We bear the heavy burden of a complex consciousness that makes us creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb, apes who came down from the trees to kiss the ground with our prayers and scar it with our tranches, to discover mitochondria and mathematics, to invent love and war. Our dual capacity for creation and destruction is the price we pay for our own complexity. We live with it and die by it and make poems and paintings and psalms to transform the constant tension between the two into m...