Specialization

A musician friend who mastered a very difficult thing (Frank Zappa's notorious Black Page drum solo) complained to me that his family was unable to appreciate his achievement. To them, it was just yet more hitting of skins with sticks.

Here, fwiw, is Pablo doing his nerdily impossible thing:



I reminded him that this is normal. When a mathematician makes headway on a difficult theory, or an engineer solves some vexing problem, or a translator finds just the right phrase, none expect friends and family to applaud.

Mathematicians don't force their social and family groups to master the Navier-Stokes Existence And Smoothness Equation so they can join him at his level for dinner conversation. Off-duty engineers chat about their daughter's middle school grades and the family budget, not structural mechanics. People turn off their specializations and preoccupations while off work, becoming more generic - and thus more interactive - humans. That's how the world has always worked.

I, too, struggle to bear this in mind. The silent scattering of Slog readers have some notion of what I think about (though this is only my more accessible stuff). It seems abstruse and confusing for most people, though to me it's fiendishly simple (what's truly difficult are the internal Jenga towers of brooding discontent we whimsically fabricate and nurse as our Big Lifelong Project - not the observation that we do this).

I understand that it would be obnoxious and anti-social of me to derail conversations by debunking fallacious thinking, identifying frozen perspectives, etc. This is a big reason I made food my interface with humanity for a long while. Tacos and brownies, everyone can relate to. The other stuff populating my brain, not so much.

Whenever it feels lonely to keep it all to myself, I remember how unreasonable my drummer friend seemed, expecting his family to get it. He was missing a central truth; one I strive to remain in touch with.

Two differences between him and me, though. First, there are other drummers. He has some people he can talk to about the topic, and who'd emphatically applaud that video. My stuff is just me, alone. Second, while that sort of drumming, like advanced engineering, mathematics, translation, etc., has little to do with most people's day-to-day lives, the stuff I think about is right there, right now, underpinning it all.

Of course, a cosmologist or brain surgeon or linguist or particle physicist or auto mechanic or chemical engineer or endocrinologist might say the same thing.

Sigh.

I see how unreasonable it is to expect my ideas to be of interest to the portion of humanity that's not me - who are all-in on starring in epic narratives where they dodge fake slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And I see that truth is as welcome as glaring house lights suddenly switching on mid-show, shocking dark-adapted eyes and spoiling the deliberate suspension of disbelief. But I haven't a clue how to make myself - the guy with insight on all that - useful.

I guess just keep gambling. Perhaps that's the only avenue for a 21st century deva. Sure, it's lonely and sparse, but much less so than standing around awaiting lost travelers in Himalayan snowstorms. I guess I've got it relatively good.


I appear to have lost my ability to pull off magic tricks here.

(It's a siddhi, which, btw, has a name: "saraswati", though don't bother googling; the Internet, as I've frequently noted, is both too icily academic and frothily soft-headed to deal soberly with metaphysical/yoga-ish topics.)

Used to be, I'd sit down and start writing and, after feverish work, things would more or less tie together, and a few bonus sprinkles (sprinkles!) of insight would be coughed up in the process (an unexpected gift ala Walter-the-bus-driver's bubblegum).

But lately, I find myself unable to tie strands together, and the insight arrives, to use a salad dressing analogy, on the side, rather than worked into the lettuce. And I can't get it into the lettuce. I keep writing and discarding; writing and discarding.

People in my family lose sharpness in their mid 60s, and while I'm only just 60, this Slog has always represented extreme over-achievement (read through this series, particularly, to see a poor shmuck boxing way, way, way above his weight class). Many readers strangely assume this is all idly tossed off, but, no, I need every single marble (and then some!) to pull this off. So even minor degeneration leaves me incapable.

Fitting in that "Deva" chunk, at the end, was the magic connection. It tied together, along with a couple sprinkles. This time it worked, and I hope it's not the last.