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Stone Age Football
In reality, the relationship between nature
and culture is much
like the situation of the elephant and the mouse walking side by
side over a rickety wooden bridge. Above the noise, the mouse
shouts, ‘Hey, listen to us stamping together!’ People who
claim
that humans have left behind their biology suffer from the same
delusions of grandeur as the mouse. They barely realize they are
walking next to human nature, the elephant that sets the tone of
everything we do and are.
—Frans de Waal Recently
I read an article in a newspaper with the heading, “Gorgeous Women
Affect Men’s Brains like Cocaine.” The article told about
a study that showed that looking at beautiful women activates the “reward
circuits” of the male brain in the same way cocaine and food do.
Beauty, the study concluded, is hard-wired and not, as many postmodernists
assume, socially constructed. I wasn’t any more surprised by the
finding than I was many years earlier when I was a jogger and read about
the endorphins released in the brain during a good run, a phenomenon known
as “runner’s high.”
I have a file folder in my home office labeled, Consilience. The word
is the title of a book by the Harvard sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson;
it means the “jumping together” of knowledge from various
disciplines to create, in Wilson’s words, “a common groundwork
of explanation,” or a “unity of knowledge.” I’ve
been fascinated by connections between science and literature for some
time, but after reading Wilson’s book I’ve made a sort of
hobby out of collecting examples of consilience. I’m especially
looking for common ground between poetry and the biological sciences:
a confluence of the intuitive knowledge of the literary artist and the
empirical, quantifiable knowledge of the scientist.
One doesn’t have to read Darwin to know that the effect of beauty
on a man has a strong biological basis. The results of the scientific
study mentioned above could no doubt yield countless literary equivalents.
One of my favorites is a one-line poem called “Poem” by Bill
Knott, written in the 60s:
Your eyelashes are a narcotic.
I used to think of the word narcotic in this poem as a metaphor (no doubt
Knott meant it metaphorically). But now—after reading about the
study on beauty—I’m inclined to think of it as a hybrid made
up of both metaphor and fact.
A few years ago in Tucson, Arizona I heard Frans de Waal, the well-known
primatologist, talk about his studies of bonobos. He discussed their extreme
sexuality, and especially the power that females exert over males. As
I was listening to him and looking at his pictures on the large screen
behind him, I thought of a poem by Robert Frost called “The Pauper
Witch of Grafton,” which is narrated by a woman who has enjoyed
great power over men with her beauty and spirit. She’s no longer
young, but she remembers one of her husbands:
Up where the trees grow short, the mosses tall,
I made him gather me wet snow berries
On slippery rocks beside a waterfall.
I made him do it for me in the dark.
And he liked everything I made him do.
Another example in my consilience file is by the poet Robinson Jeffers,
who in just two lines in his poem, “The Bloody Sire,” captures
something of the essence of natural selection working over millions of
years in what evolutionary biologists sometimes refer to as an arms race
between species:
What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
* * *
In 1970, at the age of 30, I wrote a poem I called “Football,”
and published it in my first collection of poems, in 1976. Here is the
poem:
Consider the stoning of beasts:
the peppered mammoth slobbering in the pit,
the stunned boar,
the bear with crushed face advancing,
the crippled, skirling cat;
consider the hands
groping along the hacked shores of rivers
how many dawns ago? for this shape of stone.
What I was trying to capture in this short poem is a scene in which Pleistocene
hunters are killing animals. But more than that, I was remembering the
violence of football, a sport which I played in high school and college.
Robert Frost, who also liked to refer to sports and competition in his
poems—used to say that he wasn’t a poet as much as a synecdochist.
My poem attempts, more or less, to define or suggest the game of football
by focusing on the shape of the football itself. Of course the game has
often been referred to metaphorically as war, with words and phrases that
have become cliches: “bullet pass” “blitz,” “defensive
strategy,” “the bomb,” and so on.
In the opening line of the poem—“Consider the stoning of beasts”—I
describe an ancient setting in which men are cooperating in the killing
of a mammoth or a bear, for instance, and in one line in the first stanza
I suggest the perils inherent in the hunt (“the bear with crushed
face advancing.”) Then in the second stanza I imagine the hunters
searching along the shores of rivers for stones they could use for killing
or maiming prey. Again, it’s the shape of the stone that intrigued
me, since it might be possible (I was thinking at the time) that the same
stone used in the hunt was adapted, later on (when, say, there was more
time for leisure) for games and sports. Is it possible that the first
pick-up games took place thousands of years ago when, after a successful
hunt, the guys chose up sides (skins and hides?) and started throwing
around a seamless stone shaped like a football?
Over a decade after I wrote my poem I was pleased to come across an article
in Discover (June, 1986) about a scientific hypothesis regarding the shape
of stones used by ancient hunters. The article refers to some stones found
by paleoanthropologists at early toolmaking sites, such as the Olduvai
Gorge in Tanzania. These stones are “smooth and roundish,”
and are “not suitable for flaking into tools.” They are also
“lemon-shaped …which suggests that they were thrown with a
spin—rather like tiny footballs,” and that they were perhaps
used for throwing at enemies or animals. The writer goes on to suggest
that because stone throwing comes so naturally to humans, it could have
been an incentive for our forebears to walk upright; and that modern sports
that involve throwing might be a way of “channeling aggressive behavior.”
My poem, “Football,” is just that: a poem. Unlike a scientific
study, it’s not intended to convey factual information, the way
science does, but rather to evoke a scene dramatically with words; to
imagine what it was like to live for a few moments as Ice Age hunters,
in a way of life that persisted for over 99 per cent of our species’
history.
And yet, because, as E.O. Wilson puts it, “no barrier stands between
the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and
the poet,” I was happy to learn that my poem tends to be consilient
with a scientific hypothesis. After all, discussions of poetry and the
other arts involve not only subjective elements but the same material
world from which both science and art draw their explanatory and evocative
power.