I described myself as a recovering intellectual today, and it rung quite true. There was a time in my life when I was quite committed to ferreting out some sort of Truth or Knowledge about art and the world and my place in it. And while that inclination in me remains, the way I’m going about it is entirely different. 

A long time ago I suggested that if the answers to life’s big questions existed, I’d have read them by now. They’d be in a book some place. While some people certainly believe those books exist, and I may be on my way to that belief, the answers are still pretty open to interpretation. If your answers can inspire millenia-long blood-fueds they’re just not the sort of cut and dry universe-illuminating stuff I had in mind when I was searching around in my twenties. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Even if divinely inspired words exist, I just don’t think the human mind can understand them. Seeing we see not, and hearing, we hear not, neither do we understand. We must approach things through metaphor, parable, story, community, myth, icon and argument and all of these things together at once in a sort of overwhelm if we’re to have any hope whatsoever of seeing a sliver of what’s true. 

I’m a firm Wittgensteinian. I believe that words exist as brain pictures, and everyone’s are different. When I think of a cat I think of my grandmother’s tabby, or my brother’s...I don’t know what kind. When I think of Jesus I think of a rusted face welded from an axe head and some barbed wire. These are unique understandings of those two words. To have any sort of hope of commonality of notion we must all aspire to foolishness and to multiplicity of aesthetic. It is only in the overlap of many, many shared experiences, notions, myths, images, icons, songs et cetera that we might find common understanding, and only when approached with an almost painful earnestness and vulnerability, and even then only when our experiences are somewhat approximate. 

I’ve heard it said that Tolstoy can only be really understood in the original Russian. I myself have said that Stephen King can only be understood by a person who has grown up in, or at least spent a huge amount of time in New England. 

Maybe I can only be understood by Jack or Abby.