All That is the Case

I'm sitting out the back at a wooden table reading a book. Trying not to lean too hard on my blue and green striped elbows. There's grit on the table.

The wind blows the shadow strands of my hair over the pages. I look up. I see something moving on the low wall near the rosemary and pencil pine, above the black pot. It looks like a tiny white and ginger mouse, or a chicken. I look harder. It's a feather, ginger at each end and white in the middle. The feather is attached by invisible threads to the brick wall. The wind is making it twist and toss and rock back and forth and seem to be pecking the air.

Now I know that it's not alive, it loses my sympathy. And immediately regains it. What makes it not alive anyway? It's moving as though it's alive. What's the difference? It's trapped. But it isn't going to die there. It loses my sympathy again.

I go back to my book, which is about Kurt Gödel the mathematician. I'm reading the words of Wittgenstein: The world is everything which is the case. Kurt Gödel is just about to present to his philosophical and mathematical friends in the Viennese coffee shop, proof that the world is not everything that is the case. I like this.

It's warm. I go inside. There's some orange stuck in my teeth, from lunch. I'm thinking about the feather. I'm thinking: after I've got rid of the orange I'll go and look at that feather close up. I get some dental floss. I walk outside still flossing. I hope no one can see me. I bend down and look at the feather.

It is in fact two feathers, each with a ginger tip, and joined in the middle by white fluffy down. They are caught on a filament of dried grass sticking up between the bricks. This is why they looked like a chicken.

I like this too.

The Mustard Seed

I was surprised by the intrusion of the mustard seed into your musical criticism, said Pliny the Elder. But I suppose I was supposed to be. Did you finally manage to get it out from between your teeth?

Yes, but not until I got home at the end of the day, I said. There is nothing as efficacious as dental floss.

True, agreed Pliny, but to return to the parable of the mustard seed.....

Parable?

You meant it as a parable, did you not? A story to illustrate the dual nature of surprise?

I did, but is it a parable if it's something that really happened?

That all depends on the telling. Jesus had a parable about a mustard seed, so I've heard.

Oh yes I know that one. Consider the mustard seed. It's very small but it grows into a large tree that birds can shelter in. It's supposed to represent the Kingdom of Heaven.

But a mustard seed doesn't grow into a large tree! It grows at best into a middle-sized bush.

That's a good point. Whatever was Jesus thinking of? Perhaps he was remembering a time he had one stuck between his teeth.