The Chicken Wire Theory of Reality - #Metaphysics #Memory

Image by Leo from Pixabay

When I was in graduate school, I would often get involved long conversations about the philosophy of life and the nature of reality. Those discussions, often facilitated by marijuana, had an intoxicating joy about them. They were almost as good as sex. After a joint or two, we saw everything clearly. We understood, and could articulate, how the universe worked. Even if we had conflicting theories, the verbal and conceptual explorations were their own reward, the mental gymnastics intrinsically satisfying. It didn’t matter much that all that clarity vanished the next day, to be replaced by a fuzzy conviction that we really had made some progress in unraveling the eternal mysteries.

There’s a theory I came up with during one of these talk-fests, though, that has stuck with me. The basic idea was that there were actually many parallel universes, joined by choice points, which I visualized as the shared vertices in the hexagons that make up chicken wire. (In case you grew up in a totally urban environment and have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s an image of chicken wire.)

As we navigate through our individual lives (so the theory went), we traverse the strands and periodically come to the vertices where we have to make some decision. Depending on our choice, we may find ourselves in a different universe.

Of course the image above is just two dimensional. Imagine this sort of mesh extruding out from and disappearing backward into the page. That would be three dimensional. It seemed obvious to my friends and me that the structure of the cosmos had to have many more dimensions, which meant many more possible paths through space and time. The repeating cyclic structure of the paths, however, meant that you might later shunt yourself back into a universe where you’d been before.

When I look back at my (fairly long) life, I can identify critical decisions that sent me on paths I never expected to travel. Some of these involved relationships. What if I’d married the romantic, melancholic poet with whom I was so desperately in love? I remember one ecstatic night when I was sure that was my future. He eventually became a lawyer and had four children – not a future I can readily imagine now.

What if I’d stayed with my Master, the man who initiated me into dominance and submission? Lisabet Sarai the writer, borne of erotic fantasies fueled by our few short years together and our long years apart, probably would not exist.

If I’d chosen someone other than my peripatetic current partner (improbably still married to me after more than forty years), it’s perhaps less likely I’d now be living as an expatriate in Asia.

On the other hand, I had a fierce desire to see the world from my earliest years, reading stories about ancient Egypt and feudal Japan, the jazz age in New York and the Gold Rush in California. Maybe I’d have ended up experiencing all the fascinating places and cultures I’ve been privileged to visit even if I’d settled on an entirely different companion. And given the fact that I spontaneously started writing poems and short stories when I was in third grade, it might have been inevitable that I’d become an author.

That’s the thing about the chicken wire theory. There can be themes, cycles, regions of meaning that you revisit again and again, regardless of your decisions. As I look back on my seven-plus decades of life, I increasingly see order and consistency in events that seemed random at the time. Perhaps this reflects the influence of earlier choices on later happenings, but it might just as well indicate some higher level patterns in the structure of time.

That notion is somewhat comforting since it suggests that no one choice is critically important. Even if you find yourself taking a bleak detour for a while, you have a reasonable chance of making it back to the central artery of your life. That realization makes me smile.

And no, at the moment I am not stoned.