Continuing Re-education

The idea of a continuing education isn’t new to me, but it does usually arrive in times where I don’t feel that I am doing enough with my life. So reading and writing, in those moments, could be seen as forced labor on my part -- the fact that I’m doing something rather nothing only so  that I don’t feel completely useless. Is that the correct motivation to learn anything, so that I can cover-up the sense that something is missing in my life? Well. Realistically, no. If there is something in my life that seems like a quick fix, then it’s probably a reflection of something inside of me that needs to be resolved. Desires play an important role in revealing our weaknesses. It’s not what we desire that is the problem, but it’s what is exposed by the desire that is the problem.

So. I say all that/this because since the tour, my mind has been thirsty for knowledge and expansion. I’m not desiring knowledge as a marketed consumable, but as a form of nutrition that I need, much like any other vitamin. I have, in the past, gone to college and learned new things, but what separates that from now is that I have a firmer belief system in place -- the things I am learning now are as much learned things as they are affirmations of said belief system.

“It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I read a line the other day about how a man these days can do math that would have taken Renaissance man hours and pages. But the difference is that the Renaissance man would not only do the math, but provide his proofs and work to show how the process came to it’s conclusion. So people today are good at regurgitating learned ideas, but they are less and less able to explain how it came to be.

So when I get into conversations with Chris K, like last night, he, as a learn-by-rote comedian, can only feel intuitively that something is wrong, but he doesn’t have the capacity, or refuses to look at himself so he could intellectualize what is wrong beyond the idea of, “you’re an entertainer, you should make people laugh.”  

Why?

I don't know if the crowd member knows that the feelings that arise while they are in a comedy club are due to their own personal experiences. Laughter is sharing of experience, as is every other emotion in that room. The person on stage should be able to correctly guide you to why you feel the way you are feeling. If a performer is making you feel contemplative, but it's cathartic or meaningful, then you are in  good hands. If they are making you laugh because they have made you elated, then you are in good hands. But if the performer is trying to make you laugh, and you feel sad or angry or dread, then you two have diverged and the performing is no longer leading you. At it’s best, watching the show is about you leaving yourself to go with the performer, who reminds you to not forget to bring along what is most important to you.

If you strip knowledge down, you can rebuild it all around you so that you might grow with it. And I think that’s what we are doing with the stage. To those who haven’t done the work, they will only see the TIP OF THE ICEBERG and not understand the process just out of sight. Thus is the folly of the person who is “completed” by external things/desires and lacks the ability to, or refuses to contemplate their own inner workings: they typecast and compartmentalize conflicts in their external world (thereby removing any sense of validity beyond that of any perceived novelty) so that they don’t have to contemplate the actual cause of the feelings from within; and in that, they deny the reality of the moment which prevents them from fully experiencing life as it really is.

Stop me if you've heard this before.