What's The Big Idea?

There seems to be an impulse to think big these days; to fit every bit of dreadful news as it breaks under the umbrella of some all-encompassing idea. We want to wrap it up and be done with it. The problem is there are always pieces that misbehave, refusing to conform to the tidy narrative. Where I might see evil alloyed with goodness and growing organically, others look for a conclave of conspiratorial villains or for a master puppeteer or to the configuration of planets.  

 The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. So said the bard. I say yes but it may be a way in, to consider the vast constellation of the interior life.

Many of us resist accepting randomness. Like the ancients, we think surely, no question shall go unanswered. We seek causation when there is only correlation. If you were wearing unmatched socks the day your rash vanished, to what shall you attribute the healing? If you read the word pastrami just as that word was spoken on a news-cast does it mean that uncle Abner died from eating a Reuben sandwich 3,000 miles away? Synchronicity happens all the time but our antenae are usually not alert to notice. When we happen to catch a conjunction in the net of the bee-loud wild garden we see it as a portal to the extra-rational. No harm exploring that other dimension.

We need our moments of transcendence. It is the stuff of poetry. If a beam of light comes through the curtains, I say, stay with it, let it signify. It is your magic carpet, your rhapsody, your poem to make of it what you will. It is beyond the literal; it belongs to another realm and is to be cherished.

My default position is in the disarray, hanging by my thumbs on the web of connective tissue. I stretch to grab a metaphor when I sense one in the minutiae of the mundane. Show me a cough and I start to think of cough syrup and I then wonder whether coughs should be suppressed or expectorated. And furthermore, whether anything should be inhibited or let loose. What did Spinoza or Schopenhauer have to say about that? Does a football game desensitize us to violence or does it sublimate our aggression?

In the case of that cough, Socrates may have had a coughing fit when he chose the ultimate suppressant, a hemlock smoothie, demonstrating that sometimes the examined life isn't worth living either.

And speaking of coughs it’s a short leap to focus on Kleenex. I’m looking for a subject so ordinary it escapes observation and any sort of overarching significance.

It occurs to me that there may be something wrong with my nose. Where are you running, nose? And not only my east and west nostrils but also my bilateral eyes. A partial parotidectomy in 1981 seems to have tampered with my glands causing an over-secretion. In addition, ever since cataract surgery about ten years ago my eyes no longer reabsorb tears so they make their way out of their sockets and travel down my cheeks as if I’m weeping. Of course, our geopolitics offers much to weep about. 

North of the neck I count seven orifices. They all secrete in their way. As a result, I have Kleenex everywhere. I am crying for you, Argentina ... and everywhere up from there on the map. I am crying a river. My body humors are speaking in the only language they have. I grant them their fluency.

Call me lachrymose and bless the tissues, so perfect in dimension (form follows function), so sublime in texture, so rectilinear and virginal as the driven blizzard in North Dakota only to find its demise as crumpled as Ohio or, better yet, the shape of Frank Gehry's next building. 

What did folks do before Kleenex or any other tissue? Why, they used handkerchiefs, of course. I used to have one in my pocket during my time at P.S. 99. I think my mother even ironed them. Far better to employ one of those downy swan-white tissues. There is nothing whiter and softer.

Before handkerchiefs I suppose there were always long-sleeve shirts but that’s as far as I want to take this. I must stop myself before I start looking for the big idea. There is no big idea for a change. What a relief! Don't get me started.