I look and look for my notes on a lecture (years ago) by Pattiann Rogers;
then realize that even if I find them, there is no certainty that my
notes accurately reflect what she said. What I remember is:

• Science is the new religion. It is what we believe in, even
  when we do not understand it. Do we understand, in our minds, in our
  bodies, why the airplane does not fall from the sky? Still, we step
  onto it.
• It is the poet’s responsibility to — explain? elucidate? give voice to? — the religion of the time. We are failing.

Karen Armstrong’s point, in The Battle for God, that:

• The fundamentalist error is to treat mythos ["a mode of
  knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning
  to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms"] as logos ["rational, logical, or scientific discourse"]
• The secularist error is to think that logos is all there is

Is mythos not the poet’s role? So we are to, somehow, imbue
logos/science with spirit? But science is spirit — no? — attention to the real,
passion — and sometimes, too often, cruelty without cause.

Can we study, learn, attend, without dissecting?

Who can look at the Hubble photographs,
and not feel awe? not see spirit?

Oh, the same person who looks at a
chickadee, or a grasshopper, or a stone, and does not see it.

So the poet must say:  look!  see!  — a greater poet than I am.  An Emily.

I have wanted a non-gendered pronoun, so that I could speak of a creature (rampaging raccoon) whose gender I do not know, without denying its personhood, without making it an it — but instead, I should be infusing the it pronoun with personhood, with spirit. For the teaching- stone is an it — the mountain, the river, the garden —

—
& I will break the stone, weed the garden, dam the river, eat the
raccoon (the cow, the chicken, the salmon) — even though — while —
acknowledging it is a person — it is in-spirited —

because I am not consistent
because I am not logical
because I am not moral?
because I am an animal?

[is "it" a pronoun?]