lickhaven

Or mental scarification

When I started sending out these ruminations in 2011, a couple people called them – or me – “brilliant.”

I hate that.

The brilliant people of the world were/are Einstein, Bertie Russell (arrogant sod), and Richard Feynman in the West, Buddha and the Indian inventor of zero on the other side of the world.

I’m bright – brighter than, say, 98% of the overall population – but you have to be way higher up the lightbulb ladder to qualify as brilliant. As a writer, I’m no Joyce, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Melville, Tagore or Pynchon, though I would be if I could: a candle that wishes to be a bonfire.

For eight decades I’ve been interested in quantum mechanics, particle physics, and the other convoluted secrets of creation, but I’ve never learned the higher math necessary to truly master any of it. 

I finally took calculus in summer courses after college, got straight A’s – I always got straight A’s, in everything – but had no idea in hell what anybody did with calculus, where it fit into understanding. It’s been easy for me to capture the “what” of what I’m studying, but far less often the “why.”

 Somehow I assumed that I was not intellectually qualified for the big ideas. Turns out, more honestly, that I was really mind-lazy. It takes work, dedication, care to capture advanced math or physics at a deep level. You have to read complicated explanations more than once! to understand them; they don’t drop like manna from heaven or pollution from Philly skies.

But what set this current yadder off? 

It comes from working on what, if completed, will be yet another novel by me that no one will read, about a woman so brilliant she can barely function.

Aside from a few shining exceptions – and you know who you are, because you’re on this mailing list – I don’t relate to men. I hate sports, team spirit, the celebration of ignorance, power over the oppressed, and creating the oppressed through personal arrogance. Most of those I consider my real friends (Linda beyond all) are women, because I see them, in the main, as more closely attuned to the “soul” of humanity, whatever that might be.

This novel – every chapter – centers on, follows along with, reflects Jenny, a math genius reared by her mathematician father from age four to become the next Goedel (look him up), only to be anathematized by that father when he decides she cannot achieve his inhumane aim.

In response to being stripped of her expected future, Jenny, at 16, activates the button in her brain that cam obliterate her entire understanding of math. 

Who is Jenny, otherwise? It took me some while to realize that, through Jenny, I was recreating my own rejection of my search for the underlying whys of existence. Her choice to negate her intellect is what mine would be if I were someone with guts; someone with the determination to fight the world on my own terms through a smothering haze of failure.

I ripped math away from Jenny because a) I see math as the secret to everything, the structure that binds together all existence, the Gorilla Glue of why; yet b) since I can’t myself do that math, having her excise it seemed the defining way to extol someone who can do it but chooses not to.

Often, when I slam my narrative vehicle into a fallen hemlock, I talk to Jenny, ask her questions – about herself, the book, my reasons for writing such a thing – and she responds with a forthright honesty that floors me. 

Does that mean that I accept her as real?

It means that she is real: the first shimmer that, somewhere within my dark caverns, flounders something that could be… brilliant.

Jenny is bright as a meteor shower, absorbing everything: history, anthro, philosophy (to laugh at), world music, Gregorian chant, the Residents. To keep her dirt-solid believable despite her disavowal of math, I’ve been collecting material on chaos theory, probability, relativity, cosmology. Etc.

This from me, who can’t do the supporting math that makes them justifiable and comprehensible? Well, poking through all this, I’ve come to realize that… I could have done it. I could have done the necessary work. Instead, I threw in the towel because that work is hard (and because it reminds me of those hideous high-school evenings when I did nothing but homework).

Consider an exemplar of the proper way to overcome the difficulty of learning: Isaac Newton.

It wasn’t an apple falling on his noggin that slammed him into gravitational revelation, it was his endless determination to badger every problem through hours, days, weeks, months of thought, beleaguering every evasive concept into submission. 

Me? For most of my life I’ve avoided intense intellectual labor; while growing up, my intelligence seemed a simple absorptive process, something easy. 

So, a few months back, faced with my latest hemlock obstruction on the literary highway, I decided that absorbing math and particle  physics – tough, intellectual learning – was necessary to finishing a piece of writing that could be my (again unread) legacy. If I couldn’t recreate Jenny’s rejected math, this novel would fail. I’d end up like a sculptor attacking marble without a chisel, trying to form an icon using bleeding fingernails alone.

Recently, I ran across an article on Stephen Wolfram, about whom I knew nothing. He claims that he and his crew have come to believe that a few simple, iterative selection rules can explain all of existence: space, time, mass, energy, momentum, the whole murky ball of wax that constitutes the universe. 

You think so? Me neither – but his outlook is fascinating, especially its undercutting of math’s assumption of increasing complexity. (String theory, the most dense and involuted math dive yet, does not help you tie a shoelace; in contrast, Wolfram suggests that one of the “rules” he’s working on, by its very nature, leads to the theory of relativity… as though Einstein needed only to find an “Aha!” dust bunny under the couch.)

Still… even Wolfram’s  “simple” approach requires complex understanding. Just to grind all the way through his explanatory overview, I’d have to learn a smoldering pile of the abstruse shit I’ve avoided for decades.

Something that delighted me, though: Even without untangling all his overlying abstrusities, I managed to unearth a couple of his assumptions that I could challenge. And Wolfram’s outlook helps support an off-center idea propounded by Robert, the scientist in my Evolution Unfolding in a Small Town in Western Pennsylvania.

So… “Huh!” – as Jenny so often responds to the inexplicable – maybe I do know something sorta big, without knowing that I know it.

But what am I really getting at with this rumble-ramble?

• That, at age 86, to complete my proposed pyrotechnic outing I must perform metal calisthenics that would exhaust a mind-jock of 20;

• That, should I accomplish this, I may be able to prove to myself that my life was been, if not wholly worthwhile, at least up to par;

• That, should I accomplish this… goddammit, I’d be fucking brilliant – by my own definition.

Will I do it? I much doubt it, not just because of the effort involved, but because Jenny must remain a human being, the sum of far more than massaged mental rigamarole. She’s a woman who reveres knowledge – all knowledge – as the pinnacle of being, yet who must continue, day-to-day, to exist believably in a believable world.

There are many human endeavors – wonderful human endeavors – that have no need to probe behind the Brainiac wainscoting. A plumber doesn’t have to know – would be impeded by knowing – the existential meaning of plumbing. And the world would be far worse off without plumbers than without writers.

As individuals, we each assume a position in life, simple or complex, hidden or obvious. If we live up to that assumption, fine. If we do not, the result can range from periodic bouts of internal hives, through mental dissolution, to suicide. 

My expectations for myself have, in large part, gone unacknowledged. And trying to uncover what’s unacknowledged is like peering up your pantleg to see where you’ve put your socks. 

As I’m signing off, please don’t mistake this flow of mental sweat for anything other than self-serving. I’m serving myself on a pewter platter; if you ingest without investigation, beware lead poisoning.

*   *   *   *

Song of the week:

Fairytales can’t come true,

It won’t happen to you,

You’re a dumb old fart…