Hippopotamus Pearls

It’s quite easy to imagine William Butler Yeats sitting in an armchair, thinking. But it’s not so easy to imagine Philippe Petit balanced on a cable 1,000 feet above the bottom of the Grand Canyon reading Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Or is it? I change my mind. It’s easy. It’s easy to change your mind. Let me restate that. It’s easy to change my mind. Not your mind. Another person’s mind is a secret so deep that it only appears in glimpses, in flashes of wit, in passionate declarations, in shouts and sighs. But mostly in words. Hippopotamus pearls and a village of levers. Are minds even singular? Are they unique? Or are they singularly similar? What makes a mind unique? I’ve got a mind like a parasail in a dome of mollusks. Bulging and pregnant. But when I hit the ground the little homunculus I’m imagining as me in the dome of my mind vanishes because ultimately it just wasn’t that interesting. The scene shifts. Everything feels like a highway, even in my own head. Maybe it was all those years of hitchhiking. This is where you learn philosophy. This is where you learn about human nature. The Hyperion storm of the universe. All those spirals and spheres and nebulae in the cosmos. And here on earth the caprices of wind and undulations of wheat. But most of all patience. Hitchhiking is where you learn patience. And trust. Not a full, unconditional trust. That would be stupid. What you want is a Farmer’s Almanac, a qualified trust. A refined trust. A calculated trust. In bridges. In Newtonian mechanics. In toes and planetariums. In doctors and car mechanics because you have to. You have no choice. Unlike politicians, in whom trust is a joke. A toothy grin. And a mouth full of platitudes. Everybody likes platitudes. They’re designed to excite you to do something you’re probably never going to do. But it’s nice to dream, isn’t it? Hence, William Butler Yeats sitting in an armchair, turning. Turning where? Turning and turning in the widening gyre.