(The unexpected always happens)
To the inexplicable we may add
that sense of confusion to which our species is so frequently heir,
as well as a need, our perhaps most primitive attribute,
to find some useful explanations, however fatuous,
amongst the flotsam and jetsam of our environment,
to reveal in the entrails the ways of Ekban,
or in the Tarot Cards, our own personal fortunes,
or otherwise. The above title, for example,
is that of a story by Merrime,
and, as well, the translation of some line by Shakespeare,
whose whereabouts I have been unable to discover.
It is true, however, about the Unexpected,
coming up out of shadows like a plague,
leaving us suddenly in arrears on the mortgage,
or discovering that the lady of one’s dreams is someone else’s reality.
But what is most important is to restrain the impulse,
that limbic reaction, so similar to that of our distant ancestors,
to lay blame upon an idol in the corner,
or that distant cousin who has somehow neglected
to pay back the loan you so naively gave him.
It is all really a case of that mess in the porridge,
the sheer complexity of the ingredients
of which it is constituted, a realization
that the universe, with its anti-matter and particles
like quarks and strange and down and up,
is so far out that 96 percent of it is still unknown,
and that other guy, the one you thought was so much in the know,
is just as much in the dark as you.