A Network of Legends

Following up on my previous posts about Personal Legends and Road Takens I would like to extend this notion of a forward moving itinerary that we all follow under heavy influence of coincidences and random circumstances. Not only do we, thinking human entities, follow these routes but EVERYTHING else does as well. And by everything I mean everything. This connection dawned on me the night before I left Cairns to go to Darwin to start work there at another office of the company I worked for at the time. This transition was extremely stressful as I was in the midst of learning a new job, bidding farewell to friends - new as well as old - and moving all my stuff from place to place at the same time. Yet as I was eating a hurried dinner at my hostel before going downtown for my last night celebration I had another epiphany (you never know when they occur!). I was consuming a salmon salad, not a regular dish of mine yet I had a couple of days earlier said farewell to a close friend who was leaving for Brisbane and she had left some of her food behind including a can of salmon, and I was now getting rid of my remaining food. Whilst eating I bit down on a fishbone of one of the salmons which made up the contents of the can and that's when the legend of that particular salmon dawned on me. This was a creature spawned in waters somewhere far away from my current location, had lived its entire life before being caught by fishermen stripped of its good parts before being chopped up in a meat grinder, canned and put on the shelf in a supermarket in Cairns, bought by my friend and then through her passed on to me to have its bony remains flicked away by me to end up on the floor outside the hostel kitchen. From there it would presumably be swept up and sent to a dump somewhere where its journey would probably come to an end. This particular example may not be the most interesting to think of, yet it did make me realize that everything has a personal legend even fish and their bones they leave behind. By coincidence they end up halfway around the world crossing legends with countless others, both persons and objects. Since then I really appreciate the act of passing on objects to others. I exchanged the copy of The Alchemist that was given to me by a special friend to another book which made another huge impression on me and will form the subject of a later post and concordantly I'd like to think that my copy of The Alchemist will similarly be picked up by another person and cause a similar train of thoughts as it did to me. Another example is a snorkel I picked up of the bottom of the sea in Sydney just like new. In Darwin I went to the extraordinary Kakadu National Park where my friend and tour guide lost his snorkel while diving freshwater pools there. Thus before leaving Darwin I gave my spare snorkel to him continuing its own personal legend. These inanimate objects all have personal legends and to think about where it has taken them can be a fascinating train of thought. As anyone who knows me can tell you I often cite The Simpsons in almost all contexts. But the show also provides a great example of the personal legend of objects in the very memorable episode spoofing Citizen Kane where Mr. Burns is trying to get reunited with his lost teddy bear, Bobo. As viewers we are shown Bobo’s personal legend from the moment Burns lost it as a child after which both Charles Lindbergh and Adolf Hitler briefly possess it before it ends up in the Kwik-E-Mart and bought inside a block of ice by the Simpsons. Obviously, few objects have personal legends this interesting, but the very notion of what they might have witnessed can be tantalizing in itself.

I remember looking at a helmet of a German knight of one of the crusades at the National History Museum in Berlin, Germany back in February 2012. The journey did dawn on me then but only now can I label it. To think about the journey this helmet had taken from being formed through to the tools of a blacksmith several hundreds of years ago, to being on the head of a knight fighting and possibly killing people or being killed while wearing that very helmet, to ending as a trophy or heirloom handed down through generations perhaps stowed away in a casket or an attic for years on end, to end up in front of me in a museum in the modern sprawling metropolis that is Berlin, a city which is incredible on its own, is indeed fascinating. This ties in to my general fascination with history and how everything around us tells us a story of what came before. This will form the subject of a later post (I've had a lot of epiphanies lately!). This helmet had a personal legend that spanned several centuries, longer than any of us, yet as the fishbone I chewed shows, even after life fades away our personal legends may continue and cross and by chance influence the legends of others such as the fishbone of a random salmon did mine. Everything has a personal legend, a road taken, and together this network of legends is what makes up the very foundation of existence. See how much you can get out of chewing on a fishbone? To be further developed...