My kingdom for a box!

“Thinking outside the box.” Not here, folks. Though I don’t claim immunity to the occasional appeal of sophistry (hell, I’ll quote anything if it supports whatever position I happen to be holding at the moment), I would never be so foolish as to claim that thinking – even of the most poetic, artistic variety – can take place outside some kind of “box.” It can be any shape; it can be as large as you please; it can overlap only to a very small extent – if at all – with received thinking. It can and should be a very topologically malleable sort of box. But I can’t see how any meaningful expression could take place apart from such framing. And the frame employed, if we are paying proper attention, will always seem something of an arbitrary imposition, a superfluity, extrinsic to “objective reality.”

I don’t discount the possibility of direct apprehension of reality unmediated by thought/language, of course. In fact, I’m inclined to think such apprehensions are rather more common than we might suppose. I will go so far as to propose that all kernels of insight, the sparks of inspiration out of which genuine thinking arises, represent in fact the commonest version of such direct, unmediated seeing. Let’s ignore for now the possibility that more complete, more fully transformative realizations can be had. I want to ask the poets and artists out there: isn’t this what keeps you writing/creating, really, this realization of something that cannot quite be put into words/forms?

And such an experience does seem transformative, at least in a small way. I think of how Rilke ended his famous poem about the “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: Du mußt dein Leben ändern – “You must change your life.” Because of that, that summons one feels at the heart of an authentic insight, one feels one must keep trying, poem after poem. If I can just find the optimal words in the optimal sequence, then something very similar to my original intuition might be passed along, might be felt in turn by the properly attentive reader or listener.

And who can’t read or listen with the necessary degree of openness? Who are these people who say things like “I just don’t understand poetry?” What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with us, that we don’t know what they’re talking about when they say that? Perhaps they have been taught that every poem is a puzzle to be solved, that it takes a peculiar kind of intelligence to unlock it. But whence the insensitivity to that which lies beyond language? No normal five year-old seems ever to suffer from the obtuseness that so frequently afflicts otherwise intelligent adults who imagine a one-to-one correspondence between words and reality.

Such ignorance is not inborn, I believe, but must be deliberately inculcated through years of intellectual bullying and the meticulous application of soul-destroying curricula. Eventually, if all works according to the lesson plan, the Möbius river of time shrinks into a one-way street, and the Klein bottle of imaginative space acquires a definite inside and outside: it becomes a non-topological box, a mental jail cell. This is the box that must not only be thought outside of: it must be escaped for good.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.