[Image: “OK (Santa Monica, California),” by John E. Simpson.]
From whiskey river (italicized lines):
Mind
The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop. What is it
they cast for? The poplars,
advancing or retreating,
lose their stature
equally, and yet stand firm,
making arrangements
in order to become
imaginary. The city
draws the mind in streets,
and streets compel it
from their intersections
where a little
belongs to no one. It is
what is driven through
all stationary portions
of the world, gravity’s
stake in things, the leaves,
pressed against the dank
window of November
soil, remain unwelcome
till transformed, parts
of a puzzle unsolvable
till the edges give a bit
and soften. See how
then the picture becomes clear,
the mind entering the ground
more easily in pieces,
and all the richer for it.
(Jorie Graham [source])
Not from whiskey river:
On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. You would end up a different version of yourself, in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way.
(Gabrielle Zevin [source])
The Missus and I are in San Francisco this weekend for a family wedding. Our hotel’s airport shuttle service has not been restored since the COVID-19 lockdown, so we and a couple of her relatives opted to summon an Uber, which arrived promptly. This was around 5:00 PM, so the highway leading away from the airport were clogged with rush-hour traffic; luckily, there was a nearly-empty express lane available to vehicles with three or more passengers. We were zipping right along in that lane… until the impatient driver of a car with a single passenger suddenly pulled in front of the SUV in which we were riding.
Our driver recovered very well, blasting the horn and slipping juuuuuust through the roughly car-sized gap between the concrete wall on the left and the now panic-stricken driver on the right, who was trying to re-insert himself into the lane he’d veered from. And the remainder of the brief ride proceeded without further incident — albeit with a lot of nervous chatter and laughter from everyone… everyone but me.
All I myself could do was to imagine the intersection now receding in the rearview mirror — not a literal intersection, but a potential divergence which life had suddenly, unprompted, thrown in our path. There really was no “choice,” as such, offered to anyone in our car; our driver’s response was automatic and instinctive. The other driver had made an unconsidered choice, of course, and it had instantly opened up a rat’s nest of alternative if-then-else futures for many others on the highway — not just our car and lives and his own, but the cars and lives of dozens, indeed hundreds of other drivers and passengers all around us (potentially even including those in the oncoming lanes, on the other side of the median)…
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five described the alien Tralfamadorians’ view of creatures’ lives: all moments coexisting, such that any given “I” is actually like a giant caterpillar extending all the way from the womb to the grave, and wriggling — morphing — like mad from one split-second to the next. Years earlier, Robert A. Heinlein’s story “Life-Line” had expressed the idea this way:
He stepped up to one of the reporters. “Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to, perhaps, 1905, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man some place in the 1980s. Imagine this space-time event, which we call Rogers, as a long pink worm, continuous through the years. It stretches past us here in 1939, and the cross section we see appears as a single, discrete body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity to this pink worm, enduring through the years. As a matter of fact, there is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.”
This perception is compounded by all the overlapping, wriggling routes of all the other caterpillars or worms, none of whom exactly occupy the exact same point in time and space (except perhaps in catastrophic explosions in which many individuals at once are vaporized and, for a time, share the same cubic foot of air). To consider the multi-layered overlapping and intertwining complexities of all the possible futures which those lives don’t actually have, don’t actually share, and all the possible branches of life — of infinitely wriggling worms — which might have erupted from those futures…
Well, the mind reels.
Leave a Reply