Signs and symbols, signs and symbols, which of us doesn’t love a sign or symbol?
Last week I found a key-ring on the street. Was I meant to find it? Of course I wasn’t. But it seemed burdened with a freight of meaning. And wouldn’t it be nice to find a meaning.
We heirs of the enlightenment, we know there is no meaning and no plan. We know the whole shebang is random chance and nothing else, that we’re the arbitrary kids of happenstance and chemistry.
But that’s tough knowledge to have. It leaves us spinning in nowhere to no purpose.
And so, in despite of reason, there sleeps in us still a sense of something else, some sort of power that runs the show, for better or for worse. It doesn’t matter what you call it - fate, destiny - it’s the thing that determines how things go.
It is everywhere in literature. It is the Moving Finger of Omar Khayyam, the finger that writes, and, having writ, moves on. It is the ‘‘Immanent Will’’ of Thomas Hardy, that draws the iceberg and the Titanic to the same fateful co-ordinates. It’s the divinity that shapes our ends, according to Hamlet, rough-hew them how we will.
But how do we read its mind? How can we make it tell what it has in store for us?
That’s the riddle. That’s the task. Hence the lust for signs and symbols.
There have always been people who pretend to know, who claim connection with the Great Inscrutable, who will interpret for a fee the signs and symbols. Shamans, juju men, palm readers, astrologers, seance-wallahs, spiritualists, necromancers, entrail-readers, sybils, prophets and countless other charlatans, all promising to peep round time’s corner and tell us what’s on the way, all plying a trade as old as gullibility.
Bibliomancers seek answers by opening the Bible at random and putting a finger blindly on a verse. Romans did the same with the works of Virgil, no doubt to the same effect.
Sometimes we have a go at it ourselves. If we’re unsure which course of two to take, we’ll toss a coin, give fate its chance to speak, to guide us this way or that.
We know it is blind luck, but deep down we want it not to be.
Why a higher power should need to speak through texts or coins, we never ask. If it really ran the show it could write stuff in the sky for all to read.
But no, it does things indirectly, through signs and symbols, the guts of a sacrificial ox, burn marks on toast, stars in the sky, dreams, or just randomly discovered objects.
All can be signs. All can be symbols. Which brings us to the key-ring.
Mid-morning in an unexalted street in an unexalted suburb. No-one about but a scattering of cars from recent decades parked along the kerb. And there beside a hedge that had collected litter and not been addressed by a caring hand in half a dozen years, lay the key-ring.
No keys attached but two little fobs, one circular, one shaped more like a pear, the whole thing made of the cheapest metal, but metal nonetheless, and our eyes are attuned to the value of metal.
I looked around - for found is found but still one does not want to be found finding, or at least not finding and keeping - and seeing nothing other than the battered cars I bent to pick it up.
No great weight to it, no heft in the palm, a shoddy trinket. Idly, thoughtlessly, I turned the first of the two fobs over in my palm.
‘‘Be proud of yourself,’’ it said in bright enamel letters. And oh, a little something fluttered in my doubting heart, my cynical heart, my heart that has no faith in signs or symbols.
Less idly now, less thoughtlessly, I turned the second fob over. ‘‘Great things are coming,’’ it said in bright enamel letters.
I stared at it. I looked around again at the quiet suburban thoroughfare, the blinkered houses, the scruffy lawns. Be proud of yourself. Great things are coming.
I weighed the key ring in my hand, reread the fobs, then bent and put the key-ring back, just where I’d found it, by the littered hedge, both fobs face down again.
For someone else to find a sign and symbol.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
