John Wise

Delving into the perversity of abstract thought, I search for fetishes (writings) that will anchor me in greater isolation as I lose the context of living with others. The challenge of deciphering the obtuse and complex propels me into chasms of other’s thoughts into which I’m ill-equipped to descend. I hang on by fingernails and scratch for fragments but inevitably fall down.

I’m relegated to gathering impressions of textures as words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters plod by the slow mind of the aging man who can no longer objectively figure out if the density of the subject matter is, in reality, difficult or if my own ability to comprehend is being compromised by my advancing years.

This then asks the question, am I losing my humanity (discernment), and has the bulk of our species ever had much of that at all?

If the purpose of the amoeba is fulfilled by its limited stratagems ordained with its simple life, what is the scale of human failure as we ignore the bigger directives of our own existence? We possess the power of scrutiny and yet see little beyond a primitive desire to decorate ourselves under a cloak of superficiality.

Mind you, the invisible cloth of the masses torn from the king who’d been adorned with a similar wardrobe offers transparency to those able to see the truth but easily tricks others who are mostly unaware into believing that they, too, are humans. Alas, you cannot alter the perception of what you wear without first consuming the pigments that will paint the fabric used in making your garb.

It is at the intersection of words that the fetish of our individuality takes form, and real human transparency starts to be seen instead of standing naked and stupid upon the throne of ignorance. We are not two-legged amoeba, nor should we be subverted into acting as such, but that is where many who form the masses have been banished to.

The heavy-handedness of this judgment weighs upon me as I consider the level of arrogance one must attain when passing these kinds of ideas off as having legitimacy, but this is what my observations of a plurality of those around me suggest. To miss this obvious state of affairs and deny voicing them is an acceptance of banality that ratchets my inner world into turmoil. I do not, adamantly do not, desire conformity to a standard of intellectual equality that might indicate a sameness between people, but just as society is able to have some expectation that we share enough common language so we can communicate with one another. I desperately need the bar to be raised.

You see, I am nowhere I want to be, but I also have very few around me who elevate the conversation and cultural embrace that indicate we are ascending the ladder of progress. On the contrary, obviously, I feel we are descending into not only greater banality but into madness. And just maybe, the division has been materialized by our unhealthy fetishizing of the economy and not giving rightful value to words, ideas, and thoughts that challenge our understanding of knowledge.

A daughter only becomes a mother upon the birth of her child, suggesting that two births happen simultaneously. So, it could also be said that the infant is the mother of its mother. The lineage of my understanding if I was able to comprehend what I was trying to draw from Catherine Malabou and her writing of Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, in which she was referencing Claude Levi-Strauss’s writing about the poem titled Autumn Crocuses from Guillaume Apollinaire is that each interpretation of knowledge gives rise to a new thought, or as a metaphor, a new child. In this type of “child of the mind,” we might consider the idea of birth and growth of a non-linear intellectual play of things branching from an arbitrary point across the timeline of potentiality or knowledge.

What I’m taking from this is that every time I encounter a new bit of knowledge that resonates long enough with me that it has the chance to impregnate my curiosity and make me want to learn and understand more, I’m giving birth to a new “thought-child” that with enough nurturing will grow up to be something. I become the mother to this child who was the mother of an idea that could grow to maturity.

What, then, is the difference between seeing a compelling character in a movie that I might want to see again and reading a book about science, history, philosophy, or some other work of non-fiction that inspires me to go further? Why do I immediately jump to the idea that entertainment is a mindless bundle of fluff with little in the way of redeeming qualities that, while it might spark a kind of joy, cannot compete with factual narratives that arrive out of the past or with current developments that impact our tomorrows?

Putting that to the side for the moment, I’m just as curious about the idea that well-formed threads of learning where deep contextual information can weave a more immersive tapestry, I’m able to better visualize the branches of where discovery can take me. One thing that comes to mind is the story of Martin Luther. When I arrived in Germany with the U.S. Army back in 1985, I quickly learned about the role of nearby Mainz and Johannes Gutenberg’s work regarding the printing press. On the heels of that revolution in movable type, we see the Gutenberg Bibles. Over time, I was able to visit the Wartburg, where Martin Luther translated the first German bible from Latin, which would benefit from the recently invented printing press. At another time, I found myself in Erfurt, where Martin Luther studied theology at an Augustinian Monastery. With the rise of Protestantism (Lutheranism), history runs headward into World War Zero following the defenestration of Prague, when a return to Catholicism was rejected.

Bach then gets tied into this as he was from Eisenach, Germany, where the Wartburg is located. Bach’s devotional music arises from his Lutheranism, and it was that which brought me to Mühlhausen as I was continuing my journey of building out a construct of devotion, spirituality, revolution, war, and intellectual evolution that could be referred to as the child I hold aloft in my mind created in the image of the influences that share these ties I’ve brought together.

My interest in geology is a wholly other child, which birthed my curiosity to cultivate knowledge about the formation and history of the world I live in. Symbiotically tied to land seen and unseen is the life that emerged in the crevices and small spaces, and while this potential silo of vast history and evolution could stand as a thing of its own, I’ve not really been able to separate them. Yet, intelligent life that branched from those areas has its own vector in my mind, but if I give pause in my thinking, I probably believe there are two vectors in regard to humans: those that evolve and those that do not. Chronologically, I can give parental attribution to the processes of chemistry that not only happen on the cosmic scale but also that have been occurring on the planetary scale. This lineage is only known due to intellectual processes, not because of the order in which I grew my interest.

These, then, are some of the children of whom I’ve become a parent, and it was their incredible potential that allowed them to become parents of nascent thoughts that would need nurturing over time for me to grow with them.

Let’s return for a moment to entertainment and the relative frivolity I see on its stage. Granted, there is a valid domain of aesthetic value and narrative, while those who take inspiration to further their craft have the most to gain, but other than the capitalist artifact of the potential of commerce to validate and create demand for those that work around the field, I see more harm than good. I refer to the harm that arrives with the absolving of consumers from participating. Thus, entertainment takes on the role of temporarily warding off boredom, which in itself is not a bad thing; it is the lack of balance between being an observer and participant that concerns me. Why do I care about this imbalance? Because I think it is part and parcel of our collective madness.

Just as humans must create new humans, I sense that those in balance and finding happiness do so as they cultivate aspects of themselves that flirt with creativity, thought, contemplation, and exploring difficulty. Mind you, these need not only to orbit around purely intellectual processes. Woodworking, pottery, fiber arts, robotics, playing an instrument, gardening, and a host of other labor-intensive hobbies can allow someone to practice mastery of a subject as they work through iterations of success and failure.

Maybe introducing something new to your senses on a daily basis will lead you to a succession of subjects that fail to find resonance with you but what if one a month strikes a chord? What if this only occurs once per year? Over a 10-year period, you will either be overwhelmed with dozens of fascinating subjects, or you’ll be honing in on less than a dozen new areas of thought and hobbies, which, either way, would be a win-win situation.