A Sideshow

“With information we are alone; in appreciation we are with all things.” 

― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

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Dear Kate,

To me it is quite inconceivable for a person to live a frivolous life without first thinking it futile.

When WYSWYG (What You See Is What You Get), you want to control what you can see as a way to deceive yourself that's exactly what you are getting out of life.

Dreaming about retiring? waking up every morning to the easy rhythm of wave hitting the shore? smelling the ocean, feeling the warm cup in your hands already?  Dream on.  After today you will have moved only an inch closer to retirement, but also a mile away from retiring this way.  In your dream you can't see yourself needing the hospital so badly, that a leaky roof and shaky foundation by the sea plus no Home Depot or timely Amazon delivery means a beast of an imagination ravaging your senile mind, which seems increasingly (and ever more rapidly) to have a mind of its own.  Then you recall once you had friends and families too, but you've written them all off and out of your dream, alienated the unpleasantries that would necessarily come with their love and help.

Yesterday someone asked me to weigh in on a question, whether people of the prior generations were just as busy with their lives, like how we the modern Man are with ours.  (How could it not be, with no modern technology at their disposal, no laundry machine, no vacuum cleaner, no cars, no painkiller of a thousand sorts and...no vaccines?)

I said, Let's first define our busyness, understand what we actually mean by this particular description of our state of existence.  I think the real question is one of control: the more (we think) we can control, the more we feel life is out of our control---and hence our "busyness" to reshape what we see to get what we want.  Running out of sugar?  Let's do another Costco run (Again, after running there only yesterday?), and you shall pick up a few other items you don't even know you need until you see them.  A person from "generations prior" might just not have any sugar with her coffee and expect nothing more or less from life.  Sugar will come my way again, she said to herself, Not today. Maybe tomorrow.  Maybe never again.  There is always a chance of that.

If we have once conceived our gods to be capricious and cruel, and ourselves, like Lucius, the protagonist of the Golden Ass, curious and cunning, fascinated by the chance of controlling Chance (fortuna) with our busy magic, we are now doing the same with science and technology, seeing no more than what and how only a technocracy can answer to our fear and greed.  Lucius tries to trick Chance by drinking a magic potion, only to find the trick is played the other way around: he takes the wrong potion, turns into an ass, and is then harried, busied by Chance from one stage of humiliation to another, finally becomes a performer in a sex sideshow.

A sideshow is an adjunct, related activity, a subordinate event to the principal matters, an also-ran in the quest for life, fated to be frivolous in its daily wandering and futile in the end.

Yours, Alex