[Newspoetry] Psycho-historicism: Active and Passive History

[DL Emerick]

Active and Passive History

 

Blood courses in your brain

Some see it as a gravy train,

Feeding a brain with what it carries,

As if its body were just a machine

Circulating oil through its engine.

 

Somewhere, a governor steps on the gas,

Or engages the breaks, shifts gears,

And the rote machine does all the rest,

Responsively, automatically, in response.

 

The brain is a bit like that governor,

As well, constantly attended by this flow,

And, yet, somehow it makes decisions, too.

 

The brain gives and receives interrupts,

Directing it to change the present flow,

Or to stay the course in which it flows

And all this is done outside quite the flow,

Though some still claim that it is all mechanism,

All the way down to the last stimulus-response.

 

But, this scene remains a matter of doubt,

As to whether or how or even how much,

There is an outside to all acts of behavior,

An outsider deciding to exert control,

Or leaving things to run as they will.

 

Active or passive is a either-or choice -

with wildly diverging, differing results:

Memory will collect only pale images,

When a passive role is given and chosen;

In an active role, all choices are recalled,

the past of action is ever living and alive,

though alternatives unchosen remain just so,

the shadows of futures never made to happen,

so action parrots "I'd do it all over again."

 

The trick of existence is consciousness,

To experience, perhaps, all time as choice,

To be ever in control, ever on high alert,

As if God were watching, recording it all --

Ever calculating the possible consequences,

Of butter-fly wings flapping in the wind,

Of lips yapping some of the calculations,

Of accepting one's vulnerability to flows.

 

But, there are still times I'd forget,

Times when I want to sleep on duty,

Just as there were times I slept on duty,

Passive experiences then changed me,

Rather than preserving me, as action does.

Action lives to deny the passive new life,

Action ventures toward fate and death,

As predetermined by courses of action,

Yet the truth ever is in the middle way,

At once being active and passive too.

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