Four of Cups

A young man sits under a tree, three cups on the grass, ignoring a fourth offered by a hand from a cloud. Waite reads weariness in it, "as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only." Franky saw "the introspective fool walking the streets of a bustling metropolis, the wallflower perusing a random book on the shelf while the party chatter ebbs and flows in the background." Then he dropped the pretense: "But let's be honest, you don't really care about anything right now."

Echinococcus granulosus is a tapeworm a few millimeters long that lives in dogs, and its eggs leave with their droppings. A sheep swallows one, or a person with unwashed hands does. The larva rides the blood to the liver or the lungs and builds a hydatid cyst: a sphere of clear fluid in a white wall, lined with living tissue that buds capsules full of protoscolices. Each of these is a tiny folded head, a whole tapeworm waiting to happen. Sometimes there are cysts inside the cyst, cups within the cup. It can stay silent for years.

It's a waiting room. Its future depends on a dog eating the organ it sits in. In a person it's a dead end. The human cyst is a cup offered to nobody, full of heads waiting for a dog that isn't coming. Samuel Beckett wrote a whole play about this. He spelled the dog backward.

The gnostics called the sealed divine fullness the pleroma. The cyst is a little pleroma, perfect, translucent, and useless to its carrier. It's also dangerous to burst: a ruptured cyst can cause anaphylactic shock and seed new cysts, so surgeons open one with great care. So honor the sphere, because some feelings need a wall while they grow. But while the young man holds out for the dog, a hand from a cloud is holding out a cup. Franky again: "So wander nautically and noetically. There's gotta be something, somewhere you can give yourself to."

Rest inside the sphere if you must, but stop waiting for the dog.