“Templates can’t stand a masterpiece.”
In the bon tradition, a tulpa is an object created through sheer focused thought. Buddhists call it a nirmita and Lewis Carroll called it a phlizz. The compressing of ideas into books for subsequent release can generate a small-particle tulpa swarm if done correctly. You’d expect the most boring phenomenon to therefore be the least probable, but it turns out this is the only one anyone bothers with. Its lowest form is the golem or academic, someone locomoted by others’ words on their brow and incapable of creating anything from scratch. Diplomas cover the walls like custard pies and a billion ideas fail to conceive. True creativity is a soliton wave, perpetual unless obstructed. It’s reasonable that the Prayer of Jabez boils down to an encoded plea for god to simply leave him alone.
Like any valuable commodity, the most dangerous time for an idea or philosophy is during transfer. All forms of damage, manipulation, theft or loss can occur as it’s being expressed from one person to another and this may sometimes be deliberate. Even fire is fragile when it’s small. The young Buckminster Fuller was stumped when his teacher represented infinity with a shabby line capped by an arrow, finding it more representative of limitation and expired curiosity. Mired in formal education, Fuller started his career popularising other people’s ideas, such as Walther Bauersfeld’s geodesic dome, before gaining the confidence to head off on his own with synergetics, an idea he’d carried around in a perforated box for years.
When Walter Benjamin saw Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which portrays a sheep’s head on the body of a hen with cardboard legs, he called it “the angel of history”, a fairly astute view considering the way history is taught – without connections, cause or effect. In keeping with the policy of incoherence and surprise, incidents are inserted without warning into the faint flow of things – no root or growth, and denied even the oxygen required by that most sarcastically unresponsive of house guests, the airplant.
For many, school is an experience of such toxicity and destructiveness that it is merely a thing to spend the rest of their lives recovering from. It serves as aversion therapy or a system of encapsulated samples introduced to stimulate antibodies against creativity or knowledge. The antibodies cover koans in commentary, exclude the wrong-note realities of life and seal the spirit against brilliance. Teachers who present the promise of a full-blast-on-all-cylinders nerve array prove as disappointing as ornamental berries. Some adopt the ‘stern cadaver’ style of teaching, marked by a contentless disapproval of humour and a perverse pressure to learn reluctantly. They are professional mourners.
In this freezing inferno, a child grows with the certain knowledge that she is only one of billions. Those who speak of the golden age of community overlook those ages when it was possible to be left alone. Amid an infringement so total as to be superimposition and the hobbling effect of peer hysteria, it is not done to remark on the obvious: that it helps kids to get used to boredom, obedience to people who are wrong, and the rewarding of the loudest. To scold is to bore with restriction, which in a secure kid will feel like an urge to go and explore. Indignation in a child provokes mirth or disgust, but what is the contribution of a child who never felt indignant?
The unfortunate honest try to play along by building a barrier against truth with Tetris-like efficiency, only to have the wall immediately disappear. For many savants and synesthetes, ideas and philosophies have a shape, colour and operation, and this perception is an instant means of knowing their quality. If an argument has a hole in it, there’s a visible hole. It makes the flatness of fanatics as apparent as political sleight of hand. It’s even possible to design a hole into an argument to lure someone beyond its darkness, like the impossible shafts and missing walls of the vessel in Hans Henny Jahnn’s The Ship. Among clairevidents the purpose of certain ideas is the shape they make in the mind – they are intended to be decoded in the form of higher-dimensional sculpture or schematics. Connoisseurs slip each other the raw texts like addicts of an unbranded drug. To most people the only clue may be a repeated contradiction making folds in an otherwise coherent narrative, or a bit of wiring that seems to serve no purpose. The addict will sense at once whether a book contains anything.
The child thinking along these lines looks around the schoolroom in dismay, and as this turns to disappointment and depression, the idea calcifies inside her like a stone baby, staying there until they are dead together. The same goes for the child thinking about snot. Hearts go numb with less commotion or recognition than a big break and are mourned too late or not at all. Lights are going out even now.
After ejection from a school, personality is determined by whatever happens to fill the hollows gouged out there. At the very least energy and years are devoted to compensation for the pulling and squeezing as the wound changes focus. One of the main consequences of today’s infantilising culture is that the traditional denial of a child’s sentient humanity has been extended to adults, especially in the workplace. Companies are now operated as if full automation has already taken place. Solutions vanish every second of every day and we will never know the geniuses lost to the cubicle or to cops in a burst of taser confetti. Occasional reforms pump out the remaining air – the Trilateral Commission began to reinforce the trend in the 1970s when it concluded that public trust in governmental authority had declined because American youths were over-educated. Rebalancing nature is like drawing an equator through a starfish. I did that once and it started shouting at me. No one entirely succeeds in getting bent back into shape.
But you can’t always be sure what’s rocking in the bomb cradle – raised by a mother like a whale heart, you can still spend a life guessing the weight of the world. A believer in truth, having dodged formal schooling, William Blake navigated complicated moralities as one would stride across a mosaic floor. His testaments to the great beyond are like one-shot tarot cards, hand-painted and human. Hoping to be reckoned with but finding no takers, his few commentators ran out of steam before they could get their act together. Blake meanwhile stood with the luminous endurance of a saint. He could have gone far and fast if he’d got any traction, but cultural flat-Earthers would look away for many more years, each like an eternity.
It can be interesting to look at those scarce cultures that have been entirely honest about not wanting anything different or very interesting. During the tacitly tolerated phase of rumspringa or ‘running around’, many Amish adolescents find that the regular world’s pretence at encouraging imaginative individuality generates a stress they are unprepared for. Honesty is always a relief and saves energy. Faced with two restrictive cultures, most choose to stay with the one which is upfront about it and ignore any options beyond these two. Whether agreeable or contrary, they resemble cellular automata that alternate in binary and depend on neighbours’ values. We’ve all heard the story of the man who wrapped a map around his head and then burst the latter like a balloon. Beginners in spatial thinking can write an idea, put it down and walk away while acknowledging all the adjacent ideas they’re wading through – keeping a continuity of mind down the street and round the bend leads fairly soon into vivid territory. But for some a notional vertigo stops even the simple dropping of an idea to see where gravity takes it.
The apparent lack of receptor points for the original to plug into is only in people’s minds. In the absence of fear, the mind has as many orifices as it wants. Yet even for the fearless, off-the-peg wackiness marketed as originality often serves as a prophylactic against the real thing – there’s no need to try for something seemingly already owned. Many people defer the achievement of anything interesting to their offspring. This postponement may roll over for a hundred generations before either they stop pretending or someone finally accomplishes something and is frozen out of the family for being a weirdo. Some parents take delegation seriously and decide who the child ought to be before its fontanelle slams in their faces. Most adults who resist for a while the urge to delegate finally decide to dangle from their own past, disguising themselves as their earlier, living version. One kind of surrender masks another and the false epiphany of late-life political conservatism helps. In the curiosity of last resort, they find that in a whole life the meaningful events add up to a few days, or the length of a story.
Hermann Hesse’s book Beneath the Wheel describes a child who is curious about the world but is under the control of people who understand none of the factors in that equation. Unlike many other writers deemed to be phase reading for teens and slackers on a zoned-out god safari, Hesse can be revisited and found more solid and viable than before. From his earliest days he studied the myth that so long as enough stupidities are convergent, there will be a viable civilisation. He doubted that the sun needed alibis or embellishment and wondered why tycoons were so boring. Basic stuff but fluorescent thoughts for a child stitched into a sailor suit. His elders tried to mute him with a course of opera appreciation and rote recital, or what today we would call attempted murder. He was honestly bewildered by the perfunctory topology of their beliefs. They had built churches for gossip and appeasement, tapering the congregants’ preoccupations upward like the filament of a silkworm until the steeple’s apex held a single pinched nerve. An attempt to throw himself on the mercy of the river saved him from those equally useless fates, standing speechless with illumination or draping around in contentless ennui. He’d got a fright and emerged irradiated. Something had changed in each door and each lock. He decided against being an author who adds not one new detail to the impressions we have already collected. The fool sleeps in the master’s hand. Living out a life in the golden climate of creativity, he ended up telling stories in the ninth person and the subtemporal tense, exquisitely tooled narrative cascades with thousands of integrated components and the intricate valving of a chiton. It’s an extravagant open system of wisdom well-spoken, as surprisingly broad and detailed and strokable as the iris of a sunflower. Though pragmatic as the python he resembled, culture had him seen as inscrutable as a cigar store alien. Deference, reverence or expected bafflement – these keep the content unexplored.
The historical Doctor Faustus is reputed to have been vindictively boring, perfecting the method in both silence and many words. Watching people and guessing at ingredients, he extruded the moment in all directions, wasting the time of everyone he knew. That’s how he spent his gifts. Resources too often go to those with no imagination. There are those who think it unseemly that an individual without extensive ‘formal’ education might have risen to Shakespearian heights – far preferable an Edward de Vere, one of the landed gentry capable of evading in nine languages and possessing enough cash to screw up badly and fall arse-backwards into Christmas. It seems more fitting to some that great work should emerge from one who has had an approved programme of knowledge fed in increments to his incurious brain, rather than one who is actively voracious for any knowledge he can find, like a candle learning at both ends. It would shore up the conceit – not a fantasy because it’s not actually desired – that precocious individual thought can be established mechanically by syllabus. Probably it’s been argued that the man we know as Abraham Lincoln was not in fact the boy from Kentucky but a privileged landowner who used the poor dolt’s name. The truth is not hierarchical. Those ravenous for knowledge chomp through it like ever-starving zombies, blood hanging from their faces.
Born and counting, Antonin Artaud studied the world as if facing his accuser, seizing and turning to account each street and field presented to him. He had a face like a wet kestrel and more worries than a shaved lion in a rental car. His appetite for honesty had him digesting his own bones. Many put his desire for a ‘body without organs’ down to the fact that his own were rubbish. He struck an attitude that no one could understand, wheezing like a hilarity. It’s been claimed that Artaud’s performances were kicked off by the writer rattling his limbic system in a hat and throwing it at the audience. It was then for the audience to remark upon whether he was entitled to do so. In fact his works were as closely appointed as daily life, a familiarity he then threw lopsided in five directions by introducing the nonconformist element of common sense. This put him out of favour with Breton, whose equational tirades and art deco synapses carried less juice than the moon. Artaud was soon booted out of the Surrealists for his position that lobsters belong in the sea and other notions troubling to the movement. His belief that there’s no such thing as an amateur scream was unwelcome in a world where it’s not acceptable to scream in company, irrespective of the pain level. Artaud hadn’t learned such unspoken rules and never discovered where those mute lessons were held. In 1948 he recorded a spoken piece commissioned for French radio titled To have done with the judgement of god, a screeched diatribe on how to dance wrong-side-out and deliver Man from all his automatic reactions, punctuated with viscerally terrifying shrieks and hoots. France had only recently commenced the denial of their four-year Nazi collaboration and a copycat genocide in Algeria – this feral squawking of Artaud’s didn’t fit the bill. After one listen it was officially declared unfathomable. Enforcement was unnecessary among a crowd that could be depended upon not to bother anyway. Nobody could remember for a long time afterward that Artaud’s mouth had distended into a sort of ribbed pipe like a duduk flute. In fact some of the shrieks heard on the recording are those of the sound engineers. And with his head now resembling that of a shovel-nosed sturgeon, it never fully recomposed itself. Doctors prescribed him enough chloral to kill him several times over, a measure which took account of his virulent desire to live. He died a month after the programme’s censorship. It was thirty years before it was broadcast. Artaud’s deathmask could double as a crowbar.
America, another empire with its heart in its jaws, observed the dead walking or hanging by a catgut thread of credit and wished none of their scratches of protest read into the record. Nelson Algren confounded these contortions by going up and asking. Uncle Sam valued decree above the facts at its disposal – Algren made a practice of allowing what was in front of his eyes to reach his brain without interference. Researching for a book called Nonconformity, he saw people listening to sermons that ended them; those lucky too late for it to help; the dead springs of those who had lost their faith and turned to religion; the strange tension of disorder at rest; police retribution and the nostalgia for a foreign threat since serfdom was rediscovered in the factories; kids carving Fibonacci forearms and bleeding in pulsed spurts; shadows pegging it to nowhere. In those days there wasn’t much to it. America’s fear of a dangerous naked democracy led everyone to shriek at truth with the bandages removed. Algren pointed out that there are few things less available for public use than a public statue; that it is possible to be simultaneously monumental and misguided; and that statues take a long time to die.
In a culture where it was patriotic to be guided by alarm, Doubleday reneged on his contract. The grave kept Algren safe from gladness when Nonconformity was finally published, 45 years after he finished it. A topical book so recently old should taste like a dead firecracker but Algren created a system of gyroscopic ribs surrounded by 18,000 moving parts to power a summary incriminating government and its infantile finalities. Then as now, the authorities’ pondering was so plainly outside the problem that they only reached the solution to its front yard. Critics abhorred Algren’s pointing out flaws and proposing no solutions, on the odd grounds that a man unable to stop a fire himself should not presume to alert anyone else. A fully-automated device, home-made but intricate, is best bequeathed to those who need it most. Everything in this little book seems arranged to cope with what threatens it.
No truce is accepted or honoured, so do not hobble yourself by seeking to accomplish it on their behalf. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska spoke to thunder and made the first drafts of almost every painting and sculpture others would produce over the next 50 years. Young enough to think war would give him more life, every part of his promise destroyed him.
Instantly thwarted upon deployment, some theories can survive only in a place where there are not any circumstances. Like a scale model, the theory does not behave like the real thing – the weight, speed and density are off. It’s not exactly a lie but at best a slant rhyme. Parables work something out in the privacy of another problem, while children’s cautionary rhymes exaggerate consequence so that, for instance, patting a stranger’s dog will surely make your legs explode. The feeling of cause-and-effect power this gives a child is short-lived. Rational motive also misleads. An adult learns that many things can happen impartially to end the Earth.
The best writers of fairy tales understood that life is bones in treacle and that treacle is expensive. Hans Christian Andersen, a creepy writer whose potential readers have been kept at bay for decades by Danny Kaye’s stupid face, wrote in The Shadow about an honest author whose shadow detaches and becomes a ‘man of the world’, learning the twists of human society. Finding great success, it enslaves the meek author as its own shadow, and finally has him executed. In Wilde’s The Fisherman and His Soul, a witch claims that the fisherman’s shadow is his soul and this he cuts away with a knife so as to live in the vividly fertile undersea world of his beloved mermaid. The shadow asks for the fisherman’s heart but is refused, and so the shade sabotages the fisherman’s life of love and beauty. The shadow, when apart, is as malignant as the one in Andersen’s tale. The loving heart, senses and mind are treasured, and it seems that the witch lied about the shadow being a soul. In Japan they call intuition ‘stomach art’. A man was once tasked with creating something using only the stomach contents of a great white shark. The result resembled a kind of consultant. It’s pathetic to have someone else’s gut feeling.