Opinion/Editorial
ENIGMA
To puzzle over the strangeness of life’s thrown pitches where the ‘ball,’ of life, which is supposed, in fact guaranteed, to come straight across the plate, instead bobs, dips and goes right by with no opportunity to even swing one’s ‘bat’ at, is the kind of mental exercise that flows across the mind when lying in bed late at night or maybe vegetating in front of a television set wherein the images firing across the screen are barely seen much less remembered. Think of watching the pope doing his thing on the television screen while “sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe” …. song that plays in the background on the radio. Are the pope and his whole philosophical presentation more apropos and meaningful than the rock group Air Supply’s lyrics?
To get up and get going for the day, stopping only to make a call to a cell phone company to have service reconnected and be told by ‘Lawrence,’ speaking in a semi-foreign English tongue somewhere in deepest India, that he’s sorry, starts everything with a smile. Lawrence, speaking for all modern corporations of size and high profit, uses carefully chosen words to give the impression that his company throws only nice looping fast ones straight and true while the ball he’s tossed floats right on by. There was no chance to swing because Lawrence’s pitch required that a backup credit card should have been posted to the account (and never was) to allow the player to possess a bat. Another credit card comes out and is posted, the procedure only taking half an hour while the pope gets himself halfway through a Catholic mass so he can get back to waving the incense around, which he loves. Stepping up to the plate the guy with the expired card gets another swing at it. Lawrence tosses an easy one down the lane and it’s a hit, bouncing once before Lawrence fields it. But Lawrence, being like the pope, filled with happiness and apologies if not prayer, allows the batter, running like hell to reach first base before he throws to second. The second base is not to be accessed. That’s for next month.
Why is there so little fairness in the universe? Why do things not go one person’s way more often? Why are there so few ‘fastballs straight and true’ thrown across everyone’s home plate of life? It’s that way because of only two things. Survival. Perspective. It’s easier to conceive of coming upon a field of lemon trees, picking the fruit to discover it’s too sour to eat, and then coming up with the addition of sugar to make lemonade than it is to find the lemon field and sugar when dying of dehydration. All animal and plant life are driven by survival to procreation, yet that first state, a complete function of the second motivator, is seldom considered when humans think or discuss what is happening or why they are performing some behavior. There is no romance involved in the reproductive process of Homo sapiens reproduction. Romance and love are creations of man to satisfy motivational needs brought about by perspective. One man or woman appears better looking than another because of human preconceptions about genetic perfection. The most attractive humans are those humans with the most general looks. Deviances from generalized “normal” appearance are all considered to lessen beauty (a morphing of a million faces will produce an image chosen by almost everyone as the most beautiful every time!). Males pursue sexual union for the pleasure of the act while females pursue sexual union for qualitative gain. Uncomfortable truth.
The single element that makes survival more likely among humans is deception. Uncomfortable truth. That slow looping fastball to be delivered across the plate in the baseball analogy of life is first lied about by the ‘pitcher’ by engaging the perspective ‘batter’ in conversation. The pitcher prepares the batter for a straight slow ball and then throws a hard and fast inside-breaking curve. Men all lie about what they want and so do women, especially when it comes to motivation about procreation. If men and women tell the truth they come to be known as bachelors and spinsters.
“You can be right, and you can be alone,” a beautiful woman once mentioned in a local coffee shop. She was not talking about procreation, love, attractiveness, or baseball. She was talking about life itself. If humans are to succeed in fierce competition with other humans (and it is all fierce competition) then humans must come to be experts in deception not in being right. Donald Trump is lecturing the nation right up there along with the pope of all Catholicism. He’s allowed to do this to great international success because of his ability to deceive while he attempts to give the appearance that he’s actually the one telling the truth. If he were telling the truth he’d be broke, alone, and quite probably naked for the short period of his remaining survival on this earth.
“Life is a mystery. Everyone must stand alone. I hear you call my name, and it feels like home.” Madonna, the singer, has never received plaudits as a philosopher, but her words expressed in the song Like a Prayer could not be more true or descriptive about human life. So many times, the philosophers of our day can only be encountered in the entertainment industry simply because of how their message is sugar-coated for more effective delivery (think lemonade) and to receive any real compensation for their work at all. In the movie Princess Bride the character, mouthing words written by another unrecognized philosopher says: “get ready for disappointment,” when he encounters an enigmatic superior foe. Life is an enigmatic superior foe to each human being still living on planet Earth. Why humans are here cannot be convincingly explained by any physicist, anthropologist, or even the pope. What ‘here’ really is cannot be rationally defined either. What we know is that it is all a mystery with some small parts uncomfortably understood and, although humans can right and potentially alone, they all share tribal relationships without fail.
When human beings hear their names called it feels like home. Human beings can live with unsolved mysteries and enigmas, but they can’t live without other humans or the life they live is alone and might not be termed to be life at all.
