[816] On Complex Thought and Layered Meaning

I've written several versions and limbs of this blog before. I might link to them as the mood finds me, but for now, I want to see how much has been lost in the time I've waited to begin writing.

I get both mildly flattered and a touch uncomfortable when I'm told I'm smart. I'm not embarrassed about understanding things, and I certainly lord myself over the things and people I think I get better than they get themselves. It doesn't mean everything boils down to manipulation, but it's been hard to get into a flow of my social work job without receding into a kind of character I've long since stripped of its playful novelty. Whether you think there's different veins of intelligence or not, I think you need a kind of baseline.

What are things people have considered smart? We'll use the term "genius-level athlete." We like to find scientists who, by virtue of their field, are genius for even being able to pronounce certain terms, let alone manipulate them. Brilliant writers wrap us up in stories and capture imaginations of millions well-independent of personal taste or general familiarity of literature. Hell, if you thought my writing was awesome, Grammarly would punch us both in the dick and dare us to pay a premium to get rid of "incorrect" passive voice.

Across the potential domains of intelligence, there's a degree of complexity. Can you figure out the mind-games the quarterback is playing with the defense? No? He's brilliant! Can you fluently swing between keys and read the mixolydian pattern as the improviser wails? Fuck no? "I could never do that!" If you don't speak the language, and you regard the potential gibberish to translate as respect and admiration, extreme consequences can follow. This is as true for those bent on hero-worship as it is for those who believe everything they tell themselves.

We also make a distinction between being smart and being wise. Wisdom can learn from someone else's mistake, and it's merely smart to learn from your own. Wisdom watches. Often, we have a solemn respect for the person remaining calm in the storm, letting things play out, or maybe only feigning a degree of disinterest. The reactive hothead gets put in their place. The mad scientist doesn't bet on the unified heart of the world who'd revolt. The tale of ego or pride destroying in very foreseeable ways is persistent lore for a reason.

I like to say several things at once. I like to be in the middle of a dozen things. My best blog titles, to me, are when they stand for at least 4 or 5 things. Maybe a song title comes to mind that seems to capture the essence, and then happens to have killer relevant lines if you know the words. Maybe it ties itself in a nice bow to the last line. My brain automatically tends to run in different directions at once, and it gives zero shits if I'm comfortable picking one road or another. Try as I might, I'm often reacting. I'm feeling something turn or drop in my stomach. I'm persuading myself the dread is something less significant, and it's my burden, nay, “mature duty,” to combat it until the next practical reality can roll around.

Today provided some insight into that. I was getting my job done. I was making my rounds. I had a plan to write up some loose ends. I was going to be done early. I started getting afraid. It was too easy. I was playing along. I knew the tasks and just did them in a line. When I got to the end of the line, then what? So I sabotaged it. I let the last hour of my day go to some bullshitting and tying up one loose end instead of 5 or 6. What are we supposed to say about this?

I don't like the band Tool. I find their music boring, and every time I try, I just can't. Their “complexity” is often cited. Complexity for complexity's sake I've never considered compelling. Me telling you of the dozen things I'm doing half-assed isn't compelling either. It doesn't make me move on them any faster, nor does it make me proud to tell you how far I haven't gotten. I could write the 12 minute song that spends the first 4 minutes adding an extra note, instrument, or flourish. I could also attempt to write a 4 minute song that says more than “because I can.” Is there a degree of “smart” or “wisdom” in doing either? Is my inability to be brought to tears by Tool, as one reviewer I read, simply my inability to appreciate the beautiful and brilliant language?

This all would matter less to me if we didn't make terrible judgements based on our impressions of these tastes and capacities to understand. I'll never quite swallow that Trump is president. For my brain, attempting to run in every direction, the reaction to that news and fact is to so many suicidal and dark places, it's genuinely hard to spend any time reflecting without wanting to give up. What do you say to the absence of organized thought? What do you say to burned nuggets of wisdom? What's the exercise of existing when survival is predicated on both strangling as damming a selfish conception of yourself in the world as it is denying anything beyond you exists?

There's a way to describe the insanity of a chaotic mind as “it's own kind of intelligence.” I'd call this disingenuous, but we do it all the time. We don't want to believe the people we associate with don't have their niche. We prefer the polite language of “accepting differences” where the language of cutting dead weight would be better suited. This especially when it's “family.” This proclivity when we feel ashamed or are reminded of when we've slipped. To my mind, insanity comes in equal doses as opportunities to create a little order. Then we make the “wise” move to incorporate it into our language, even if in practice we have no idea if we're keeping a balance or managing to grasp the concepts of “order” or “chaos” altogether.

Order feels very tired. I got my house in order, and the loudest indicator of how to spend most of my time has been to mostly watch TV. I wish I felt worse about that. It's not like before, where that's all I really could do. Now, I'm doing it after I spend my whole day utterly subsumed by order. I don't make the rules. I barely rattle the cages for a little leeway here and there. I'm tired after work, not because it's hard, but because it's easy. Watching TV makes me tired. Doing the grunt work of scanning and organizing books does the same thing. Trying, and failing, half a dozen times to uproot a stubborn tree makes it one more.

The individual daily acts that eat up your time and disengage you are what we add up at the end to claim a form of “meaningful life.” How many rallies did you go to for your designation as “long-time activist?” How many classes do you teach before you're a cherished educator? How many times do I get to be told the work I'm doing is important before I start to believe it? Does it matter if I don't know where August went as long as a few dozen families got a slightly milder impression about the imposing nature of DCS? What if I was pretty-much dead inside the whole time they were thanking me? What if every sacrifice I made for them made me resentful for not recognizing similar ones made in service to me?

How quick and easy it would be at this point to resolve to the complex nature of being. “Everything is everything!” “It's just a ride!” “Karma, bro!” Why acknowledge and work with your own experience, especially if you can't trust it, especially when there's an infinite justification to keep it playfully light and confusing?

I continue to return to the idea that it has to be by you and for you, but to the extent that you even bother to describe yourself, and to the ability to orient and depict accurately. Trump voters have the 3-10 ego lines, and that's their existence, so burn everything else down. Radical leftists have the religious idealism that serves the same purpose. The idiot merely needs to speak and dance. The intelligent can hide behind their complex-sounding narratives or philosophies that amount to “I'm scared too, and can't be bothered.”

If you get a thousand bad reviews for your deeply personal work (and, lo, what isn't deeply personal?) should you care? Should you care if it sells like Oprah? Should you care if you're prepared to recant and be forgiven before you die? The ego-driven YouTube “celebrities” and charging bulls of housewife fables aren't slowing down. The entertainment sits ass-to-face with the news for thousands of scrolls. Where do you exist in it all? Watching? Reporting? Capitalizing? Fighting as hard as an immigrant kid with all the pizazz of a pyramid scheme pitchman? Do you know the difference between your story and struggle, and the words laid before you? Do I? Can I?

You know what I want before I'm exhausted doing whatever it is I want to do? Someone to do it with. And more than that, real individuals with their own thoughts and fights and words that when mixed with mine create a better narrative and we discover the working wisdom. I want my best conception of my friends to hold true and to believe there's more than just biding my time until the list of tasks is inevitably done, and the paycheck hits, and the options for dinner are within driving distance. Who's qualified to review you besides those who know you? And who knows you but the ones who are paying attention for your sake and for theirs? Who am I trying to impress? For how long has it been the abstraction of what I take to be people's conception of me to live up to the hype? You know who never asks me what I'm doing? Almost everyone.

So is it time to wisely move on from another mild mental crisis and get back to organizing books and reinforcing shelves? I'm certainly going to finish the last 3 episodes before I get to 450 in One Piece. Should I approach my next 3 days off of training-vacation with renewed vigor at the prospect of learning how to forensically interview children? Should I sleep a little sounder knowing I got more confusing, laughably “wise” or “smart” words out for me to read a thousand times looking for what I really said later? Does it matter? Do you care? Do I? I've watched myself over the last few weeks, months, and years, and keep seeing it manifest as words. I don't know what to make of them, or myself. I don't know that I want anymore access or luxury than I have now, as I'm almost positive I'd have so little occasion to share it. If only because I'm perfectly ignorant about what I can provide, or what it is that's really needed.

[296.5] Stupid Vs. Smart

This is a blog I should have written weeks ago so excuse me if it’s a little scattered. For just as important as thinking about time shapes my perspective, the eternal struggle between what I’d call “smart” and “stupid” rages on. I would love to be able to draw a strict demarcation between the two. As far as I can tell, everyone is both smart and stupid given a specific context, so how do we get to the “meta-smart or “meta-stupid” person?

Theoretically, we want to “grow” as individuals. If we look at a child, it’s generally preferred that we want them to learn the ABCs and how to count and how to walk and maybe one day look both ways before crossing the street. These are “smart” if not practical, life affirming, intelligence expressing ideas. They are growing. As adults we hope to find people who can share in another’s perspective. Hopefully they’ll accept people despite their color or sexual orientation. They grow to understand that these are not things which threaten them or account for the morality of the individual.

Surely, this growth caps at a certain point academically. We don’t really go around arguing about who is more PH.D.’d or fiercely debate the merit and number of books each of us has read. So we must be expecting, hoping, that people are growing “emotionally” or “spiritually.” What’s odd, is that we consider these areas to be “too personal” to really be discussed intelligently. We don’t get smart, as far as I can tell, about how or why you grow to accept different people, or how life works, and on what basis you should do so.

It’s this kind of emotional stupidity that we somehow match against intelligence. It takes work to get informed, but anyone can feel. In my experience, my feelings only bring me back to a point where I need to explain something intelligently. If I get super pissed, I need to talk out the details for why I’m not going to burn a place down. If I’m getting close to someone, I need to venture down what it means to be emotionally manipulative. Huh, I kinda have two settings, pissed or tepid.

It’s emotional stupidity that prevents me from having too many meaningful conversations about religion. If you weren't afraid to lose something, afraid of change, or even if you don’t feel afraid still unable or unwilling to take any and every question as far as they can go, it has something to do with stupid emotions, because I’m convinced your brain works. It’s like an overbearing mom speculating about all the crazy things that can happen if you stay out too late; you know you’re just wandering around Wal-Mart or bullshitting at Steak N Shake. Even if she knows this logically, she won’t accept it. Sooner or later she’s picking you up from jail or taking you to rehab, she just knows it.

The folk knowledge is that all teenagers are crazy. They destroy, can’t be trusted, and upon reflection of your adventures as a kid, you know all you need to. Even if 98% of the time you spent it on the couch playing Halo, you remember that one fire you lit that got a little out of control and ignore you had the foresight to bring the hose around. You remember trying cigarettes, but forget not liking them. Hanging onto these ideas is problematic, much as believing in anything BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS it to be true, because the idea is incomplete. Much as my time in school, it’s too easy. Easily offered and accepted.

Emotional stupidity I see as a hindrance; it’s anything that prevents you from growing into accepting more about the world. It’s when you could apply your “reasoning by way of feeling” to the world and see a measurable decline in the reliability of information. It’s believing in a god to the point of campaigning against science or to justify some atrocity of nature or personal depravity. It’s believing in love or a relationship to bring a kid into an unstable situation because you’re searching to be complete. It’s placating a person’s entire history by one act or what they look like. It’s being ruled by the fear of the unknown or of where the thoughts might take you.

Therefore, smart should be the opposite of that. It’s learning enough about yourself and place in the world to adopt a stake worth having in it. Understanding how small or big your decisions may impact the people in your life. Holding yourself accountable for how you feel and still managing to consistently go with what makes the most sense, if only at the time. To me, if I’m to be considered smart anymore, it’s not because I read and write, it needs to come from being personally responsible and accountable. It’s not to say I won’t do stupid things or allow a twinge of emotionality to creep in, but I’m capable of recognizing when it does.

Stupid follows a pattern of avoidance while smart explores. Stupid is afraid and smart perseveres. Stupid sums things up, smart is in the details. Stupid makes excuses, smart offers different theories. Most importantly, stupid is empty and smart is a kind of fulfilling that I've never been able to experience another way. Yes, I consider myself smart. Yes, I can do stupid things. There’s a mental happy place I reach when I’m doing something smart. It’s almost like a lifestyle, where shit just makes sense, even when you can’t tell why.

This might speak to why I have two settings. Either things “are” or are going well-enough, or there’s a threat. I can react so viscerally because if I’m threatened it has to be at a very fundamental level. Luckily, that’s usually only coming from myself and over-thinking I suppose.

But as to why I don’t think we’ll make it as a species and call most people stupid, it just seems smart given everything they say or do. Given the stress and drama presented to me, given their non-productive, emotionally driven squawking, their inability to answer anything or change anything without so much undue hassle. The smart thing to do just seems to be “get by” primarily and espouse a personal set of ideals about exploring the potential extent of an intellect. If that, by happenstance, tends to help people, then yay I guess, but to truly care that much would beget me being emotionally stupid about their judgments from the onset.

Funny how the exact same words can mean completely different things.