“God!” she exclaimed, “why are men such homicidal mass killing maniacs?”

“Why?” the man echoed.

“Yes, why…?” she repeated, nearly in tears. “It’s pure evil, …and it makes me sick!”

“You want to know why men make such consummate murderers?” he said, calmly looking her square in the eye.

“Yes,” she said, “yes, I want to know why.”

“Because we do not give birth to children.”

She looked disgusted. “What kind of bullshit is that?”

“I’m serious,” he said. “The life energy that is being drawn in to the female of the species—any female of any species—is issuing out of the male. It is all one and the same. Each month living energy is stored up in the female body in the event of a pregnancy and then flushed out in the absence of one. We males store up nothing, we expend.”

“So?” she said, hardly containing her contempt.

“So,” he continued, calm as could be, “it’s all in how we expend the energy. What direction it will go. Everywhere else in the animal kingdom the male’s energy is bound more or less tightly up in instinct, but we humans are freer. It is our greatest biological advantage, this apparent liberation from the shackles of instinct, but it can also be our greatest curse.”

“But why so much savagery? …. Such evil?”

“What is evil?” he replied. “Is there evil in the animal kingdom? Evil in the plant world? No. Evil only applies to humankind, and more specifically humankind in community. ‘There is no good or bad but that the mind makes it so,’ wrote Shakespeare.”

“God! I can’t stand it,” she wailed.

“Precisely,” he said, smiling slightly, “God.”

“That’s how the Poets, the genuinely possessed, describe to a community the totality of the flowing energies of life. It’s how they channel those energies toward serving life and not something else… something perhaps ultimately destructive to the community.”

“Don’t talk to me about God,” she sobbed, “I’m sick of it all. Why would God permit such violence?”

He did not reply. Not in a puzzled way though. He remained perfectly still with his eyes fixed compassionately on the sorrowing young woman. What answers were there to such questionings of life’s inscrutable ways? How explain in words that even the violence and inhumanity was inextricably part of those ways?

It would take a better communicator than he knew himself to be. A Poet in fact, to explain… to encompass it all.

He sat quietly musing while the young woman suffered. Musing about Life… and a bigger, more encompassing God.