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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Aria de Capo
A short consideration of various types of thinkers; "dutiful" thinking, "inspired" thinking and the varying intellectual styles and capacities of man.
Monday, 2004-09-06 | Classic Gin, Philosophy
A million related bits of phrases come unbidden to mind--maybe you think it's an allegory for something first, maybe a metaphor that fits with your previous experience, maybe you have more of an ear for sound--but when I hear a proper noun or a noun phrase associated with (or clearly derivative of) the various intellectual disciplines with which I've become familiar over the years, my peculiar brain condition causes me to suffer the blistering licks of a thousand incandescent Pentacostal tongues.
It's incredibly difficult to think when you've got to work from behind a wire-crossed veil (a veil that you might imagine as 'cinereal' in color, if you were interested in really mixing the metaphors up).
When I hear words and speak words, I feel like I've got John's trusty yellow multimeter in one hand and a soldering gun in the other: I'm hunting down shorts and patching synaptic gaps as best I can, but inevitably a good percentage of signal never makes it through the circuit for which I'm responsible--spare electricity, fizzling and crackling out into the hungry air in the same way that water is wasted into the thirsty sand. The issue of responsibility of course complicates the metaphor even further, but let's ignore the question 'to whom are you responsible to for the successes of your cognitive processes?' in the spirit of maintaining a lively narrative.
Would that I could hide my sparking circuit from the world, but if the old axiom about the eyes and soul holds any truth, there's no hope for my efforts to obfuscate my designs. In conversation my eyes must twitch like a jar of flies--more so when I've found good and sweet wine and a place from which I can raise my index finger and hold forth. If the eyes are any kind of window on the cognitive apparatus and the processes in which it engages, casual interlocutors must be certain of my madness from the word 'Foucault.'
Finally, I think what I'm describing has everything to do with what I've long known about my own intellectual capacities. Whereas a man like my colleague M.S. Brent is an inspired thinker, I am a dutiful thinker.
In the pages that corral the finest output of the finest minds, you can see it if you read carefully: the great men of the past were inspired thinkers, each was able to find patterns in the organization of things where others had not previously found them, each was able to discern contingencies and describe his processes of discernment with alacrity and poise. To think productively; to produce new morphemes, memes and to recombine existing sensations in new and exciting ways.
I am rarely capable of such actions of the mind. Instead, I am made (that's the duty part) to focus the majority of my intellectual energy on modulating/demodulating meaning and attempting to order words as they enter my ears and exit my mouth--my brain grapples with my organs of sense rather than grappling with the semantic properties of circumordinate data.
Being a thinker ex officio is a terrible thing; to be awash in an unending deluge of givens and have to work feverishly to pile sandbags against a ceaseless and boundless tide.
What's more terrible is that, as dutiful thinkers go, I think that I'm more dutiful than some.
