The Crying Game

Frogs and birds all have very small brains.

The brain of a frog or a bird is so small that practically the only functions it can manage are eating and defecating, flapping and jumping, balancing heart-beating and breathing.

If we were to magically strip the outer layers of the human brain away, taking all the extra folds which enable us to remember, reason, dream and love, I think we would be left with something that would resemble the brain of a bird or a frog.

If we were to breathe life into a man who had a brain the size of a bird or a frog then I think that man would have a vocabulary similar to what we know of birds and frogs today.

That is to say, this frog-brained-bird-man would probably eat whatever he could urge his fingers to grasp and spend most of his days sitting naked in the woods while singing out to an unrecognized presence, “I am here! I am here! I am here!”

I can imagine ancient men, the first to stand upright, often moaning to the moon in the middle of the night in this same way and not knowing why. It’s easy for me to think that this lonely self-centered existence is at the core of our knowledge no matter how hard we may try to dress it up.

When our fragile bodies are conceived, we may look remarkably a lot like frogs, birds, or even mice. It appears at first that we all came from the same original seed. But as our tiny tissues double, double and double again we grow into far more formidable creatures.

As we take our first breath, we may rely on that ancient program in our brain to cry out for food and warmth and rest. We cry, much like a bird in the tree or a frog in the night, “I am here! I am here! I am here!” not knowing why or if anyone else can hear us. But if our faculties and our environment are healthy, then at some imprecise moment, sooner for some, later for others, we realize our cries have an effect.

Rather than just singing for the simple sake of singing or calling out to an unknown presence in the darkness, our song suddenly takes on a different purpose. We cry out to touch others like us. And if our newly developed brain functions well, collecting the bits and pieces of early experience in the proper folds and places, we soon learn that our cries result in an even greater sensation. Then we cry out to be touched by others, as well.

We can laugh about it now but when we were young this crying game was all we had.

And when we look back later, we may come to realize how important this game was to our growth. From this we may have learned to not only better observe our surroundings but to instigate certain patterns of behavior and reason their probable outcomes. We can see now how it was all so finely meshed, so intricately designed, and how one small slip could have changed our course, altered our desires or brought our precarious existence tumbling down like the flimsy house of cards in which it resides.

Perhaps by playing this game we eventually come to believe that we have an inbred power over our environment, unmatched by the likes of mere birds or frogs. Perhaps because of this we come to put more trust in our compulsions than we should. And perhaps because of this, following our practiced path of reasoning, we come to believe that we deserve more than we get from the loneliness of just crying out in the middle night.

And soon we may come to suppose our behavior has a higher purpose than simple birds and frogs, that we are created in the likeness of something bigger and better than they are and because of that we are owed something more than just a similar existence. Then we may start to judge the actions of those around us, comparing them to our own standards and individual understanding of that purpose. We can remember when too much or too little, the improper proportion of crying out loud brought undesired results, effects which may have defiled or defused the intent of that lofty rationale. Rather than just touch others, our communication may then be designed to influence and may start to take the form of counseling and preaching the need for a more disciplined approach. From the confusion and chaos of everyone crying out loud all at the same time, we may try to bring some order to it, cataloging each complaint as if they were injuries of emergency room victims, quickly justifying those cries as obvious necessities, basic rights or harmful luxury, carefully characterizing each resulting affliction as sin or virtue.

And all that thinking and remembering, screaming and crying, perfectly fluffing up the purpose of human compulsions, following the circular path of cause and effect of our own making, conveniently masking the ancient truth that we are all just lonely individuals in a large dark universe who once all looked the same, all of that may bring us occasionally back to the simple case of the birds and the frogs and, rather than just accept their song gratefully we may ask ourselves in our own pretentious way, who or what do we think these silly little creatures sing for?

“I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Cheers,

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