71. Revolution (III)

As I have grown older, I have become quite convinced that there is another, truer, order to the universe that has somehow been diverted away. We are living in a false order, but we still have some intimation as to what the real order of things should be. If we pay attention, we can see the shadow of this other universe—the universe that should be—thrown on the wall of our history. I do not mean this way things should be is some utopia, though it is somehow a truer order of things. It is not easier or kinder, but it is in the right. The Ancient Greeks spoke of the cosmos, and this cosmos was not an empty universe; it was a creature and we were organs within it. A creature has wills and instincts and I think that the shadows I see are the lineaments of the will of the great cosmos creature. Perhaps if we accept that the creature still lives, we will once again come to know the will of the whole.

This is abstract, so let me be plain. As a teenager I knew a boy and a girl so perfectly eccentric that they were meant to be together. I watched them playing with a bouncy ball while other people watched music television and they played with such perfect innocence and completeness that, even now, I know, very certainly, the cosmos wished them to be together and to raise a child. Of course, this has not happened. Whatever kisses they exchanged or whether they even slept together I do not know. I know they were together again, sometime later, briefly, in the their twenties; but, again, they were pulled apart. The cosmos was willing them into existence, willing a child into existence. Perhaps, generations later, these two spirits or their distant ancestors from children born to other partners—or even their collateral relatives—will come together and the will of the cosmos will be done. For now, however, I feel that there was a great perversity done with these people, as if we have all had a sheet thrown over our eyes and cannot see what simply must be done.

A more mundane and less romantic example from my life. As a teenager, having just left school, I toyed with volunteering for a charity—working in a bookshop—for a while, but I never did it. I almost went to Palestine with some volunteers, socialists who despised the Zionist project. I did not do that either. There was a lassitude on me. Today, twenty years later, I can see it was the lassitude of reason; perhaps this is why we cannot heed the cosmic will, perhaps it is because we have doped ourselves on reason. Nevertheless, ten years after I contemplated these things, I did them. I volunteered in a bookshop and I went to Israel and Palestine, though now, no longer a teenage idealist, I held no beef for either side. I went after exploding from a relationship and that explosion was like a regression; it was as if the cosmos said: “Go back! There are things that you are yet to do and you shall pass no farther on until you have done these things.” And, looking back, another eight years on, I do feel different. These were things that had to be done and I am now more complete.

So, in short, there are people and jobs and children and relationships and travels that are being willed into existence. And, I think, if a person gets very silent and looks within they will see what has to be done, what really must be done. Every evasion we make is just a delay, and perhaps we delay because what is necessary is not always happy or easy or joyful. Somehow in the great nexus of time every connection will be made and every necessary act completed. Until then, we live in the shadow of what must be done.