"yet it didn't make sense. who would want to play such elaborate jokes? what for? who could have know that we'd discover the arrow and take such a deep interest in it? no- this concurrence, however small, between the stick on the thread and the sparrow on the wire- was pure chance. granted, a stick on a thread, one doesn't see this every day...yet the stick could have been hanging there for a thousand reasons unrelated to the sparrow, we had exaggerated its importance because it turned up at the end point of our search, as its outcome- when, in fact, it wasn't any outcome at all, it was just a stick hanging on a thread. pure chance then? indeed...and yet one could see in this series of events a propensity for congruity, something hazily linking them together...something was trying to break through and press toward meaning..."
from "Cosmos" by witold gombrowicz
the Jehovah's witnesses were touring the neighborhood this morning...bringing truth and meaning door to door for those of us too damned lazy to go out an look for it ourselves...everything explained...all the answers right there in a small tract if i could only get past my sorry-assed skepticism and embrace the true love of the son of god...so we stood there feeling sorry for each other for a few moments before i closed the door authoritatively...and we both shook our heads as we walked away...that poor sod on the way to his next rejection and me to look for witold's magnum opus on the human need to find an explanation for everything even if the events that need to be explained are only tenuously related and the explanation has to stretch credulity to the breaking point...religion...science...the congressional record...taro cards...telephone psychics...campaign rhetoric...philosophy...conspiracy theories...alien abductions...all grounded in human inability to accept that there may indeed be a touch of pure random chance in the universe...there must be a reason for everything and that need for an explanation bogs life down in situations that are well beyond complicated at times...life is not linear and causality is a bitch...you cannot know all the consequences of your actions and people will always fall for a good line of bullshit because they need to believe...there must be some kind of evolutionary advantage in this...but i'll be damned if i can figure it out
No comments:
Post a Comment