Are Arrows Hereditary?

Or: A Theorem on Exodus 20:5

[May 18, 2000]

In the last post I wrote of improvisation and music, and so here is more on the same. This piece arrived into my notebook while I was on a break while working the International Children’s Festival some years ago… I sat in the balcony of the Seattle Center House with the hubbub below, the echoes of festival theater, music, children’s shrieks, the language of life echoing all around me.

What I traced revealed itself to me over the next eight and more years, and this became a favorite piece of my own writing (no matter that no one cared to publish it). Moreover, the question became not theoretical anymore when Amy and I got married in 2008, and later when we had Japhy. Part of Amy and my explicit commitment was to break the cycle of the sins of the fathers, the relative dysfunctions of our families (as all families have them): could we do it?

Exodus 20 lays out the ten commandments, saying this of having false idols in verse 5: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”

Indeed in these times of such cultural strife, how can we not see the truth of this? The very foundations of this country—land theft, slavery, and genocide—are carried through for more than even four generations. More recently, the fallout from World War II alone has created entire systems of industrial, chemical, and ecological disaster: how do we chart a course out of it? How do we break the cycles?

In the poem I suggest some impossible math, an imaginary leap to get beyond the dichotomies. Can we break beyond simple binary choices? Can we reach towards a harmony that exists above and beyond treble and bass, something new? As always, the question: can we simply meet each other? Of course in this we will probably fail, and thus the conjugation of an imaginary French verb based on “to lose.”

But in losing… perhaps… we will find something else. In the effort, something possible for our children, a different dream.

So then here’s to imagination, to failure, to loss. To shadows in the bright sunrise.