Fated to Be One
by Sarah Odishoo

She felt two ways about fate: one was that it was the inevitable, and the other that it was a necessity. Our bodies, she perceived, are preordained, designed by the genes we inherit. We, she thought in terms of the human species, are stuck, pinned like a monarch butterfly on a genetic bulletin board with all the coding, the alphabet we can’t read, spelling us into our existence. Even though the signs are everywhere and in everything from Post-it note clouds to advanced stereo systems in our throats, we can’t change a thing. Most important, she concluded, we don’t know why we are predetermined in quite this way—on this material plane called “earth” and in these “space suits” called bodies; it’s all written on our foreheads, her mother used to say. And she finally concluded that her mother was right.

And it was that alphabet, the written, she was interested in. As in all codes, she reasoned, you had to know the secret to “read” what the message actually said. The question then became purpose. What is the point, she would ask. Why would our bodies and these minds be made in just this way? Think about it, the part of her mind that doubted she existed at all, why would we not be able to perceive anything that was of a material nature directly? All living, moving beings experienced this dimension through “senses,” those mysteriously appointed antennae that take in physical information only with the physical extensions of ubiquitous energy locked within a covering—skin, in the case of mammals.

Think about it, she persisted, hands touch to feel, ears receive sound waves to hear, mouth the entry for nourishment and water, and eventually the expulsion of all that can’t be digested, and the nose to take in the air and give it back. The eyes are the most fated, though, she reflected.

The eyes. She persevered. We take the world into our very bodies in the air we breathe and the sights we see. Everything we perceive travels into us, penetrates our bodies, pierces, breaks through, seeps in, invades, soaks in, and permeates vision. We have no control of our sight. Our eyes are receivers, like women, she thought. Like our souls, she re-thought.

After she played with the idea of sight as mirror, reflecting on all that she saw, she walked down the street and realized that the young man with blue and red tattoos up and down his arms and creeping up his neck, virtuoso dragons, she thought, was inside her; the flower man who handed her the flowers, a gifted character she had in her hand; the bag lady, bruised and bewildered, propped against the side of a building with her shopping bags circling her, pleading with her eyes to strangers passing, was living somewhere in the back of her skull, propped up by some force bigger than both of them, begging.

But one of the senses she perceived was missing. There is another receiving, reflecting sense no one ever includes in the litany of sensory preceptors: the sexual organs. Were they also fated, that is, inevitable, that the human race would choose not to manifest—make real—the very organs that created and reproduced them, that gave them the only democratic pleasure available to all of mankind? Like the Hebrews not naming their God, would naming sexual organs be unfaithful to their truth? Or was it a recognition of human’s inability to articulate the force that crowns all transcendent play—Creation itself?

Creation?

Why does it feel like “something” to be alive? Why when you put together millions of cells does suddenly “something” have a sense of itself? The search, some call it, for the Soul.

That word “Consciousness”—a window on the mind—and knowing—not know—but in the process of finding out—that we are not ever conscious of the present. We are always a little late—in the past—catching up. The brain, it seems, needs time to get its story straight. Perception and reality are out of synch before it reaches us. The brain is trying to piece together the best story it can tell.

We’re stuck in time, like fish in water, our brains oblivious that we are processing a little out of sequence as if thoughts seem to belong to someone else…a tiny tweak in the brain, a change of perception and what you see as real isn’t real to anyone else, and you are alone, completely and utterly alone.

Or imagine ourselves as bits of hardware, networked particles of some celestial organism. This incompleteness—this a little behind knowing—this certain uncertainty to search more and be certain-less drives us back to our origins, it seems, finally.

But making love is a race to eliminate not only consciousness but those pauses between conscious thought and another pause-thought, in order to raise an awareness of unconscious thought. This union of two separate bodies and minds in the process of finding the present moment when our perception is always a little late—behind the present moment—trying to catch up—sense and loss of sense simultaneously appear suddenly in the act of intense physical lovemaking.

In that chase with the other, our brains a little out of sequence, we try to catch up with our bodies and that tiny tweak in the brain—love or threat of loss of union, self-same-identity as one—changes perception until in that chase with the other, time gets erased, and like fish in water—we are oblivious—again.

But this time, we are knowingly and willingly oblivious, merging suddenly beyond our perception into a second one—a triumphant amnesia. This incompleteness—this a little behind knowing and a little ahead of it, this certain uncertainty, to search more and be certain-less—drives us back to our origins…One and One makes One…finally.