Page 35 - The Irony Board

Into the Body

Those chances for which you’ve searched
(Even though you know they’re slim),
Look very fat when they’re perched
Out upon the thinnest limb.

Without totally anticipating works below dealing with
metaphysics, a few words about unpredictability are in order here.
Pre-intelligent organisms evolved in ways to compensate for the
possibility of calamity, mainly by genetic variation and ecological
saturation. It mattered not that many of those unconscious
individuals wandered randomly into the jaws of death; others carried
on. For us, apprehension is a double-edged, therefore potentially
ironic, tool in the struggle to survive: consciousness of what is to be
feared as well as what is to be expected. Denial of contingency, self-
programmed in neurosis or canonized in metaphysical ideology,
limits both senses of apprehension and sets us up for a fall.
Gravity, a force in all real events, plays a part in this poem. To be
out on a limb is to make an attempt fairly certain of failure. But why
go there in the first place? Here Gluckman plays on resonances of
fat/fatuous/infatuation to suggest the seeker is in fact overweight—
not his object of desire. Then the expression functions sarcastically:
a fat chance. Thus the lopsided perception of a greater value than
the risk of taking that chance justifies objectively.
Beyond the likelihood of the feeble branch breaking solely under
pressure of the folly it will bear, this play on common cautionary
proverbs maps onto the untutored illusion of distant objects
appearing smaller than they are, and therefore approachable without
danger. And to the author it may also echo a verse from his favorite
literary work, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “How sweet is mortal
Sovranty!”—think some:/Others—“How blest the Paradise to
come!”/Ah, take the Cash in hand and waive the Rest;/Oh, the
brave Music of a distant Drum!

33