On Watching the Grandmasters Play

11/28/2007 6:10 AM – 6:33AM

And there with nothing pressing, nothing new figured out, just working towards a goal, you wake up in the morning and do the things you’ve got to do. You don’t have to live in fairy-land, though there are some that make it. You don’t have to just let the world float by, thought there are some that can. You do what you can to make your corner of the world a better place to be.

And even if you don’t believe that you can make the world a better place by overt means, though there are some that do, you continue in action, forsaking the smallness of ones ability and the smallness of those that love you. It is a small world, after all. The boats bottom out from time to time and they close down the ride to make them float higher in the water. And if it doesn’t make sense, if it doesn’t cohere, we recognize in watching the grandmasters play that it’s possible to say that either there is no plan or the players are much, much smarter than we are. There is a choice in seeing the universe and that is the odd thing, that is the uncomfortable thing, that is the innate strangeness of being.

It’s much easier, much more palatable to find a prophet to tell you what to believe, even if they say they’ve peeked behind the curtain and lived to report that there is nothing there. Perhaps they have, but their revelation of nothingness holds little import for those that are not them. We still stand outside on rainy days, wondering what’s playing at the matinée. A cartoon, a serial, a newsreel, the previews, the feature. One leaves the darkened theatre and the eyes adjust to the color of the sky and the perception changes rendering the data acquired unreadable. One can never step into the same river twice. Of course, argued Nietzsche, there is a limited amount of matter and energy and so, given enough time, not only is it possible, it’s required that the water you walked through yesterday will one day be the water you walked though again. Nietzsche was crazy though and though his wobbly mind by virtue of its wobble could pierce though any number of curtains of bullshit, it was unable to detect the bullshit that it itself had produced. There are not an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters with infinite time. There’s just us with one typewriter, a certain number of heartbeats and a vague attempt to better our corner of the world as only we believe it should be.