Column: Fearful symmetry

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

--William Blake, "The Tiger"

Screw the stars. Or at least screw what the romantics and control-mongers have done to them. Anyone with a trained eye can see that the night sky is patterned, almost musically so. What that means, if anything, is anybody's guess. When I was 12, I bought those astrology scrolls, the ones that are tightly rolled and gather lots of dust at the grocery store checkout counters. I remember the urgency with which I checked my horoscope in the newspaper. I cheaply tossed around the adjective "star-crossed" for two reasons: one, because I knew that my classmates (the ones that resented me for precisely this reason) didn't recognize it as a Shakespearean allusion, and two, because I believed it meant something. Life became simple once I let the stars chart the course (mystically, not geographically). Alanis Morissette seemed downright profound when she released her maddeningly overplayed Top 40 hit, "Ironic," because she envisioned a determinism that comforted me. I knew nothing about irony. Neither did she.

Irony represents a different sort of equilibrium than most of us seek. It is a balance of undefined, unmeasured forces. Generally, we want to know what will happen next and how, if at all, we can possibly avoid it. The phrase "what goes around, comes around" is a cliche not because people believe in karma, but because they like to console themselves with a reliance on fairness, on the principle that the bastards will get theirs. Sometimes this is true and often it is not (the entire LAPD is evidence of the latter), but the heavenly scales seem balanced in the most unpredictable of ways. They are ways that always keep us guessing and undermine any modicum of human control. They exist in the far-fetched, the jaw-dropping, the absurd; in short, they keep us on guard.

Turn on the TV and one of life's many wild cards will inevitably get your attention. The world pricked up its ears when it heard of Lorena Bobbitt's crime, and it almost choked when it considered the implications of her name. Add to that the given names of her husband, John Wayne--the very icon of American masculinity-and the entire picture is more than slightly ridiculous. Not to make light of a man (even a vicious wife-beater) being separated from the most beloved of male appendages, but the circumstances are cartoonish.

Then there are, of course, ironic deaths. Most of these are horrible, sometimes so much so that they, too, are humorous. I had to laugh when I read that Linda Henning, who was convicted of murdering her lover's estranged wife, allegedly boasted that she consumed the flesh of her victim, Girly Chew Hossencofft. She ate Girly Chew. In 1981, Antony Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite plastic fortune, smothered himself with a plastic bag in Rikers after he was convicted of stabbing his mother to death. Producer Mike Todd won the 1956 Best Picture Oscar for Around the World in 80 Days and then his plane crashed into a mountain two years later. Alanis Morissette could never conjure that, in all her wailing and screaming and emotional exsanguinations.

Ironic criminality often takes a much more sordid, and decidedly un-funny form, as was the case this past September of the woman charged with savagely beating her four-year-old daughter in a parking lot. She confessed after she was caught on videotape and was sentenced for felony beating. Her name? Madelyne Toogood. I never even knew that the last name "Toogood" existed, outside of didactic Puritan allegories. If the insane brutality of a woman punching her child in the face 12 times in 25 seconds didn't say enough about the crisis of child protection in America, then Toogood's name said it all.