Uncontrollable

Cat on my lap, purring, she looks up at me & I gaze into her eyes, which are a glowing, iridescent green, more like jewels than eyes, & wonder, as her eyes shift about, what might be going through her mind, & what that mind might be like, and what is a mind, exactly? I think it’s a 26-foot-long cable 1,350 feet above the streets of lower Manhattan with a man walking on it seeking & maintaining balance in a world fraught with chaos, mediocrity, & indifference. Or let’s get crazy & say the mind is a wall: a door swings open & a piano walks out. This is where thinking gets mercurial & slippery & invents things. Meaning meaning doesn’t always come naturally into the world like trees and flowers but hides in the bushes like a frightened runaway cat that has to be coaxed into the open. This is what art and writing and science are for. Writing is especially generous as its use of language empowers it with virtuosity & cocoons of transformative silk & provides us with imperatives. It urges reflection. It admires the graceful sublimity of swans & urges us to do things. Pass the salt. Pour the gravy. Chop wood. Carry water. Crease your pants. Don’t crease your pants. Do the dance of paregoric. Murmur like coal. Shout like a lout. Whistle like a thistle. Sing like a wing. Listen. Listen to the sound of rain in early summer when it murmurs among the leaves. Listen to a cellist pull a long delicate note out of a cello and gingerly lower the bow as the note hangs in space. I remember putting vinyl records on a turntable and delicately lowering a needle into the music sleeping in the grooves.  Things are different now. I listen a lot to YouTube. YouTube has turned my head into a jukebox. A time machine. A nostalgia dispenser. A round thing with hair and earphones on it. The whole character and flavor of an age is there with a click. 1966: one click. If there’s anything good at all about getting old it’s looking back at the broad landscape of a life. With a soundtrack. Well you know now you make me want to shout, sings a diminutive but kickass Lulu descending a spiral staircase. Everybody shout now. Shout shout shout shout shout shout shout shout shout. And yet, for Heidegger, it’s all about tools. Things in the material world shaped into meaning and agency by purpose. And not necessarily things. Anything. Situations. Baptisms. Bar Mitzvahs. Mustard jars. Speed bumps. Gun fights. Revolt. The smoke of rebellion. Delacroix. You know that feeling of defiance that persists against all odds, when there’s no control, when you’re out of control, when control is uncontrollable and the uncontrollable controls everything, including the polish on your shoes when you walk down a sketchy street at night, is that the blues, I believe so. It’s an e minor in a b major dilemma. A transition. A moment in time. And who controls time? Nobody controls time. It doesn’t exist. Time isn’t real. Time is tied to entropy, or the increasing disorder of things over time. But try telling that to a clock. Tic toc, said the clock. It’s ten o’clock. Thus may we see, said Shakespeare’s fool, “how the world wags; ‘tis but an hour ago since it was nine, and after one hour more ‘twill be eleven; and so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.”