D. M. Hoven
5-28-2023
One of the crueler tricks of nature, if I may be forgiven for evoking so heathen a sentiment, is that not all men are born imbeciles. If all men were, then the proscriptions for goodness, indeed all philosophy, would be readily collected into a single fact, perhaps even a single picture, by which all phenomena and experiences might be understood. The medieval system, with God above, hell below, and angelic spheres in between, was perhaps the wisest view of nature our race will ever know. The imbecile population, well represented by Chaucer’s carpenter, indeed profit little from education. Better it is for them to know God’s laws, and nothing more. Gazing too long on the clockwork of it all, serves only to make an insane imbecile.
Of the many problems of scale in the modern age, surely their chief is the education of imbeciles. None of this would indeed be much of a problem, were not an (increasingly small) population of those born, not imbeciles. Truly few men indeed can “gaze upon nature’s innards” without going immediately mad, and these men belong to that class we give the aphorism, “genius”. Sadly, as the population determining which of their members belong to this class are themselves outside it, much insanity has been given an inordinate degree of acclaim. There is, after all, no desire of the imbecile more likely to do him harm, than the call to enter that elusive class. While on the subject of Eleusis, a word must be said in favor of certain kinds of insanity. There are many practices natural to imbeciles that give them a superior wisdom to those who ask questions. Not enough nostalgic praise can be given to the lost practices of singing and dancing that once formed the social center of life.
But, in the course of time, there will come a man who is not an imbecile, a Socrates, or a Nietzsche, who questions the picture, the single fact, the place of man in the cosmic sphere. In so doing they seem to arrive at some principle outside the whole thing, that both defies, and in a strange way gives new light, to the picture of the ages. This insight comes only for a flash, and is run through the whole business of language, to be misunderstood by educated imbeciles for decades, centuries, even millennia. But the luminosity (or despairing darkness) they bring, gives credit to the whole institution of education, as the many deem it a ladder to join the few. I am of a certainty speaking in half truths, brush strokes that, of themselves, seem detestably poor representations of the landscape being illustrated. It is simply this case I desire to make, that sanity and certainty, are competing frames of mind. Is there hope then, for the geniuses? Might the truth of the simple picture be extended for their benefit? Or are they doomed to forever ponder it’s deficiencies… To answer this sentiment, I shall in due time return to the wisdom of the dancer.
If I may consult the folds of my own cloak, or draw upon the coat tails of my own age-bereft experience, the first barrier to sanity for the genius is the stupidity of most who claim to have it. They twirl and dance with the picture before you, like a sign holder on a street corner, aghast that the fact of it’s existence does not immediately bring you to bended knee, hailing them as at last, wisdom itself. You may attempt even to better illustrate their own picture, frame it in a less occlusive manner, display it in a less shadowy room, but no! Such aids are spurned as an attempt at refutation, a departure from the “pure truth,” as though it were “adding to the words of God” to merely translate them. The advertiser is aghast at any suggestion the picture is not but a photograph in the simple sense. Attempts to point out the oil paint and brush strokes are met in the same manner as before. The refusal of the picture is not really a refusal at all, merely a desire not to become a sign twirling idiot.
The second barrier, and this is a harsh screening for the man who deems himself a “thinker”, is that sanity is an embodied thing. You cannot merely have “sane thoughts”, or “insane thoughts”. As Chesterton says, The mind has no tools for announcing the insanity of this idea or that. Becoming insane is not a route attended by much scenery at all, it is an invisible jump, like the charging of an electromagnet. One moment it may draw a ton of scrap iron to itself with the fury of a starving god, the next moment, it may hang inertly from a still crane like the raised foot of some giant sleeping flamingo. The truth of the matter in either case, is the effect had on those things outside the self or object. The thinker desires to exist entirely in the world of thoughts. All things to him seem best valued by contemplation. The unexamined life… Suppose a man is ready to accept the picture, to cast aside all reservation, see past the dancing dunce, and ignore the many doubts that gnaw at the roots of his germinating Yggdrasil. Such a man will be a second time thwarted when he discovers that the thing he is to accept is of a different shape than the hole left by what he discarded. He has rolled the stone to the tip of the mountain at last, only to be asked to let it fall, and repeat his efforts to the end of time. Oh, and do it with a smile.
The third barrier, a most devastating blow to the philosopher, is to learn that the kind of man who may be sane, is not the kind of man he is. No man is born sane, least of all the genius. It is not a difference in degree that separates the sane from the insane, but of kind. The joyful Sisyphus files in the face of all that a man learns a man must be. No good thing was ever built without work! How can the highest good, the greatest great, be reached without toil? And yet it is endless work that is required… Sanctified, it would seem, by it’s apparent futility. Every attempt he makes to understand, apologize, or make use of the now sapling tree to heaven causes it to shed a branch, shrink, dry out, and stop growing. After all, Adam was instructed to tend the garden, not chop it down for firewood.
Such mysteries are not of a kind that mere reason, both the great gift, and scourge of man, is equipped to understand. The painted photograph, square peg, and tree with no lumber, are a different class of thing from fact, idea, and reason. We are told they are truth, and yet they cannot be approached by the very tool most prized by genius as the torch illuminating the same. A rich man indeed, will not enter easily into heaven. Much less a genius, into sanity.
To the man who faces these tests, like Arthur before the tests of the Holy grail, I give not a solution, for that is the very sort of thing we have just ruled out. Instead, I invite to a dance. Do not ask at every turn why your arms must move this way or that, or what arithmetic proof stands beneath the count of the footwork, or what goal was reached by spinning in a circle. Instead, shut up, accept the motion, submit to your Dance Partner, leave your self, and dance! You may just find it to be the thing you were created for.
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