Here’s a poem I love:
Essay on Intelligence: One
by Alison Hawthorne Deming
The female digger wasp
maintains several burrows
for developing offspring.
As the day begins, she visits
and inspects each tunnel
determining which contain
eggs requiring no food,
which contain larvae
needing two or three
caterpillars to eat, and which
the pupated offspring sealed
in for metamorphosis. On
the basis of her inspection,
the wasp knows how much
prey to capture and where
to deliver the food. If the
occupants of burrows
are switched in the night,
the mother adjusts to the change,
stocking each nursery
according to its need. But if
the offspring are switched
after her inspection,
she will spend the day
stocking with caterpillars
a burrow containing eggs
and will seal off young larvae
to starve. She will touch
and examine an egg many times
without realizing it needs no food.
This poem is the first part of part one of several essays on intelligence in Alison Hawthorne Deming’s book, “The Monarchs.” I think it describes the way our minds work in a pleasingly disturbing way. It is so good. Through history there have been philosophers who made their central concern the problem of how we can possible know anything, stuck as we are in our own little skulls. Two eyes (in the same direction) is what we call “depth of field”! They were Skeptics and generally speaking, so am I. I think we are seriously female digger wasps, in this respect. We check in at measured intervals and then go into an hypnotic redirection of vision, wherein we can’t even remember what ever needed checking. It’s all these different cultures, across the past of us and all around, I can’t believe people lived all these ways, each knowing all these fabulous things. We must be hypnotized by our culture and our parents and not have any better idea of reality than most anybody, ever. It is better to be awake than hypnotized. Digger wasps, dig out. It is up to you. Believe different things than they like you to.