April 6th - Thinking About Thinking About It
Still Thinking About Thinking About It, or, How to Say a Lot of Words that Sound Kinda Smart but Leave you with Less Words Altogether: Werds to Cause Intestinal Problems:
I was talking with a friend recently about how language doesn't suffice for communicating so much of the higher inquests for understanding. We have mathematics to get our heads around universal truths, but in many ways, that's the science of facts, belittling the important romance of the right questions. We hit upon the problem with needing to be artful with the conversations facing science, how the relational beauty of science is covered up by taking a shears to the picture instead of the single hair brush it needs to build the pastoral scene with, and how we need a modern Mark Twain (melded together with Monet's ability to see feelings behind the air layers) to unfetter the elegant drama in a way that we can then feel it bristling under our skin. That'd be great, but then we also need a Percy Shelley to fill in the emotional/spiritual so that the personal isn't so unrelatable within the confines of our blunt vocabulary. The impression of a well driven lie can get the truth across better than the facts often do.
I was talking with a different friend about the trope of the Wise Fool. That's all I'm gonna say about that. Just keep that in mind is all. Probably all the time.
When I was younger, I saw things in Black and White, but now I find that I second guess even my own thoughts. It's the wisdom of perspective, but results in inaction. Thinking about thinking about things is like "Castration Thoughts." I used to be able to write about things forcefully and beautifully. I had very serious emotions that weren't degraded by the fact that I was a selfish twat.
Another pal o' mine was telling me how he hadn't written a really great song for a decade. And though he's actually written a great many great songs in the last ten, I feel that disconnect from the cocky simplicity of pissing in the wind with the proper force.
This quote is nice:
Good language alone will not save mankind. But seeing the things behind the names will help us to understand the structure of the world we live in. Good language will help us to communicate with one another about the realities of our environment, where we now speak darkly, in alien tongues.
-Stuart Chase
The English language has over 400,000 more words than the French (plus another half million jargony terms for specialist careers). The art of a language like French and Spanish is in inflection and context, the way of speaking. I love the idea that with so many words in English that a masterfully fluent speaker could always select the right word for the right moment and therefore bring clarity to its highest magnification, but everyone else would have to be as fluent to make it work properly. The non-verbal side is perhaps a better artform of communication.
When Froebel created kindergarten, his toolkit was just a bunch of freeform games and nature immersion and speculation. The children's garden was the outside classroom of observing god in a blade of grass with the architectural toys to let the mysteries be playfully unraveled. He then tied the architectural toys to mathematics and to the ABC’s. By using the same fundamental language to build on language, everything touched some unity of thought. The knowledge was felt and pronounced through the laughter of little people.
If you think too much, I think you're in danger of forgetting how something feels.
That's language for ya. It's all about translating the power that you're born with, while it'd probably be better to get naked with someone you're super into.
A Zen Buddhist novice monk asks his master a question, "All things are reduced to the One, but where is the One to be reduced?" And the master replies in a deriding tone, "When I was in the district of Ch'ing I had a robe made that weighed seven chin." And then the master whips him on top of the head with a bamboo rod. Could the master have given him the "right" answer? Sure, but the "right" answer wouldn't lead to "searching and contriving" so it wouldn't do the student any good. It's the Reason of Unreason, because the intellect is the enemy of understanding. It's the three stooges method of discovery. If you run your head through enough doors, there's bound to be someone on the other side in their knickers.
When asked a similar question, "What is the buddha?" A master retorted, "The one endowed with the 32 marks of excellence."
Check it: The highest degree of freemasonry (except for the, like, governor of a lodge) is the 32nd one. Jesus had 32 bones fractured leading up to and up on the cross (so he is said to have said). The world has been created by 32 ways and they form the 32 mysterious paths of the Wisdom according to the Kabbalah, formed by the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the ten Sephiroth of the esphirothic tree, that are the attributes of the divine name. 32 is the Karmic liberation sought in the tests of the natural law, 8*4=32, and the Symbol of Justice according to the Pythagoreans, the disciples of the ancient Greek dude that gave us the geometric tools to create buildings still rocking out on their crazy old foundations. There are also 32 lined sections in a standard college-ruled notebook.
So, what does all that shit mean? I don't think it means anything really. I think it just shows that if you're looking for connections that they're easy to find. We could do it all day long. If you want it to mean something, then it does. Because... wait for it... It's all connected in some way, shape, or form. The Kevin Bacon six degree of separation universe.
Or, as the Johns said in their 1,2,3s children's album, "There's only One everything."
A full day of (attempted) logical thinking results in the following: It's probably not possible to know anything. It's probably only that you get to contain experiences, and, to recognize in them versions of yourself somewhere down that past road of stumbles.