Funny how patterns form, isn't it?
They're all in the mind, born of memory and coincidence in the purest form of the word, but we are hypnotised by them so...tempted, in some cases, to impart them with meaning.
You can see a pattern in clouds, or the roots of a tree, or the stars in the sky. Just because you see the pattern doesn't mean it was put there. We can paint warriors in the night sky, spin tales of woodland giants, conjure gods of weather and omnipotence, but the perception of the pattern is in you, and the origin of the pattern is in any number of a billion billion interwoven causes and effects...in everything that went into creating you and your mind and the twisting of two roots, or the rippled ice clouds, or the line of stars light years apart.
But that doesn't mean that the emergence of a pattern from all of those strands of time and objects and events shouldn't give pleasure in the recognition.
It is playing with the way we look at the world.
Yesterday lunchtime, sitting in the park eating a sandwich, I turned the last page of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Two people further up on the long park bench was a young man. He was wearing flared jeans, a short-sleeved Ben Sherman shirt, and loafers.
So was I.
He was absent-mindedly eating a baguette, having a little difficulty because while the sandwich was in one hand, in the other he was holding a giant John Le Carre hardback. A leather satchel, not completely dissimilar to my own, was resting at his side.
After work on the subway to meet Krissa near her office, I pulled out a bit of writing I've been tinkering with, and I was reading it over and jotting down questions and corrections in the margins, waiting for the C train to pull itself uptown. At Prince Street a middle-aged woman got on with papers in her hand, and she sat next to me. So there we were, as the stations rattled slowly by, editing our copy, side by side.
Krissa and I ate Mexican and made our way home, and now that the play is past and there's no danger of us being unduly influenced by watching it, we watched the Kevin Kline version of Midsummer Night's Dream, picking out our past roles - Krissa was watching the fairies and Aegeus.
I was watching for my character: Snout in the play within the play, amongst the other actors - the Tinker, the Tailor...
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