POEM: Ventriloquy Soliloquy [collage: Baron-Cohen\'s ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE + Beauvoir\'s SECOND SEX]. In Shadowtrain, 2012

[Published in Shadowtrain, September 2012]


Ventriloquy Soliloquy
 
A monkey waves an apple in a tree.
Women like this. Men like this differently;
a social system without reciprocity (or equality)
means depression. A brain on an extreme winter beach.
 
Certain biologists, way too certain biologists,
seem to have almost decreed new human beings.
As yet, no essential evidence may cast or far control
how these new women and men will create, or lead,
some sense of belonging to a particular kind.
But what, this subject would like to mouth to biologists,
of choice existence? The individual subjective element?
 
A psychiatrist, off work, is taking in a different kind of cake.
He is watching a bright array of tractors, each the size of an insect
travelling with almost no speed at all up the opposite brown hill.
 
Variations, in a kind of mosaic,
hope to grasp philosophies. Creation, protection,
resistance and self-fulfilment like maternity.
Schools establish continuity, but individual life
is definitive; an active, living process
unfolding. There may be nervous justification;
an emotional headache. This influence regresses,
take note. In minds, there might float
small starfish, plants, and misty light.
 
Mind-bound management, powerful systemizers,
let us find, then define and promote, the new categories.
Let us construct quotients; measure and make empathy.
 
Each individual has two faces. Only one faces outward. 
Some nervous winter days, I like to imagine
a monkey praying among plants
and perhaps an emotional drone from some beehives.
At times, I require nothing.
 
Asperger above, monumental, made autism-spotting
a bit of a league table. With frisbee accuracy, the tests
we psychiatrists have, eg systemizing tomboyism,
evidence our unusual interest in sub-categories.
 
Some days are the colour of butterflies
or that of a lost shell, in light, through clear water.
 
'Educational', a biologist reports to himself. 'Luminous'.
I killed time between experiments.
Among the apparatus, I was able
 
to intermediate. In some pale sun
light in my palm, the bones
of a dried up leaf. The miniature image
of a tree.
 
(Words in italics selected from Simon Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference, 2003, Penguin Books, London.
Words outside italics selected from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, 1949, Vintage, London, 1997).

James McGrath.