THE WATER ON THE TABLE

You see the water running on a table.

You know where it is heading, and you know how much time you have. The water doesn't ask to be diverted. It saves a rug.

Nothing in that was deliberation. There was no moment where a case was put to you and you weighed it. You saw the run, and the edge, and the distance between them, and your hand was already going. Naming it will comes afterwards and adds nothing.

What is necessary for the will is that we survey the mode of activity, the sequences it is up to us to match. It is the two tracks that must come together to arrive.

And there is a trade where a man can go and check that.

A tuner cannot hear whether he is in tune by listening to his own note. He hears it in the beating between his note and the one already sounding — two waveforms drifting in and out of phase, and the rate of the beating is the distance between them, countable, in cycles per second. Slow the beats and you are closing. When the beating stops, you have arrived.

The information is not in either voice. It is in what happens between them.

Which is the correction, and it is a relief once you have it. We don't play every part, we can't, we harmonize.

Now go back to the table, because the picture has one more thing in it.

There are two hands in that room. One goes underneath, at the edge, open, and catches. The other comes down from above with a rag.

And before either of them moves you have already read the water. Cool, and the open hand will do. Hot, and it will not — the hand was never available to you, whatever your timing was, and the rag is not the second-best answer. It is the only one.

That is what surveying the mode of activity means. Where it is going. How long you have. And what it is.

Timing puts us on top or underneath. Harmony makes no sound.