Contingency

Some would call my study untidy, with its books and papers strewn hither and thither.  For me, it is a paean to contingency.

It is a truism that we are all contingent beings.  We are what we are because we took this road rather than that, because we drank from precisely these cups, played cards with these people.  Our life is a unique and delicate tip-toeing through an infinite number of infinite worlds, each pregnant with possibility.  The only map we have is invisible until we have followed it.

And yet some people fight against contingency.  They rail against it as some kind of chaos, the factor which divides everything to give zero, nullifying our every act.  Some assert the unquenchability of free will, a hewing out of a monument from the hard rock of Life.  But the rock possesses unknowable faults and fissures; however skilfully we may direct the hammer and point the chisel, the rock will crack according to its laws.  Others invoke fate, and claim that we move through life like a bead along a wire.  Which is true, except that the wire is as light as gossamer, and is blown by a billion winds.

Personally, I revel in contingency.  I welcome it as the chameleon hue of existence.  At every point I am poised on the brink of taking my next step.  As I watch myself, I am aware that I am trapped in this contemplation.  Once begun, there is no reason to stop.  But then I move on, am caught in the next instant.  Something happened, happens, will happen. Nothing in particular, just the tiny event whose avalanche is my action.

There is beauty in all this.  Amidst the superficial disorder, it might take an artist to see it.  Indeed, without contingency there can be no creativity.  But there is no sequence of notes, no disposition of colours, no arrangement of words from which the heady ichor of beauty cannot be extracted by patient contemplation.  As a corollary, quotidian scenes and motley objects have a secret thread that can always be found, dance to a grave galliard which can always be heard - if you are looking for it.

So as I write this, I tap a rich vein of contingency.  I began - for contingent reasons - then each word, sentence and paragraph has grown like a mysterious crystal from its predecessors.  There is nothing fixed or immutable.  Even the final length of this piece has been determined by a beautiful arbitrary process.  It will fit precisely a page defined on one machine to accommodate an earlier essay which itself happened to occupy a page of an entirely different system.  The dimensions of that page had been set by who knows whom and who knows why.  It does not matter; that sequence of events has led to this format, and I gladly follow it as a disciple follows the incomprehensible teachings of a Zen master.

And if that master leads along a strange road which ends in a precipice, I know that I must submit to his greater wisdom and walk over it.  For without this master, who asks nothing and gives nothing, there can be no tomorrow.   Besides, there may be a trampoline at the bottom.

(10.10.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - So, What's Next? 

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