WEBVTT

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Next again a short poem.

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This sounds, I think, like
what is rather a fashionable

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surrealism, but
actually it isn't.

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It's a kind of social
and political statement.

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And it's called "Causes."

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And obviously, we
go through life

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depending to a tremendous
degree on our sense of cause

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and effect.

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If I do this, then that will be
the result, or if he does that,

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then that will be the
result. And so on.

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But sometimes in
the modern world

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our sense of causal relationship
breaks down all around us,

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and then we feel the world
has become surrealistic.

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And I'm going to use a
very dated example, which

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dates from about the
time of the poem.

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If I go to a voting
booth, and pull down

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a voting lever to
vote for a president,

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or if I refuse to go
to the voting booth

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and don't vote for a
president, and I know

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I live in a democracy
and I know I'm partially

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responsible for what
my government does,

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if as the result of that my
government conducts the Vietnam

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War, just as an example, I
lose my sense of the cause

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and effect relationship.

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What did I do?

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What caused that?

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It's gone.

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The world is crazy.

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And I think in the modern world
this breaks down around us

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to a tremendous degree.

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And so I wrote this
little poem called Causes,

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and it has an epigraph which
I found in a daily newspaper.

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And the epigraph is,
"Questioned about why

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she had beaten her
spastic child to death,

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the mother told
police, I hit him

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because he kept falling
off his crutches."

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Because one's husband is
different from oneself,

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the pilot's last
words were, "Help.

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My God, I'm shot."

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Because the tip growth on a
pine looks like Christmas tree

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candles, cracks appear in
the plaster of old houses.

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And because the man next
door likes to play golf,

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a war started up in some
countries where it is hot.

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And whenever a maid waits at
the bus stop with her bundles,

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the fear of death comes
over us in vacant places.

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It is all foreseen in the
glassy eye on the shelf, woven

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in the web of notes that
sprays from a trumpet,

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announced by a salvo of
crackles when the fire kindles,

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printed on the nature of
things when a skin bruises.

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And there's never
enough surprise

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at the killer in the self
nor enough difference

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between the shooter
and the shot,

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nor enough melting
down of stubs to make

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new candles as the earth
rolls over inverting

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billions of houses.

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