Monday after Mother’s day.

Reflection, musing, thoughtful consideration is a human trait.  I doubt that dogs are able to perform such mental acrobatics as they are not blessed, and troubled with language and syntax.  It is natural for us homo sapiens to wonder to ourselves about the origin, about the essence of everything, to put the matter succinctly, about “the universe.”   Nietzsche writes:

The celestial order
in which we live is an exception;
this order
and the relative duration that depends on it
have again made possible
an exception of exceptions:
the formation of the organic.

The total character of the world,
however, is in all eternity chaos—
in the sense not of a lack of necessity
but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom,
and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.

Judged from the point of view of our reason,
unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule,
the exceptions are not the secret aim,
and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune
which may never be called a melody

Seated at my preferred corner spot in Starbucks here on State and 3rd in Geneva, everything that catches my eye is ordered, contrived to perform a function in a vast array of other objects, all similarly functional.  The order counter is at the “right” height for the average customer who walks in to place their drink or breakfast order.  Also the glass case to the right of the counter, displays to well illumined advantage the baked goods offered for purchase.  Other customers seated to my left peer purposefully into a phone or laptop screen concentrating with intent upon chosen content.  If I were to take a walk in the morning air down 3rd street, I would admire the beauty, and the order of blooming tulips and ornamental trees.  It seems that perception has a bias for order, for purpose, for what we mean by “meaning.”

Nietzsche suggests that we need pay attention to the many failures, the not-quite-right-attempts precursor to those successes.  How many “failures” figure into the chain of cause and effect relevant to the design of the interior of this Starbucks?  Too many to count.  How quickly we forget, once success is achieved!  The tulips?  How long, and by how much effort were the variations achieved in a species of tulip?  The Semper Augustus was the rarest and most treasured tulip of all time.  There were only 12 bulbs available at the time.

The following lines leave me with nothing to say in response.  Except perhaps a feeling of gratitude that I am here as a rare exception…

Let us beware
of saying that there are laws in nature.
There are only necessities:
     there is nobody who commands,
          nobody who obeys,
               nobody who trespasses.

Once you know that there are no purposes,
you also know that there is no accident;
for it is only beside a world of purposes
that the word “accident” has meaning.

Let us beware of saying
that death is opposed to life.
The living is merely a type of what is dead,
and a very rare type.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 109 by Friedrich Nietzsche