Last Monday I wrote some really bad parody of Robert Frost's Mending Wall to describe my sentiments about an average Monday Morning and followed that up with presenting Neruda's Ode to Wine here. This in turn was inspired by an earlier post about Ogden Nash's poem A Drink with Something in it. This I believed was the seed for an interesting tradition - of reading intoxication inspired poetry as a way of getting over the Monday Blues. But I'm already thinking of breaking from tradition.
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Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of This is Water. On 21st May 2005 author David Foster Wallace gave the commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. The speech has since been dubbed the 'This is Water' speech and the entire transcript can be read here or you can listen to it youtube here. My favorite though is this really beautiful video that that takes excerpts from the speech and stitches them together with some really great video and graphics.
He makes the most profound point with this really simple story:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance
I'm going to try to not reproduce the entire text of the speech here - just the excerpts, but bear with me as I have my fan-girl moment. I went to a post graduate liberal arts program and it simply turned my world view on its head so I totally resonate with his views on the value and purpose of a liberal arts education.
the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean: To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
His insight into the human nature and workings of the mind are the reason why he can write such real gripping characters in his books. I love his point about how we experience the world through the lens of the 'self' and to be conscious of it is the first step towards developing empathy.
I tend to be automatically sure of...that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence...It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth... It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head...I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience...And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
"Getting hypnotized by the monologue in your head"....scientists write papers in Science (and then retract them) about how we're insensitive to corrective information and keep believing false information, but really it comes down to the hypnotic monologue in our heads.
The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things...then you will never have enough...Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly....Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
Guilty as charged for worshiping intellect. And it is true I feel like I know so little - like I'm some sort of backwaters oaf. I guess I have a lot to learn when it comes to being really free of my hang ups.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
The so-called real world not only promotes this way of living, it also reinforces it through the construction of a narrative in line with the worship of money, power, sexual allure and self on social media platforms. Life is demystified through a series of status updates and posts.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
Amen.
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