Poetry & Narratives

You arise upon that pleasant hill, and from a distance

You dominate the Sangro and Aventino Rivers,

Mother Maiella from afar you watch and guide the plain

And the sea, between the fir and the pine.

You stay amongst the mountains to breathe the healthy

Fragrant fluid air and until

Mind and heart restore within the human

The flow of works along their mortal path.

 

Perhaps, it is explained by

the many dimensions of the universe,

the membranes of parallel and mirror universes,

that make up our current mask of

cosmological knowing and imagination.

If the fitness landscape

is of innumerable dimensions,

and all the possibilities exist,

simultaneously, in present and future,

then the quantum argument holds.

Synchronicity is possible and explainable.

But, same-named forbearers, of faint

genetic relation, in the Abruzzi hills, on

the premonitory of Torricella Peligna,

must have shared a local landscape,

whose meme and gene soup of imitation,

tumultuously swirled with viscous adherence.

 

How else the non-local convergence?

Forlorn and foreboding mountains, a

bespoken land, a poor peasantry of

unabated ignorance and illiteracy;

spirituality yes, but surely infected

by straw-narrow tunnels of bigotry,

feudal behaviors and superstitions.

Struggling for subsistence and existence,

a culture of hunters and poor-soil farmers;

opportunities and the crop land

mostly spent generations earlier,

before the family name evolved to its present,

and dreams beyond horizons could be entertained.

Then the primal flash—the spark of ignition.

Was it courage or the common thread

of mere copy and replication;

the contagion of thought

that makes the migration gush,

from a indolent spring and despondent trickle?

Hurtling ideas into action, unleashing the hibernation

that devours the ancient community,

expelling its youth, its families, its clans;

the climax ends another

timeless aboriginal dreamtime,

destroying the old to unleash the new.

Is this the memeplex blasted

into its quantum molecular cloud;

or merely the faded hum of all familial

diasporas, as in the granddaughters of Eve?

Is it the promise of abundant life—or the deeper search,

which shadows the risk and makes the quest irresistible?

 

Of those many generation-later

sons and daughters of these migrants,

globally dispersed, of same name and place,

yet of diverse experiences and genealogy,

how do we explain the common thread

of their interests and their chosen lives?

 

The skills, the aptitudes, the adopted fields of expression?

Science, mathematics, engineering, the analytical bent:

coursing so deep; as well the golden threads

of teaching and professing these

arts of technical acquisition and discovery.

Can this be mere coincidence?

From this ancient plot of rural landscape,

the torch of objective knowledge becomes

the beam that lights and illuminates their being.

The deep specifics of this consilience,

casting suspicion on all the usual explanations

for such statistical anomalies.

Its manifest presence in the hearts and minds,

and in the very being of these

non-locally entangled strangers,

so descended from a bleak,

and desolate intellectual heritage,

begs for insight and explanation.

Torricella Peligna was not blessed

to be bathed in the cultural and intellectual stew,

as that of the Central European Christian,

the European Eastern Jew; or the universal

metropolitan.

It imitates more the hollow and ravine country

of Kentucky and coal-mining West Virginia.

Its migrants were rural peasants who largely

manned the steel mills along the Great Lakes,

and unloaded the wharves from Philadelphia to Boston.

A survey of forebears reveals an appreciation

for education as a ascendant step in assimilation and status,

but not as a focal point of profession.

And though the ticket for the next generations of Americans

has always has been the great educational staircase,

the expectation is of great diversity in dispersion.

The plethora of Torricella Peligna’s American grandchildren,

“de Porreca”, of the plain, prominent in the analytics

and sciences is implausible and mathematically unexplainable.

So, you men and women of science what say you?

Is it the absence that drives the choices in the fitness

landscape, and the mere seeking of niches to be filled? Or is something else at work?

Is the gene and meme metaphor, its dance a viral analog

that is enfolded and linked in some implausible way?

Dare we invoke the metaphysical,

the spiritual or the mystical?

Quantum physics meets the genetic-memetic entanglement

at some synchronous Sheldrakian metamorphic level, within the foam of parallel worlds inexorably at work in

the folds of evolutionary time-space?

Some wizened old physicists, controversially say,

the undivided universe of entangled particles,

that non-locally survive attempts to pry apart their affinity,

and their unitary communion, may engage in some

stringy dance, much like the multiverse membranes that mask our observation of ourselves, and hide us from

our own image in the looking glass.

Is it our image that is hidden from us in the matrix?

Or is it our connectedness,

all curled and folded in the many invisible

dimensions of the infinite multiverse,

disallowing us the glorious view into

the smiling hand of our own creation?

 

Included in David Porreca’s book Sixty2: Poenza From Hunter’s Glen copyright 2004 New Beagle Publishing. David, resided in San Diego, California. He had three separate careers as a military officer, a technologist, and a financier of technology companies.

My Mother you who are in the earth

Made of cries and of silence

Make me a gift of your years

The olive from your bread

The howl of the wind

At the top of the mountain

On winter nights.

Give me your thoughts

Tired with solitude

And the strength of love

That has been made with time

Because I am you

And I carry your flame

In my hands

And I leave your sign

In my tomorrow

Here, on this earth.

 

Delicate blondes

went with the wind

in the secret hours

of shadow and fear.

The lunar languor

removed all traces

and dawn brought

long nuptial veils.

Now in my village

young girls

have warm hands

and a still gaze

on nights of love.