Helen's Bang, Solid Stupid, and Perpetual Excitement

Sometimes the gap between Baader and Meinhof is nearly instantaneous: an idea occurs to me and I then immediately start to see it instantiated everywhere in the world.  

What I'm about to say isn't particularly deep. It's not a big deal. Just a little deal I want to disgorge from my head en route back to Helen's Bang -- which should obviously be the name of a punk rock girl group.  

Anyway, while scanning the headlines this morning I saw one about some fake professor at UCLA who wants to force us to give reparations to Latinos.  Okay. Whatever.  

The thought was this:  how incredibly boring these people are.  How can this be, given the joys and pleasures of the life of mind (let alone spirit)? If you are privileged enough to inhabit this world, and are bored, then you are not in this world.  This woman is proof -- as if it is needed -- that "There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures."

It reminds me of another aphorism or two ten, each approaching the question from a slightly different angle. The hard part is limiting myself to ten, but here goes:

There are no trivial things, only trivial minds. (AKA the tenured.)

With the categories admitted by the modern mind, we do not manage to understand anything but trifles. (The cost of ideology.)

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions. (Philodoxers.)

Stupid convictions have the solidity of granite. (It's the other way around: granite has the solidity of stupid.)

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs. (Denying verticality is like clipping one's own wings.) 

Activism is the asylum for one who has nowhere to dwell and nowhere to go. (A boon to the stupid and boring.)

Activism burns without giving light. (Literally.)

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the other animals. (Literally.)

Transforming the world: the occupation of a prisoner resigned to his sentence.  (A boring way deal with to boredom.)

The political activity of the writer is the substitute for his exhausted talent. 

I'm a psychologist, so I know plenty of boring people with minds of granite -- who are intelligent and yet tedious.  Sometimes even the patients.

There is "intelligence" the noun; and the infinitely greater intelligence, i.e., the source or ground of intelligence to which the mind ought to be in conformity.  The adventure of life -- that which gives it its savor -- is the ineradicable tension between these.  If you are bored -- or boring -- it is because you have eliminated this tension. Or don't even know about it.

So the real question isn't how this idiot professor could possibly be boring, rather, how she couldn't be. Of course she is boring. Of course our trolls are boring.  Of course Barack Obama is boring. We'll get to him in a moment.

Every morning I receive a helpful email from the NY Times, which instructs me on the Correct way to interpret the news of the day.  For example, 

1. In the last few years, Republican voters seem to have become less willing to respond to polls. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, given Trump’s attacks on the media, science and other institutions.

You can laugh.  Or cry.  I encourage the former.  

Here's the next one, from the same helpful email:

Obama’s memoir gets a glowing review.

No! Really? Let me guess: incredibly boring man excites incredibly boring readers.

• The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writing in the Times, says the book is “nearly always pleasurable to read.”
• In one section, Obama addresses his presidency’s role in Trump’s rise to power: “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic,” he writes. “For millions of Americans spooked [that's only funny if it was unintentional] by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

Okay, we'll bite:  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie?  Looks like he or she has written seven books, each somehow more boring than the others.  Imagine how stupid one must be in order to write the following sentences:

--Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come. (Move over, Ta Nehisi!)

--His language is unafraid of its own imaginative richness.  (Does that make it brave or oblivious?)

--Obama’s thoughtfulness is obvious to anyone who has observed his political career. (Assuming deviousness is a form of thought.)

--Think of the iconic image of Jesse Jackson crying on the night Obama won the presidency. (He puts the con in icon.)

--There is, from the beginning, a sense that he is above the muck of politics. (As Truman said, there's a name for someone who leaves public office wealthier than when he went in: a crook.  Except for Obama.)  

--His loving friendship with Michelle sparkles in its solidity.  (Someone needs to submit that one to the Bad Writing Contest, stat!)

Now, there's more to boredom than you might imagine. Back when I was in graduate school, I learned that when I have the experience of boredom in the presence of a patient, I should understand it as a form of counter-transference.  

True, some people are just boring, and that's the end of it.  But for others, their boringness is the end result of a complex process of active soul-deadening.   The boredom they induce is actually quite fascinating under the surface. A lot going on.

I could cite many examples from my personal life, but I want to protect the innocent.   Why are they so boring? What are they doing to themselves?  I don't mean to boast, because I think the same is probably true of any Raccoon, to the extent that he is permitted to be honest.  But no one could walk away from an honest conversation with me and say "what a boring, predictable, and conventional person!"

I am never bored.  Nor am I ever boring.  At least I don't think I am.  Of course, it's always possible that I could be like Obama, and think I'm the most fascinating person alive, when I've never actually even had an interesting or original thought in my life.  

I just sprung it on the wife.  She seemed puzzled, and then concerned.  Why would you ask that?  You're the most interesting person I know.  That's what I thought.  I just wanted to check. 

Again, this is not about me, but about the process -- the Raccoon process, which, if done correctly, should result in never, ever being bored or boring.

No time to get to the actual subject.