The Web of Life, Part 4: Intervals Between What Happens

Another way of talking about the web is that there are different levels of magnification. For example, supposing you take a piece of embroidery. And here it is, obviously, in front of you; an ordered and beautiful object. And then you take out a microscope, and you look at the individual threads. At a certain point, as you turn up the microscope, you’ll get a hopeless tangle which doesn’t make any sense at all. The wrapped fiber that constitutes the thread is a mess. Hasn’t been organized, nobody did anything about it. But at the level of magnification at which you actually see it with the naked eye, it’s all been organized.

Alright, now keep turning up that microscope. Take one of those individual threads in the fiber that seems to be so chaotic, and go into the constitution of that. And again, you’ll find fantastic order. You’ll find the most gorgeous designs of molecules. Then, keep turning it up. And again, at a certain level you’ll find chaos again. Alright, keep going. And at another level you’ll find there’s marvelous order.

Now, you see, order and randomness constitute—in other words—the warp and the woof. Where everything is—in order, everything’s under control; in randomness, it’s all over—it’s a mess. But we wouldn’t know what order was unless we had messes. It’s the contrast of order and messes that order itself depends upon. And so in exactly the same way, it is the contrast of on and off, there and not there—in other words, life and death, being and non-being—that constitutes existence. Only we pretend that the random side of things, the disorderly side of things, could possibly win in the game of competition—or, I would rather call it collaboration—between the two.

When you lose sight of the fact that the order-principle and the random-principle go together, that’s exactly the same predicament as losing sight of the fact that all individually delineated things and beings are connected underneath. You know, just like mountains stick out of the earth and there’s a fundamental Earth underneath them. So all of us, as different things, we stick out of reality and there’s a continuity underneath—but you ignore that, you see? That’s the thing that’s left out.

See? I’m just giving you many examples of the same principle. But really, deep down, we are—each one of us—everything that there is. Doing it this way, and then again that way, and then again another way, and that’s what it keeps up doing for ever, and ever. Only, it has holidays which are called deaths. You know, in the story of the creation of the world, in the Bible, God works for seven days and rests the seventh. It’s necessary to have a holiday. Holiday is holy day. And the Sabbath for the Jews is Saturday, for the Christians it’s Sunday, because Saturday is the last day of the week, but Sunday is the first day of the week. And it’s a slight difference of alteration between the Jewish temperament and a Christian temperament. Some people like to take the holiday and then do the work, other people like to do the work and then take the holiday. And since the Jews do the work first and then take the holiday, they’re always a little up on the Christians in business!

But the point is that a holiday—this pause between something going on—is of the essence of the idea of a web. For example, there’s a famous Irishman who is supposed to have described a net as “a lot of holes tied together with string.” So the holes are very, very important. And these are the holy days, you see? The holes. It all goes together.

So there must be that interval, and it exists on all kinds of levels. It isn’t simply that there is—for example, a sound that is sounded is a vibration, and the sound goes on and off. Everything that we call sound is sound-silence. There is no such thing as pure sound; you couldn’t hear it. What you hear is that tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap against the eardrum, But it happens very fast so that you get more of an impression of sound than you do of silence. But between every little undulation of sound there is also an interval. When you listen to music you hear a melody. But what you hear, actually, that makes the melody significant, are the steps between the tones; what we call the intervals. And a person who doesn’t hear intervals is tone-deaf. He only hears noises, he doesn’t hear the steps.

So that interval between whatever happens is as important as what happens. So we’ll call these two things the sound and the silence, the life and the death, somewhat analogous in weaving to the warp and the woof. Now look at the marvelous way in which the warp and woof go together. A piece of cloth is an extraordinary thing when you consider it’s made of a line of string. There’s something that always struck me as a child; fabulous, that string—just thread—could turn into cloth. Why should it hang together? How improbable.