In the Beginning is the Weird

Yesterday we spoke of the tension that exists between questions and insights. Now, tension and stress are synonymous, and they exist in positive and negative forms. Too much stress is harmful, but having no stress is a symptom of death.

And not just biological death. For it seems that, to the extent that you are successful in leading a stress-free psychic life, it will also be insight-free. Leaving aside Brandon’s dementia, his mind is as clogged and cluttered with ideological platitudes, malignant banalities, crude projections, and instinctive cliches as Obama's or Kamala's.

There is a way of communicating that is soul-deadening to the communicant. Or maybe you never went to college. But this death-dealing style constitutes a backdoor proof of the soul, since sometimes it has to be sophicated by some tenured assfixiator in order to be discovered and known. Just as the man who best understands fire has been burnt, the man who understands the soul is acquainted with soul murder.

Although we come into the world with a soul, we don’t come in with explicit knowledge of its content. Rather, it is a form — the form of the body — that has an implicit knowledge of what will come to be recognized as its content. In other words, our spontaneous attraction to this or that endeavor, or person, or discipline, will reveal ourself to ourselves.

It reminds me of Tolkien, who was a most peculiar man. Since watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy a couple weeks ago, I’ve read several biographies, and he developed a consuming fascination with language by the time he was an adolescent. Not only did he master Greek and Latin, but Old English, Welsh, Finnish, Germanic, and more, and then began inventing his own “ancient” languages (as a teen, mind you). 

Of note, he didn’t invent the languages for the sake of his mythology, rather, vice versa: he needed to invent a mythological world in order to have a place where the language were spoken. In the beginning was the word.

My point is, how does one account for such a unique and specific attraction? By virtue of what principle is it spontaneously present in the psyche? Certainly no one coerced or even encouraged such a fascination. Some parents insist that their child study law or medicine, but who advises his son to become a philologist?

Speaking of words, it reminds me of that handy one we discovered awhile back: autotelic. The Oxford dictionary informs us that it has only been around since 1901 -- coincidentally, the same dictionary that provided Tolkien with his first job, where he was in charge of W.

I’m guessing that for most of us, tracing the etymology of walnut, wampum, and walrus might be less than thrilling, but for Tolkien it was paradise; he later enthused that he "learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life.”

That there is autotelic, in that it denotes a person whose end or goal is self-contained. Instead of being externally driven toward the usual things -- wealth, pleasure, power, and celebrity -- the autotelic person is fixated on an internal goal. According to Csikszentmihalyi (in Wiki),

An autotelic person needs few material possessions and little entertainment, comfort, power, or fame because so much of what he or she does is already rewarding. Because such persons experience flow in work, in family life, when interacting with people, when eating, even when alone with nothing to do, they depend less on external rewards that keep others motivated to go on with a life of routines. They are more autonomous and independent because they cannot be as easily manipulated with threats or rewards from the outside. At the same time, they are more involved with everything around them because they are fully immersed in the current of life.

In hindsight I can see that I was always autotelic, but if one doesn’t have a lot of self-confidence, the autoteleology can just leave one feeling like a weirdo. It took many years to even identify my autotelic preoccupations, because who encourages a child to spend his life fucking around in the clouds?https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EYEDD2l0YUw

Post got away from me, but there’s nothing I can do about it, because my autoteleology pulled me into this unplanned attractor. Regarding my own son, I’ve always told him that his spontaneous attractions let him know that he has a soul, and what it contains. He is who he is, and I do my best to help him identify and actualize it.

Petey once said that "if you're not a weirdo, you're wrong." I think I understand what he meant.

 

To be continued.