Symmetry

Let us talk about the cause and a principal, let us talk about the source. Let us talk life, all life, all manner of life, all expression, all emotion of life. Let us talk life and all its forms and expressions, let us take it and like a piece of bread, crumble it into smaller and smaller bites, smaller and smaller crumbs. Let us take our thumbs and grind them over the piece of bread until every piece of it is indivisible. Elemental. This is the nature of life, according to the old philosophers, this piece that is indivisible is the core of existence, the pulse of the thing that is.

The headlines read “Euphoric Democrats Take Control of Congress,” “Miers Resigns as White House Counsel,” Wiretaps, mother wonders if antipsychotics killed her son. The cosmetic diet, the sky isn’t falling, just pieces of it, art above and below with life in the middle.

The middle is rife with op ed pieces about republicans and democrats, Catholics and Presbyterians, Us(s) and Them(s).

People are sworn into this life, they place their hand on a bible and recite the words, they repeat after other people, the words are registered somewhere that is not home here in the mind, but outside.

There is a thought that we spend much of our time outside of our bodies, on the job, working at home. There is this thing to clean and that thing to clean.

They came to change out the water heater. It had been rusting for years and finally burst at the seams. The pilot light kept snuffing out, seemingly of its own accord. One moment it was there and the next it was an empty space where the remnants of flame tickling the side of the cover had licked it black. The thermostat would say it should be on, but leaning against the pipes of the radiator brought shivers and goosebumps instead of bone melting heat.

Feet had to be covered or risk shriveling from the floor, curling into themselves from the shock of the cold. And in bed, with the blankets piled and sweat pants and sweatshirts heaped to the point of gasping for air because of the weight, and still warmth was hard to come.

Many things were cold in the way it makes the body love itself, shrink and draw inward, wrapping itself with itself. There wasn’t much conversation then. There wasn’t much of anything.

The landlady came with a roll of cash to give to the workers. They came, three together, though one stayed to do the work. His name was Maxamillian and he had one eyebrow and a propensity for winking. His face was flat and broad and he resembled the head of a shovel or spade.

His cell phone played a Boy George remix and his hands were dry and pasty from the skin coming off, uniformly, in flakes.

He has one real eyebrow, the other is meticulously painted on, to match the shape and conture of the other. His eyes are dark and abyss-like, drinking in all the colors of the world and rendering black. They flare in the middle and sweep down, top meeting bottom, at either side. His lips are thin, with his cheeks expanding, taking up the largest percentage of his face.

I ask if he needs something, a bucket and a towel, he requests and they are blue and blue. Café, it’s tradition to ask if the workers want café. The first few times, I asked if they wanted water, café, qualcosa da bere. They always shake their heads violently at the offering of any other drink besides café.

Sometimes the café is crappy. I didn’t have the right cups and served it in wax coated Dixie cups. They smirked and drank it anyway, worse than an Autogrill café.

Each time, after I try to say something to Maximillian, he turns and winks with the eye that has the etched eyebrow hovering over it.

At first, before I studied his face while he was trying to find out which wire was the hot wire, a glance, I read him as off, something not right, odd curious. There was something out of place with him and, I hate to say this, with that first glance my heart stuttered and eyes squinted. The surprise at expecting something and it being completed different from reality happened. It was the state of surprise that leadened people’s feet, chained them and set the whole weight of the body off balance.

I tried not to stare, not wanting to be rude. I was drawn to the disproportion. I wanted to know how he was different.

Finally, looking and looking and looking I thought, aha, he shaves his eyebrows, he’s transgendered, that’s it. Then I saw the other brow, arched perfectly, hairs splaying out, thick at the bridge of the nose, over the eye, slimming down and following the line of the temple until it puttered out from the bushel to a few dark hairs.

It was the asymmetry that perplexed, that elicited careful study and observation.

I roamed his face for signs of scars, for a misshapenness to the underlying structure. Earrings, painted fingernails, a trace of glitter on his lips. I looked for a limp, variations in the bodily form, betrayals in his movement.

Everything else was just so. It was just the eyebrow. When he wiped the flecks of rusty metal shavings, he was careful to avoid the eyebrow.

He reminded me of a fitness article I had read, about a competitor without arms. It was nothing so horrific as a car accident, a machining accident at the fertilizer or hot dog plant. It was simple. She was born without arms. It happens. She had faced staring all her life, like Andrea the Giant, or Siamese twins and other carnival acts. She hated it, people looking and feeling sorry for her without knowing, giving her preferential treatment, in one form or another, because she was different.

Andrea had said the people he liked best were animals, because they don’t judge, they don’t make stories, formulate theories on why you are the way you are. The uncomfortable perfidious gaze, the drawing attention to the obvious, you’re not like everyone else.

Babies show a preference for symmetry, they like balanced faces, they like harmonious tunes and screech at any chaotic clamor. So this bias, is this really something we are predestined for?


Nature holds both aspects, there cannot be good without its opposite, bad, wither wither wither, there cannot be matter without antimatter, black holes without expanses of tangible space stretching forever in all directions and dimensions and occupying what was nothing. SO perhaps there can also not be something without nothing.

Maybe there is something to be said for the creation stories that describe, among all things, darkness and nothing as first. And darkness begets chaos and chaos, order and order, structure, and structure, things that need placement into the refined and ordered system of the universe.

And there was light, the differences are in shape and order and position. In shape, A is different from N, it is said. A is for anything and N for nothing. In order, AN is different from NA, that is anything into nothing and nothing into anything. And M is different from W in the way of position, where M is macaques and W is whales and thus there is the land and the sea and the are not the same thing and do not occur in the position, expect in the blatant obliteration of one over the other, the tidal way that is like an asteroid impacting the surface of the planet and sending out a shockwave to disrupt all life, from a principal and a cause, breaking it down past its elementary elements.

How long have we been trying to break life down into the core, the essence of its existence? My question is, today, on my way to the park there is a cat that has been there for a few days now. It is hard to say the cause, it’s head is crushed from a car tire passing over it, it’s body is growing lumpy. Maybe it lapped up something poisonous that someone threw out in the trash. It’s little bits of guts, of red flesh hanging from the tattered parts of its body, is that its essence. The crushed jaw, the gaping mouth, the pink tongue hanging out at an angle, which part is this essence we are striving for? Is it the atoms, the particles of its body, red blood cells, plasma, nuclei, is it the hormones, is it what it had for its’ last meal?

There was another cat, sniffing out the trash as we left the park. It sat on the other side of the road, observing the body, the asymmetry of it. After we passed by, in the car, it pushed off of its haunches and slunk towards the body. They were the same colors, white hair with swabs of a grey tiger print. This cat, the live one was thick with age and had pieces of its ears missing. Its cheeks were puffed up and its eyes dark and beyond moody, firmly dug into survival. I coasted down the hill, flicking my eyes to the rearview mirror to take it in, the cats, one observing the other through its nose. What could it know? Could it smell the death and learn to avoid the toxin, could it say goodbye, could it eat the other cat?

Cats are carnivores, yes, but cannibals? I’m not sure what the protocol is in the animal kingdom, but chickens will eat other chickens. Is this a matter of what is plentiful, is starvation a motivating factor into eating the flesh that is you but not you?

I was waiting for the one cat to eat the other. It sniffed, breathed in the body and the decay and passed.