I was thinking about how one thing leads to another. And then another. Then it’s done. It happens. Certainly you understand, it’s all about that inevitability you didn’t see coming. And of course it worked out that way, you could see it coming from a mile away (but you didn’t look). Surprise, one thing led to another. You connect the dots.
I had a therapist tell me one time that when a person is faced with a tough decision to do something or not and worrying about it, they should think of the worst case scenario that could happen and if they are okay with that possibility then the decision becomes clear. I know, it didn’t make sense to me either.
When you talk about how it all went down and you’re sitting there in a rocking chair you have to be able to say that it made sense, somehow. How one thing led to another and then another.
I’m talking about the days after days we traverse this rugged landscape called life. Shout from the highest mountain indeed! I saw how taking that bus, choosing that date, deciding not to go somewhere had to lead exactly where it did, or at least in the neighborhood. But only with the gift of hindsight, and we all know what the optometrist has to say about that.
Okay, maybe the writer Amity Gaige can throw us a bone here, help a brother out. She was referencing the ancient Greeks:
He wrote poems of sanity. And as Sophocles had said, all the poetry of sanity would be brought to naught by the poetry of madness, and behold, at the end of time, the sane poets would not matter.
Besides the thrill of being able to quote someone quoting Sophocles (whose work Antigone I detested, but that’s another dead end story to exactly nowhere), the quote is illuminating in its own right. The fight between sanity and madness lives on in all our lives, be us poets or not. It’s played on the field of the sucker’s bet that knowing how perfectly things have aligned and turned out was clear all along. Of course it was, because we desperately want it to.
Yes, I was once in a locked ward, and I wasn’t the first in my family either! Let’s put it this way, I’ve known the sound of locked doors calling, and I was on the wrong side. I still wonder how the heck that happened.
It’s like the TV detective who has to put up with all the b.s. excuses and alibis the arrested bring forth. How often have we seen the cop show where the detective cleverly picks apart the perp’s historical lies and leaves him wobbling. The criminal’s claims didn’t add up; his thing didn’t lead to another, it led to jail. Of course jail is somewhere, kind of like the last house on the block is somewhere.
I’m talking about being the holy fool out parading in the streets and then ducking in an alley to sit with your back against the wall of circumstance. The age old question joins you, “How did I get here?” Sometimes the scruffy guy will say that he never caught a break, or the dolled up dame will blame her daddy. A stray sociologist might invoke institutional racism. It’s all the same thing: first one thing happened and then another.
Looking back, bending backwards, leaning into the view like Narcissus at the pond’s edge. We can all fall in the water and drown, but who gets a flower named after them like he did? One gaze led to another.
Systems theorists break it all down, mathematicians add it up. Magicians make it disappear. In college I fell in love with Deconstructionism and look where that got me! Instead of wondering who wrote the book of love, perhaps we should instead take our seat at the table and wonder how to live the life we bought and paid for. It makes some kind of sense anyhow that there is a transaction involved.
I’m not trying to make this difficult, I’m trying to answer the question that goes something like this: If we knew twenty years ago who we would end up being today, would we have made different choices? If you’re lucky the only answer is no, because all the yeses in the world would still lead right here.
I hope this plunge into swarms of nonsense brightened the horizon just a bit or at least cast some shadows. I mean, really, what takes the place of a sunrise other than a sunset? One thing leads to another.
