Challenge 962 Response

But What Results?

with Larry L. Richardson

[L. L. Richardson] About Julie Brandon’s poem titled But What Results? Your Challenge question suggests the poem might be read as a satire of superstition, but I see something different. I read the poem as a musing about the human tendency to wonder if there is a deeper reality beyond that which we can detect with our limited senses. As the poet concludes, we can’t really say with certainty.

[Don Webb] Quite so, Larry; I’d say we are in complete agreement about the ending of the poem:

Then again, they could just have just been two crows on a wire,
and I have an overly active imagination.
I guess we’ll never know.

The narrator observes two crows on a wire — possibly a power cable or a land-line telephone wire — and wonders what “global implications” — what deeper reality — they might represent. The narrator concludes, “I guess we’ll never know.” So far, Larry, you and I are definitely on the same page.

However, sitting atop the poem is its title: “But What Results?” Okay, what might result from our not knowing “a deeper reality beyond that which we can detect with our limited senses”? The poem both raises the question and gives a partial answer at the same time.

Perhaps this as yet unknown reality is indeed that of the Norse gods. Perhaps the birds are not crows but the two ravens Huginn and Muninn, who bring to Odin news of peace or war.

On the other hand, if the birds really are crows, they might represent a means of peering into the unknown, namely the Roman practice of augury. That exceedingly complex ritual depended to a great extent on the behavior of birds, notably eagles, crows and chickens. Yep, chickens. A practical lot, those Romans.

Christianity gradually replaced the Old Norse religion because it was both good for business and easier to understand. The Romans went about it earlier and quite legalistically by substituting it for pagan polytheism as the Empire’s official religion in the 4th century of the Common Era.

What, then, might be the “global implications” of observing two crows on an overhead wire? What are they? Take your pick: the means of Odin’s world surveillance or of Roman augurers’ divinations. Or maybe we just throw up our philosophical hands and say we can’t top the Norse and Romans. Or, worse, we cannot imagine anything in which to put our faith.

The title comes back to haunt us: what results from our not knowing? Some fancy stories or nothing at all? Is that all? Is that it? Rather, the poem might easily have figured in a conversation that Cyrano de Bergerac had with friends one moonlit summer evening. He found himself faced basically with the same question. Given how little he and his friends knew about the Moon, what results? Upon returning home, he is offered an answer in a different form: Have Cardano’s visitors left an invitation?

Science can’t tell us everything, but it may tell us part of what we would like to know. Bird-watching is fun, and we can learn from ornithology things we can’t learn from mythology.