Mind over matter, or does it matter when the world’s a stage

I went spelunking recently. Not by choice, mind you. Not sure bout y’all but one of the most frequent celluloid shorts to jump my blood-brain barrier involves potholing, or caving.

The long-running reverie usually ends with head torch alkaline AAAs dying out in tight darkness, invisible wet walls moving closer round me, a black widow wending its way across my arm and me reaching for the No 2 pencil I forgot to pocket for the final.

But enough about these nearly nightly nocturnal narratives that never, ever go away (I tried piping in Kenny G covers of Metallica during alpha states … doesn’t work).

Luckily I manage to put the mayhem to bed each morning. Perhaps it’s the coffee, or mind over matter.

But I consider myself fortunate that the sanitation workers only work night shifts while sifting through my mind for pasta past its shelf life, or sentimental soured scallions weighing on my mien.

You will recall Ebeneezer citing psychosomatic visceral sources in shrugging off his first of four uninvited Yuletide spectral visitors with: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than grave about you, whatever you are.”

Luckily, most of us are not visited by former business partners we well thought achieved room temperature some years earlier.

“To sleep, perchance to dream …” but of what? The busier the business day, the more boisterous the nightly janitorial crew leafing through the lobes for furtive and frivolous flotsam for the furnace.

I recently experienced some spillover, hence this cautionary caving caveat beginning with spelunking.

The spillover from the late-night REM-inspired caving images led me to a well-lit stalactite sanctuary that actually demanded payment for participation.

I paid to pass into the auditorium to take in the show, in this case, a Peking opera performance.

Indeed, “the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players …”

So do we attend these events to escape reality? Or reaffirm it?

The allegory of Plato’s Cave comes to mind when one fears losing the very same. Are the images themselves reality? Can we tear down the artifice, go backstage and see what’s actually casting the shadows on the cave’s walls? Do we dare track the prey — as did Nietzsche’s hunter — whose bagging promises not frozen venison steaks and a 12-point rack for the billiard room, but the answer no one dares hear?

To make a long story short (Too late, Thomas!), I’m back in the opera hall, and it’s a deathly silent, polite population all on board with phone proscription. Therefore, I was all ears, unencumbered by conversational cacophony, when I heard it. “Wan, Wan!!” (“bark, bark” in English).

It came just over my right shoulder, probably two rows back, because it was a dry wan, arriving unaccompanied.

But arrive it did, and oddly enough, just after every cymbal crash!

Peking Opera fans know how frequently the brass is beaten in such shows, so the bowing and wowing was nearly incessant.

I struggled not to turn around and make eye contact with the voluntary virtuoso, but as a New York subway regular, I have been trained not to establish eye contact with strangers — chalk it up to self-preservation (Hey! I’m still here, aren’t I?)

Feeling like the proverbial cat lady, i.e., the only one who can’t smell the litter box, I imagined I was imagining the whole canine call confusion.

I left proud of my fellow opera buffs in that no one made an offstage scene by ogling at, or otherwise confronting, the dogged director of the dirge-like din.

Whether it was Tourette’s, acoustic trickery, autistic-spectral dissonance or a symbolic stance against the overuse of cymbals, i.e., textbook anticymbalism — it was a victory for humanity, as we went home knowing we did not ostracize one of our own. Perhaps we are actually man’s best friend.