Beautiful Mistakes

What were we doing when the question of "mistake" came up? I think we were working in the yard and admiring the newly sprouted life in the few green oases scattered around the pebble-covered garden. Martin was explaining how a funny flower in one of these green spots saw the light of day entirely as a mistake: the seed that happened to be inside a pot his mother gave him somehow got hold of the soil and grew happily oblivious of its accidental, "mistaken" origins.

But then, you could say this for the entire life. It's just a mistake. That took root.

I am choosing to understand "mistake" as a "lucky coincidence" because this is how I like to think about it. Here's an example. Ever since I got the simple, plastic bird-feeder and hung it on the branch of a tree in the yard, the local sparrows, starlings, and a couple of unidentified bird visitors hang out in front of my window, inventing ever more acrobatic ways of getting to the food inside the feeder. Some days ago I decided to record the event, waited patiently with my little camera, stealthily approached the window as much as possible while the birds were busy fluttering around the cage, hardly breathed trying to stay invisible, and shot a brief video. The next day I transfered it to the computer, and while I was watching it, I realized that it had a completely unplanned-for background music to it, which I wasn't aware of while shooting the video. As it happened, Martin was practicing upstairs and some of his notes wafted from behind the closed door and down the stairs, infiltrating the moment which I thought was reserved for the birds in my lens, expanding its seemingly controlled parameters into a completely new universe. And what was created was a mini world of 19 seconds, full of incidents. Full of "mistakes."

Today I found out that a friend died. I am dedicating this small written record to the "mistake" which had brought us together, and which is called Emily Dickinson, or Philip Larkin -- depending on how you look at it. In the winter of 1999, I changed the topic of my Ph.D. thesis proposal from the poetry of Miss Dickinson to that of Mr. Larkin, and that's how Terry walked through the door of my life (to supervise this "mistake"), with a good-natured moustache, a hearty chuckle, and a healthy scepticism towards all things pretentiously academic. What good laughs we had, together with Larkin, over the folly of mankind. What deep thoughts we thought, glimpsing, through Larkin, at occasional moments of beauty and grace (mistakes in the overall madness?).

There aren't any mistakes, really. Only "a unique endeavour/To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower/Of being here" (Philip Larkin, "The Old Fools").