But it was a disorganized library. And so you'd try to sell me an idea that was bigger than any system or sentence, and I'd look at you with almost-total incomprehension. And challenge my library's usefulness and accuracy? What do you mean I didn't perfectly catalog popular music by decade from memory? Material Girl was not in the 1980s? Is there no God, Mother?
But I grew out of that phase and grew to love ideas, grew to relish ideas with the same sense of intellectual accomplishment that I'd reserved for my old library of things and systems. Now I wanted not to be the curator of a library I'd built: I wanted (in Borges' metaphor) just the library catalog! I wanted the Big Ideas that would unlock every system and subsystem of the world. Real mathematics, foundations-of-mathematics stuff, proofs, logic, long trains of discovery with the Fibonacci sequence! Generalization after often-pretty-specious generalization! Libertarianism as a objective perspective! Category theory! Perspectives taken for their own sake (how far can you take 'em before their low utility or their frailty is revealed?)! Jokes that seemed to me to peel at the wallpaper to give you a glimpse into the support beams of the House of Humor and Truth! Wikipedia was a god-send for this period of exploration, as was college. Formal systems and computer science made much of my exploration relatively rigorous in the hard sciences, and my exacting self-selected intellectual circles kept all of the exploration into the soft sciences out of the nebulous haze of college freshmen..Through it all I guess the uniting frame was the Heart Sutra, which was about the closest thing I came to a religious, all-is-one revelation. I talked about qualias at dawn and tried to fix the seg-faults in time for due dates. Yes, as I'll explain, it was bereft of some crucial aspects of life. But it was enlightening, and I never lost sight of the importance of things like literature as more than just applied systems and ideas and styles. There was something there in those words larger than the author, the reader, and the book. That's the whole point, after all, of the Sutra.
But the limitations really became apparent and a nuisance and I couldn't shake them: I would ask myself simple questions that anyone should be able to answer: Hey, why are simple conversations so damn hard for me? Why was communication a seeming act of condescending? Why was speaking the simple truth to my life filled with so many awkward pleasantries, as if apologizing for the way my mind works, God forbid you and I have different wavelengths and strengths and weaknesses? Anyway, these questions really welled up as fundamental doubts, and at the end of the day I began to doubt the whole enterprise of an intellectual life (okay, not really, but perhaps the way I was living it). And so I searched for answers, of course, in a system or an idea (do what you know even when you don't know, heh). I began to ask better questions: Was I closing myself off? Was I just neurologically unable to empathize? Did I just not want to identify or communicate with people? Did I actually want experiences or did I want to live an ascetic life of unencumbered distance (which I was, truth be told, ultimately living)? And I found in this last question the true fundamental, existential doubt. I was living in unencumbered distance. Any way the wind blows and all that. You're supposed to shiver and plan and your dreams be tossed and blown. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to be engaged.
With the aid of a lot of great (and a few random-but-oddly-prodding) people pushing me in the right direction, I started to really figure out what it means to engage with the world. I surely am not done with this process, but I made a lot of huge steps (I'd like to think, heh). In the process, I started to realize that, yes, obviously, I had gone too far into the realm of ideas. But more importantly, I'd kind of denied myself humanity in the process. Like, in this obsession I had with methodology and rationality and Socratic dialogues and finding the core research papers, the gooey nougat papers in the annals of academia that truthfully alone justify its existence as an institution, that I ended up kind of overlooking that, hey, the human intuition is just as miraculous as the human mind. And that you need to feel confident and you need to hear out what people are trying to tell you. And that culture is just as much a triumph of human endeavor as academia (not in practical terms, but in a "Wow, that really exists? Pretty amazing, guys." sense). And that when you deny the brain its due experiences, you might as well be denying the body food. An mind bereft of problems is a mind that starves. Oh, you can live for a long time without your food, as long as you're getting your water (your stimulation, in this analogy, I suppose). But eventually you get hungry. You get really, really hungry. I was hungry for experience at that point. And I guess something snapped in me (call it a light switch) and I started to really seek help and to really talk about myself frankly and exhaustively, not in the abstract sense of a self and the particular example of Alex Dewey, but in the sense of an actual person whose fate I cared about a great deal and who wanted something more than a perfect library catalog and the smallest number of proverbial grains of experiential rice I could eat per day without starving my brain.
And it's been great. I don't want to trivialize that, it really has been great. But almost by the nature of the shift I'm always-already looking forward. And looking forward today at my life, there's a fear that emerges. Because from systems to ideas to experiences have I traveled in my category of obsession. And as I move from one to the other, I find myself going gradually and then quickly along a spectrum starting with pure neurological functionality (almost like test-drives) and sliding over towards pure humanity and culture and social undertaking. I love to coach and teach now, and I used to only like mentoring because it clarified my ideas; now I genuinely like imparting the thrill of discovery and I enjoy the happiness of other people, even if it feels a little abstract.
And there's a fear there, because where I'm headed is a place laid bare: To love and be loved by another beyond mere infatuation. To empathize deeply. To begin to obsess over and collect people and relationships and the small victories of social conduct that constitute a society, the same way I've loved things and ideas and experience in their own times. Where I'm headed is a place of openness and vulnerability and expectation and, ultimately, judgement and constant discomfiture leading to change or surrender.
And as this process goes, I truly feel I can handle all of it. I'm not afraid at all of the process, no. But what I do fear is that this love of people and relationships will be done with my characteristic acuity, attention, and placid obsession. That's what scares me and it scares me (in a good way, a life-affirming way) to think about. Imagine: That one day my travails will lead me to a new island. And on that island I'll speak another's name and they'll whisper back "Alex" with a certain thunderous quality and I'll feel like they'd just shouted into the darkness "Let there be light!" to my most cherished encumbrances for a moment and all that will be left in me to love is she.
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