I had originally thought of this part of my website as a daily blog. However, as you may have noticed it’s been far from daily almost since its inception. Of late I have been posting short pieces, thoughts, comments etc on Facebook and even shorter ones on Tweeter (@dzuckerbrot). So I’ve tended to use this blog for slightly larger or more complex writings.
I think that makes sense. We’ll see.
As the great god Wikipedia (no doubt a non-human avatar of Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, Anansi, Hanuman, et al) tells us in regards to his use of “so it goes” that it’s a literary device where:
“The story continually employs the refrain “So it goes” when death, dying, and mortality occur, as a narrative transition to another subject, as a memento mori, as comic relief, and to explain the unexplained. It appears 106 times.”
Wikipedia offers some other uses besides Vonnegut’s.
“So It Goes”
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So It Goes may refer to:
- So It Goes (TV series), a 1970s British music programme
- So It Goes / Goodbye for Now, an album by Perry Como
- “So It Goes” (song), a song by Nick Lowe
- “So It Goes”, a song by Corey Hart from Young Man Running
- “So It Goes”, a song by The Verve from A Northern Soul
- “So it goes”, a recurring refrain in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five
- So It Goes (Ratking album), 2014
- “So It Goes“, an episode of NCIS
But enough of Vonnegut lets get back to me. After all whose blog is it anyway?
When Karen pointed out to me that I often ended my part in a discussion with the comment: “we’ll see” I started to consider the implications. What did this mantra or incantation reveal about me. Was I just hedging my bets, did the universe seem so in flux that I was unable, or afraid, to make the simplest of predictions. I decided that was exactly right – it was an acknowledgment of the role of accidents and the limitations of my (and others’) vision.
I don’t know when I started saying “we’ll see”. Perhaps I adopted it from Silo. Certainly it was a phrase that featured in our conversations, where either or both of us might have terminated the proposal, the subject or the discussion with a wry “we’ll see”.
Was it mocking? Was it an acknowledgment of the role of the gods, the fates, the turning cosmic wheel of fortune? Maybe more of a reminder that outcomes depended on what I, or he, or the others, did with what was being proposed.
I believe it was all of that; a verbal knocking on wood, a secular insha’ Allah, or “God willing” and a very healthy reminder that one thing is what people say, another what they do, and in the end not everything depends on our intentions even though their direction may be the only thing that matters in the end.
Sometimes, faced with the monstrosity wrought by naïve faith and fanatic faith, I think of it as a battle-cry for a different kind of faith, one useful for life.
Can something as humble and simple as Silo’s Message really make any headway against the perilous mental plague with its accompanying sturm un drang of growing fanaticism and irrationality?
We’ll see.
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