In I Love Lucy, Fred Mertz has been asking the same question for 55 years: “Not who is it… what is it?” Indeed, that is the question: what is it? It is a vexing thing for sure. It isn’t exactly this and it certainly isn’t that. It’s beyond this or that.
It is hard to conceive of the concept of It yet it obviously exists. In Hollywood, they talk about a movie star having that “it” factor. They can’t exactly say what that is, yet they know when they see it. Remember Cousin It from The Addams Family? What was that? I googled “it” and there are over six billion entries. It’s ironic because there are now over six billion people on earth. Very strange. That could mean there is an it for each of us, or that we have an antiparticle “it” inside of us, or a corresponding it residing in some primordial ether. When I googled “image” for “it,” over 240 million hits came up and not one image looked the same.

    Perhaps it’s that illusive particle physicists are always going on about. Maybe it has something to do with Hoggs Boson or some sort of quark or charm, or it resides somewhere in dark matter/dark energy.
   
So again, it’s hard to come up with a clear definition of what it is. See, there’s no doubt about it – an it is a challenge. Someone asked me if an it has been genetically modified. I don’t think so but I suppose it’s possible. You’d have to ask a geneticist. Are there any in the audience?
   
It may become something but when you factor in the ramifications, the possibilities – in all directions dimensions, reactions over time, it becomes an it again.
    An it is a surprise that continues to surprise. An it isn’t what you think it is. I do know, that it is beyond gender, beyond political persuasion, beyond collectivist values, even individualisma.
   
It is radical but not fanatical. It is pervasive and persuasive. It is subversive in that it rattles reality, rational thought, normal response. Whatever it is, it is decidedly not normal. Neither is it ab-normal. It is above all that. It doesn’t make linear sense or literal sense (as you can probably tell), yet it is potentially profound and powerful.
   
You have nothing to fear from it. It means you no harm. In fact, it doesn’t have any feelings about you one way or another. It is indifferent to any human sufferings, failings or successes, any likes or dislikes, any silly opinions from critics, mimics or the half dispossessed. It does not correspond to the status quo. Do it. Don’t do it. It doesn’t matter.
   
Deconstruction is an it. Construction isn’t. It’s too specific. An it is not a “thing.” A thing is too clean, too defined. It cannot be defined, it refines. It cannot be a raindrop; a raindrop has a name. Here’s a thought experiment. If you took a raindrop, a physicist, a poet and a fool and put them in a particle accelerator for a week or two, and throw in some diamonds, a handful of sand, a moonbeam, a mollusk, a musical note. Maybe, just maybe, you might get a manifestation of it… but, honestly, I doubt it. It would be too difficult to proceed: who would volunteer for such a weird endeavor? The cost would be astronomical. The religious right would be aghast. The religious left… unawares. So forget it. It was just a theory, a whimsy, a hypothesis gone awry. So it’s just as well this experiment can’t go forward.
   
Someone else suggest holding an “It-a-thon,” you know, to raise money for research to discover the meaning of it. But, I don’t think that’s a good idea because, again, an it cannot be an it, once it is understood. Once it is captured or examined too closely, it becomes something else.
   
So a real it, a true it, must by its very nature remain unknowable, elusive. Whatever it is.
It is what it is.
Let it be.
It happens.