Reinventing the Wheel

Barnett Newman said that his zipper paintings paid homage to man’s first truly creative act, which was to take a stick and draw a line in the dirt.

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I came across a man today that had a tattoo around his arm. It was a quote from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in German:

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent”

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How much can one learn in a lifetime?

The indelible contribution that language has made to our search for truth and understanding is that it allows a given man to 'learn' for many lifetimes not his own. For example, Newton spent his whole lifetime studying, among other things, the nature of the physical universe. He set aside some time to write down everything he learned, so that the next person would not have to reinvent the wheel. When the next great physicist came along, he could just read such books and comprehend Newton’s whole life’s work in a matter of days. One only had to re-read the written conclusions, without re-conducting all the experiments. In that sense, the capacity for human understanding grew exponentially with the advent of language, and by extension, the maintenance of libraries, and most recently, the creation of google.

By that, I mean that one’s ability to understand life is not bounded by the length of one’s own time on earth any longer. Rather, one has at his or her disposal the countless lifetime’s that have been reduced to newspaper articles, academic journals, philosophical treatises, novels, novellas, charts, power point
presentations, paintings, poems, songs, movies, hieroglyphs, excel spreadsheets, abstracts, tables of contents, indexes, and the backsides of children’s cereal boxes. Among other things.

But suppose this wasn’t the case. Suppose, we didn’t, as a matter or habit, look to our fathers, teachers, scholars, or dusty old books for lessons on what to know and how to know it. Suppose we weren’t rabid consumers of other people’s conclusions. Suppose it was all on us. Then what? If you had to start from scratch, how much could you possibly learn in your 70 years? How much in the 40 or 50 you have left?

My first instinct is to say, very little. But, I think that may be the right answer to the wrong question. Rather than ask, how much, I think it might be better to consider what kinds of things I’d want to know if I had to start over. It appears to me that all the requisite knowledge I would need to lead a happy and relatively healthy life would be within my gasp, even if I had to begin anew. That is to say, 70 years, or even 50 years, is plenty of time to figure things out by oneself. I have to believe that the very design of life is such that it is possible to ‘complete the task’ within the allotted time.

Our life, of course, does not function that way. We are told a great many things. From a very early age, we are instructed on how to live life in the imperative– how we should dress, how we should act, how we should carry ourselves, but we are rarely ever given instruction on why. Indeed, should the question ever be broached, the response is often, “because so and so said so.” Indeed, even the great many who claim to be steely individualistic merely “reject” that which they’ve been taught, and are thus, merely a predictable mirror image of their lessons. The fact is, we are served ethics on a silver platter. We are so used to being given it, that when we have to go out and get it, we don’t know where to begin.

Then the question becomes, does our culture – one that encourages the blind consumption of pre-fabricated conclusions - aid or hinder our search for the good life? A central characteristic of the good life, it appears to me, is the search itself. Our culture does not search, for it believes that truth and understanding
is a commodity that can be bought and sold, traded or given. We give a university some $30,000 a year in exchange for knowledge, meaning, and wisdom as though such a trade were possible. We go to church to listen to someone tell us how we can be saved. We listen to the director’s commentary special feature to be told what the movie really meant.

In a like manner, 100% of everything I know to date was given to me – some of it was paid for, some of it was charitably bestowed, but all of it was passively received from someone else. Our culture encourages this. They tell you that nothing is new under the sun. They tell you that there’s no such thing as a truly original idea.

I envy the first man, his simple life, his humble pursuit of understanding necessary to live. I want to forget everything I’ve ever learned and go back to that time. I want to tear it down. I want to give back all of the lifetimes I’ve consumed and all the conclusions I’ve greedily devoured. I want end plagiarism; I want for everything said to have been mine in the first place. I want for the wheel never to have existed and I want to reinvent it. I want a stick, a dirt canvas, 50 years and the will to figure the rest out.

What would you believe if someone before you didn't believe it first? What would you know after being granted your freedom from the known?

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Tear It Down - Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.