Why is a Wise Guy Not a Wise Guy?

Requested by RGF

To properly answer this question it must be stated aloud. “Why is a wise guy not a wise guy?”

Or perhaps the proper way of writing the question would be “Why's a whys guy not a wise guy?” In which case the answer is that a wise guy does not bother with so man “whys,” because he sees that “why” is only useful up to a certain point. Why allows one to make sense of how forces and agents operate within a system, but also comes to a terminus where continuing to ask “why” will only yield impotent “because” answers. Eventually one is bound to come to a point where the answer is “it just is” or “I just do,” and the “whys” guy who insists on asking why beyond the point of usefulness cannot be a “wise” guy who applies knowledge and understanding to his actions.

On the other hand, maybe this is all wrong and it is not a question at all, but a statement: “Wise: a whys guy not a Ys guy.” In this instance we have two types of men, the “whys” guy and the “Ys” guy. Y being typical shorthand for a “yes” response, especially in questionnaires, we can picture the “Ys” guy being the chap who does as he's told and doesn't bother with asking too many questions. He acts based on the vision of another and is not concerned with understanding too much of his own area of activity. The other man is the questioner – the “whys” guy – who will not act unless he has been given an explanation of the meaning and context of his actions. The statement declares the “whys” guy to be also “wise,” to the exclusion of the “Ys” guy.

Or perhaps it is the reverse! Perhaps this statement says that the “Ys” guy is “wise” while the “whys” guy is not! For what, after all, is wisdom except an aid in determining what actions one should take? And what is the critical foundation of society except a willingness to trust others and accept a certain level of blindness in order to function at greater levels than any single individual imagination would be capable of picturing? In this case, the “whys” guy slows society's progress, the “Ys” guy understands the value of endorsing a social structure – and is therefore “wise.”

And what else might these words be saying? “Why is a wise guy not a wise guy?” That is, asking why the wise are not wise? A bit a shoddy logic that illuminates the deeper truth that a wise guy is only wise in a certain context – that is, certain behavioral inclinations and certain maxims may make a man wise in one situation, and a fool in others. Put a wise debater in a managerial position and see the fool come out; ask the analyst to be an artist and you'll soon beg the fool to go back to his dungeon of spreadsheets!

And thus we see that the same bit of wordplay can be used to say this but it can also say that and that in this context we're discussing wisdom in the abstract and in that context we're discussing social structure, and no doubt there are more this and thats that might be appealed to as context. No doubt all this confusion could be avoided by multiplying words to create clear logical pictures of what we are trying to communicate, and therein lies the real wisdom of the statement: A bit of wordplay will stay with us far longer than logical clarity, for the wordplay resembles the obscurity that characterizes our lives as they are rather than our lives as our logical pictures say they can be.

But even that explanation pales in comparison to the goofy joy of playing with words!

Resisting the System

In the past all I wanted was to weave all my thoughts and theories into one big, coherent system that explained my fundamental views on the world and invited (read: coerced) others to come live in that system. Today I think my thinking is more sophisticated than it has ever been, but I also find that it resists systematization. I think in remarks, I think in isolated games and relations, I oftentimes relate those relations to one another, but they do not have their proportions worked out. I don't have a hierarchy, I don't have a scale for those games in relation to one another.

Sometimes I want to sit down and build that system, but I resist that urge. Why?

To get the baser reason out of the way: because not trying ensures that I won't fail. For the more fundamental reason, though, I have come to distrust systematic thinking.

I find relations to be more personal than nouns. When we observe phenomena we tend to observe them in largely the same way - that is when we talk about them we don't seem to spend much time squabbling over, say, the blueness above us or the greenness beneath us. We don't squabble terribly much when we observe common relations, like the being-on-top spatial relation between a cat and a rug or the prior-to temporal relation of Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama. But we do notice increased squabbling around the point where we discuss relation, like discussing the similarity relation between a given lasagna and a given pizza. We are left in dark and confusing territory when we begin discussing causal relations, like bad parenting, destructive culture, genetic predisposition, and mental disorder in relation to a given committed crime. Then we enter into full-on war when we discuss the proportional relations like the balance of strength and speed in successful martial arts strategies.

We find some relations which rely heavily on common, public appearance and phenomena, like spatial relations. Then we find relations which seem to be based largely on personal intuition and seem to be perceived much differently depending on the one who perceives. Sometimes these latter relations can be cast in a way that can be publicly measured, sometimes they cannot.

In terms of system building, it seems inevitable that much of the scaffolding will be made of these personal relations. Perhaps to me we have to start with the absurdity of human existence, or perhaps we have to start with the question of what can be known, or we can ask how we follow God in a modern age, or we can ask what is the Good. Perhaps I say that this starting question (whichever one I choose) has a primacy relation to all other questions, my question must be asked first. Of course there is no appearance that we can measure to see if this is true, and there is no shortage of people submitting alternative questions that they claim has a primacy relation. The system becomes deeply personal, less and less available to other people living their lives.

Or, to put it in a another way: perceived abstract relations contain something personal to the speaker. The bigger the relation, the more personal it becomes. The more personal it becomes, the more alien it is to other people. So whereas my little isolated relations and games contain a little that is personal and offers itself to other people as eager, helpful tools, if I were to turn them into a large system it would taste so much like me that only those who happen to like my flavor would be able to thrive living by my system.

Writing With the Pretentious Dial Turned Way Up

Oftentimes I will write something and, upon reading it, realize that the style in which I write is completely inappropriate for the setting that I write it in. Blogs are conversational, they aren't meant for proclamations from the mountaintops (I proclaimed from the mountaintop).

I try not to ever write in a way that is unclear to me, which I take as what pretentiousness essentially is. When your writing escapes your own understanding, then you are being pretentious. Also a shit.

Yet upon reading my writing sometimes I get the feeling that I naturally think in somewhat obscure statements. In fact, I do not think that this is particular to me, but is in fact how most of us think whenever we think for ourselves. We usually have to do some light translation to make our meditations fit for public consumption. I rarely actually go through this step, instead posting it while it is still written in the language of a private writing. It is for this reason that I think there is a disagreement between my style and my substance.

My writings are blogs written half in the style of doctrine and half in the style of personal explorations and inquiries. At the same time a blog is essentially written for other people. This is where the disagreement lies. The result is a blog that comes off intentionally obscure - therefore pretentious - therefore shitheaded.

Well, shitheadery happens.

Here's a video featuring the words "vagina blood fart."

Tumblring

Well, seeing as today is my day off, I decided it was finally time to make my own tumblr for the purposes of documenting my progress on my ridiculously long Batman story project. Presently I'm trying to approach the story at a leisurely pace, hence the tumblr will make it easier to view the entire endeavor as a unity once the whole thing is complete. Besides that, I figure I can fill it with whatever observations I'm having on the story as I'm writing it.

My present blog will remain my main blog, of course. Only matters pertaining to the story will be relegated to the tumblr.

Is it 'tumblr?' Or do you capitalize it? I'm not quite clear on the etiquette yet....

Ambition Tempered by Apathy

Let apathy encompass your life and you will be a nihilist, everything will be equally worthless as everything else and it will be impossible to love or pursue anything in life. On the other hand, let ambition encompass your life and you may find that there is so much that is worthwhile and so much that is lovely that it will likewise be impossible to pursue anything because your love is spread so thin. If no roads are worth walking or if many roads are worth walking, you remain standing still staring at the landscape.

So you let your ambition run wild; you wander around collecting things to care about, ensuring that you stave off nihilism with will and desire. Then you look at your mere twenty-four hour day coupled with an anemic seven day week and your growing collection of fetal projects that just lack the nourishment to make it to term. Then you've got to turn around and go in the other direction: pruning, burning, chiseling. You are going to have to drop some hopes and smother some ambitions so that the others have enough resources to survive.

Remember: You are mortal, therefore finite, therefore particular. You can't be everything; every moment you spend carries a cost.

The Fragility of Productivity

This is presumptuous of me to say, since I'm not a writer (except in the sense of these blogs and the, uh, Batman story I've devoted my present life to), but I have come to the conclusion that the writer needs one of two things to pursue his activity: solitude or a close circle of exclusively supportive and understanding people who endorse the writer's desire to write. Naturally the writer can not expect the entire world to support his endeavors, but his close circle, the people he interacts with daily in his free time, must support his endeavors.

The reason I say this is that productivity is easily disrupted; even if the will to write is healthy, distractions derail the process or increase the flaws in the products. To minimize distractions requires an environment where the collective will of the people occupying the space is in agreement that distractions ought to be minimized. Even a single rogue will can lead to disruption... especially since the invention of the TV.

So which is to be preferred? Solitude? Or support? I will not make a judgment here as I do not think that this is a case of worse and better, but a case of different heights and different flavors being produced by different conditions.

But, then, one can not stop being productive simply because conditions are not ideal, but it is always tempting to do so. This is a case of cathartic bitching.

They Come and Go

Just try keeping track of all the little observations and questions that pop into your head in the course of a given day, particularly if you keep any kind of blog. Little ideas pop up, and if you don't feed them, they fade right back into the obscurity of your mind. 999 times out of 1000 they are completely mundane ideas that interest no one except yourself and yourself only because of a self-interested bias, but the question is should you go out of your way to feed them or only let the useful ones - the ones that regular recollection and employment ensure are not forgotten - occupy head space?

I keep this blog specifically because I like feeding those ideas, but I would not necessarily recommend it to everyone else.

Worth

There are times when you find yourself passionately motivated to do something, but you find yourself intellectually doubting its worth. That is, you know that your emotions and your will are what cause you to find something worth your time or not, but you also develop an intellectual picture of yourself and your goals and what kind of things you value. You may find yourself feeling that something is worthwhile, but uncertain if it fits in with the rest of your desires and values. It is the intellect that moderates once the emotions have had their say.

In such a situation you have three options. First, reject the thing that captivated you, you were captivated only in a moment of weakness. Perhaps this is true in some cases, but more often than not it would seem to me that this is direction chosen by someone who does not want to see that their nature is more complex than their initially thought. Second, accept that perhaps your nature is more complex than you thought, but choose not to feed into those impulses. Choose to live up to the image of yourself you already have by refusing to indulge any additional desires or impulses until they atrophy as much as possible. This seems to be a noble choice, it takes responsibility for shaping one's own nature insofar as such a thing is possible, but it also seems potentially stifling and could turn someone into a caricature of a human being if they starve too many dimensions of their nature. Third, accept that your nature is more complex than you thought, and change your life to reflect that. This can be a dangerous option, as there are often parts of our nature we do not want to see influencing us, but can also be fulfilling if we find some deep desire that we had previously been neglecting to indulge.

The first option seems dishonest, and is essentially self-deception. I personally do not respect it. The other two we should alternate between on a case-by-case basis, depending upon the extent to which social norms, personal standards, and expediency in attaining other goals drives us to expand or not expand our list of goals, desires, and loves.

Sometimes, though, you cannot shake the feeling that the thing you really want to do might turn out to be a colossal waste of time. In my case at the moment, I have spent the last month dreaming up a Batman story that, according to my (very) early estimation would be around 252000 words at completion. That is a long ass time, that is a lot of effort, that is something that is very likely to not be finished. And even if I do finish it, it's a Batman story, it ain't getting published. At best it entertains people online. Having considered the certainty that the best I can hope for is creating something that maybe people like online, I still feel compelled to try it.

If nothing else, it will be the most ambitious project added to my list of abandoned projects. Or, who knows, maybe I'll follow through.

Setting Finger to Keyboard

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit.

-Ernest Hemingway

In the back of my mind, I've always sort of figured that if I actually sat down to write, whatever I wrote would probably be good. I figured it would need editing, and that it would probably take a very healthy dose of inspiration before I would be “literary,” but I always figured my writing would probably be about above-average.

I finished my first 1000 words yesterday, and in the course of it, contemplated scrapping the entire project. I even had an opportunity to do so when I realized that my announcement blog did not post at midnight like it was supposed to, so I could write up a different project and could avoid owning up to the failure altogether. Just reading a few paragraphs of my clunky prose made me see myself as too untalented to bother continuing, and reading my words appear on the screen never tickled my pride or excitement enough to compel me to go on. Worst of all, my chief motivation is the desire to have a novella written, rather than my desire to have a particular novella written. I'm writing without inspiration or without an idea or theme to build on; I have a rough outline and a handful of themes in mind, but they were chosen after I decided to write the book, they did not inspire the writing.

So I have about as much emotional fuel as a bored bureaucrat who has a set number of forms to review each day. This does not bode well for the quality of the material, or my endurance of the project. But there is one thought that I am trying to keep in mind throughout the writing:

It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be complete.

I'm sure that those with some writing experience are cringing right about now, but this is the philosophy that I think will carry me through this project. I am not approaching it as a potential masterpiece, I am approaching it as an experience that I want to have. If one day I ever do write something worth someone pirating online, then this novella will be practice for that day. If I do not, then this novella project was at least a case where I saw a creative act through to completion.

Mostly, this novella gives me a reusable lump of clay for the future. I can edit it, I can rewrite it, I can tweak it, I can modify it. Whenever I find an interesting literary technique, this novella gives me pre-written material that I can rewrite using the new technique, letting me look at it from the perspective of a writer and not just a reader.

Writing shit is the first step to writing something better. So, I will endure. But today, my prose still sucks.