Reflections on fate: choice

Most people have a strong instinct for the existence of fate. At the most superstitious level this amounts to a belief in some divine interventionism, the fixed unfolding of the universe, the preordained: it is insh’allah, God’s mysteriously wayward benevolence. It is the promise of true meta-human intelligence, that mighty beyond at which are somehow aimed whispered prayers and wailed incantations, sacrifice and libation, in the hope for recognition and influence. It has been promised that fate will seek out the good man and reward him.

Less superstitiously, fate can be thought of as the timely presentation of opportunities, in which reality is the secondary manifestation of potentialities, spaces ready to be filled out by action and choice. Fate is the intersection within reality of the timeliness of a chance, and the possibility of an action. It is a progression of opportunities to be taken, voluntary actions to be performed and life events to be realised. Fate is the memorial evidence for the unending will of man.

I am sitting at a cafe table alone, it is hot and cobbled, I have a coffee, an ice-cream, an empty seat and a vacant evening. How nice it would be to share this with another. On cue, a spark-filled woman silhouettes towards me. Divine intervention, perhaps gaia’s munificence, the universe unfolding as it should. Or an opportunity in which life is dangling a carrot in exchange for a reckless tilt at humiliation? I think the latter and do nothing. She walks past. I tell myself once is a coincidence, a statistical inevitability. But...if somehow our paths cross again...then that would be fate, that would be the universe’s way of telling me it was meant to be. A moment later she does walk back, déjà vu, a fighter jet who missed its target, the postman, again. If I do nothing, it is not fate but just a girl changing her mind about her destination. If I act successfully, it becomes providence, I have made God’s choice by acting it out: all I need to do is act. But I do need to act.

This fate is not determined by external reality, but is voluntarily created. This fate is a potential energy, a coil of reality as yet immobile, but ready to stretch and spring. It is not in the world, but perhaps a semantic montage of potentials, possibilities, choices and actions; as a cause in itself it can only emerge later as a contrived postscript. Like morality, fate is reverse engineered, a story told backwards. I can fulfill providence’s gift, take fate by the balls and shake my future out of it; or wait for it to come to me, until I can see the whites of its eyes, until I can read the writing on the wall.

There is a unifying, if esoteric, standpoint available: that fatefulness emerges when action is in alignment with the universe. To be fully in contact with reality, to be really plugged in, is to always inhabit the reality which the universe presents. All that is required to answer perfectly the questions posed by life is to be aware there is a dialogue. The space opens, unfolds, and you must enter it, moment after moment, as if always guessing the right key for the lock. To continue is out of choice, of agency, but of an agency which is one with fate. Fate, in this state, is doing exactly what you are doing, nothing more, nothing less. The world turns, do you turn with it?

The Wheel of Fortune

Siena cathedral, 1372. A king sits looking down from his architecturally permanent throne, dressed in robes and holding a globe. To the East and South men are clinging on as they plummet towards rock-bottom, their robes and wild hair billowing and blowing, at the West, with great toil, his legs wrapped around the slippery wheel and his arm gesturing upwards, a man is emerging from his nadir, reaching in longing for emergence and salvation.

Looking at the image, one cannot tell whether it is the wheel that turns, the men merely able to cling on wherever it takes them, unwittingly emerging in the courts of kings and then inexplicably being cast down again, the relentless comedy of their lives as inevitable as the repeated crushing of an ant stuck to a wheel; or if it is the wheel which is motionless and the men who endlessly pull themselves along, all their effort spent in seeking the next summit, yet disorientated enough to be unaware of whether this summit is above or below. They crawl along this Sisyphean track, round and round, this way and that on the möbius of life, in their own cycles of fulfillment, hubris, calumny and infamy.

The king alone seems secure, seated as he is, uniquely stationary, poised, phlegmatic, as you may expect the patron’s image to be. Or perhaps of all men he is just the least aware of the nosedive which inevitably awaits him, blindfolded by hubris, oblivious to his imminent fall: as The Fool skips gaily to his doom, The King sits still as his mundane greatness rotates and is ground into dust, half sunk, his visage shattered.