Friday, November 27, 2009

Mattering

A person close to me, who is unlikely to ever view this blog, has a magical and unsettling relationship with matter. Things disappear, then reappear. It would be easy to blame this improbable phenomena on faulty perception, due to her many summers. I know better, because I too experience this mystifying reality. The person in question rationalises it, with a feather of mirth and a pendulum weight of conviction, as the work of a thief. It is a family tradition. Her own mother talked of having undergarments stolen by a fellow resident in the old people's home, then was further amazed at the cheek of the woman when she returned them to the same drawer. I laugh, and I don't laugh. I have the sombre knowledge within me that my day will come when antimatter eats even more of my stuff, and I start to attribute it to others, in an effort to make sense of it. My current looseness around existential mysteries means I am able to go with the flow. To accept that things will come and things will go. That the sock, the earring, the keys, are changing their nature, all simply as a manifestation of the inexplicable of life. Physics has reassuringly discovered that all substance is energy. That things would be visible sometimes, and not at others, make sense. Kind of.

No comments:

Post a Comment