A SIMPLE CELL.
There are five people in a solar system.
It is Xmas day.
Each of them sees themselves as the sun, with the other four a planet spinning round, to their magnetism.
It is a fact.
We behave this way.
On one level, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, we are a collection of a few billion molecules.
All, tiny, individual points, and we, as we perceive ourselves to be, actually do not exist.
We are not solid in this universe.
Of course it would be absurd for a molecule, in my big toe, to understand the whole of me, for it to have a concept of my wonderful brain, my great thoughts, feelings, understandings, knowledge, appears ridiculous.
The whole of me subjugated to the comprehension of a molecule?
How preposterous!
Proportionately, therefore, there is no argument, surely, with the fact that each human being is a molecule of humanity?
But we all know, living as we do in a society where everyone knows everything, how the whole world should be.
Each molecule of humanity imagines it has the answer to the world’s problems.
Families all over the ‘Christian’ part of this planet Earth gather today to participate in this Xmas celebration; as they pontificate their opinion on how the world should be run or on how it is another’s fault their own failings.
It could be any city, town, village in either hemisphere.
Let us say our five are in Paris celebrating the Nativity in the Rue Notre Dames de Champs at the back of Montparnasse.
Our party consists of an estranged photographer, Dennis, and his increasingly eccentric ex wife, Caroline, who dabbles in the world of prophecy.
They meet for the traditional repast at their son, Nick’s house. Their daughter, Natasha who at 22 is sixteen months younger than her brother, coordinates the event.
Nick’s girlfriend, Louise, also joins them.
It begins disastrously owing to the ‘astrological conjunction between Mars and Saturn’ delaying Caroline’s departure from her house.
Nick and Louise when joined by Natasha and Dennis are unprepared and undecided as to the preparation of food.
Underneath the varying opinions as to how to make the day as ‘jolly’ as it is supposed to be, lie vast chasms of experience. Unwritten, unsaid, divisions and unions, infest the spaces between them.
Each knows how the other should be and forgets themselves in the rush to tell the other how to be. Yet the past is dead, gone, irretrievable and from its ashes, the meat of sacrifice is consumed, between wine and paper crowns.
In millions of households throughout our world, this Xmas, eyes are met across tables and that which has passed over, in time; yet has left its trace in the posture of the living, is held tensely, in the chest.
It breaks out in an inevitable clash.
It is the nature of these occasions and the set up. The solar system in which there is competition to be the sun.
Emotion quietens, in the wintry snows of Paris and in the silent Park opposite the house in Montparnasse, which could be anywhere in the world.
We are all a solar system. Within each of us lies a Pluto, Saturn, Venus, Mars, Earth, Mercury and Neptune. But we are drawn out to always seek, in the external for answers to questions that have an internal source.
There is no unity and so things fall apart.
The source seeks us but we refuse it preferring to cast out the mote in another’s eye before even noticing that we have an eye ourselves, let alone a mote in it.
It is the same for us all.
Little molecules of humanity resonating till the waves that wash this simple cell, desert me.
