “tap” to enact the absorption. But there is also something else going on in the poem, something harder to pinpoint.
The evolution of music and the development of a limb would seem most at home in a history paper or a scientific dissertation. Instead, we have them tied together in a poem. There is something mysterious about the way music just is. There is something magical, even religious, in the animation of the clay. And there is something confoundedly figurative about all this mysticism, as if “music” and “clay” are meant as stand-ins for any number of interdependent concepts. If we gathered all the science and history ever written, there would still be some big holes in our understanding of what it’s like to see the world as a human, and to be sure, there are big holes even when we throw poetry into the mix, but this poem’s attempt to build upon these ideas with deeply expressive language and emotion seems, to us, worth the effort.
-The Editors