“Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
My father knows how to hold a wrench. Or rather, it knows how to hold him—or rather, the wrench knows, through him how to act, it’s motion back and forth about the nut becomes an analogy of unscrewing. Until, by some zen magic, some studied non-magic, the nut is off and in his hand.
One of my father’s favorite books is Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not so much because my father is a Buddhist of any but the most practical sort, but because he is a mechanic of the most enlightened sort.
In the background of his workshop, classical music plays; his shop stereo is always tuned to a local NPR affiliate with a heavily orchestral playlist. This juxtaposition is strange only to those who’ve never held a wrench for long, never felt its cool logic, never felt the warmth of the movement of a long-stuck bolt finally sliding free. Those who find this strange haven’t felt much or often the burning in the muscles of the forearm on what seems to be the thousandth micro-revolution of a hard-to-reach nut, never felt the muscles cramp and bind until a stasis is achieved in which not muscle nor wrench nor hand are felt as distinct and become the punctuated inevitability of a seedling sprouting a little every time out lighted consciousness allows a brief moment to see.
Illumination is the price we pay for the inability to witness larger superpositions. Things polarize for us constantly, either cold or hot, moving or still, particle or wave, created miracle or accident of the physical law.
This, too, fascinates my father. A good Mennonite boy who grew up with a literal Genesis, the thumbprint of God behind every cloud, he was also saddled with an engineer’s mental trap, capturing the thrum of the spheres and revealing it as the beating wings of a frightened gull.
He spends hours, still, reading about physics and faith, trying always to marry the two, straining, through one more act of study, to put the frequency of that bird’s wings back into the pantheon of metaphysical motions. But we all have our own skies populated by our own set of angels—some fundamental paradox the reconciliation of which drives us, the illogic of which tells its presence, despite our practical desire to see either/or, to bit out all by zeroes and ones, to record that the wind again today was from the south, and not from everywhere at once.
This is what time means to us: the inevitable trope towards what it is hard to say—the eternal reward of what may be nothing at all.