Maybe things are exactly as they do not seem: Out with the dog on his last walk of the evening, just before one a.m. As I approach the bare face of the school, a hulking figure shambles into the sidewalk in front of me. He’s all hunched, and I’m a little concerned for my safety… then I steel myself, and then I’m more concerned that he just not make comments at me or leer… and as I jockey around the sidewalk, trying to maintain a distance and keep the dog from lurching into him, he mumbles something incoherent, which in a moment becomes clear: Take care of yourself. Get home safe.
I went out to Central Park today and talked with S.K. Thoth (I am not going to link to him yet, I’m feeling a little posessive in this pre-pitch period). I’m ashamed. From the other end of the tunnel, seen through a swirl of Lindy Hoppers, yeah, he had looked like a yodelling weirdo with a fiddle and leg bells, and I don’t think any of us enjoyed giving our lungs a workout in a rogue cloud of incense. And yes, while I’m giggling behind the duck blind of my computer, this guy who sings about an imaginary continent in a made-up language makes an easy target. When am I one to ostracize, though?
I didn’t really have to ask many questions. A solid-built weekending Latino with a couple of kids squirreling around his knees was asking him plenty. First, what was his performance about? Something about the Hero’s Journey, a search for self. Thoth explained, as he would again later, that the fantasy world he writes about is a metaphor for his own life. I got the impression he’s not as immersed in his fantasy world as the website implies.
“I call this a school,” Thoth said. “I’m learning much.” Well, what had he learned today? “It was a musical thing, this time.” Since he has long since abandoned formal schooling on the violin, and never had any in voice, it’s up to him to make progress. “There’s nobody to ask, how do you do this next?”
I don’t brook any of this bullshit about cleansing spaces with sage smoke, or feng shui, or ancestors speaking to you directly. I grew up with a father who took us to Caltech parties thrown for Mars flybys and put a plaque on the door telling proselytizers and salesmen we were happy the way we were, thanks, we’d seek them out if that changed. I trust very few things which haven’t been affirmed by scientific inquiry — love, for example. Yet here was this gold-loincloth-clad guy I’d taken for a lunatic, who had my trust by the end of an afternoon because he left formal learning behind.
One thing I should tell you about myself: yes, I love my high school and everything it gave me, love good teachers and academic communities, knowing which ideas build upon older ideas and how; I’m proud of how I did, still puff up over my AP and SAT scores and the A given to me by a gruff old English teacher who never gave ’em out to anyone. But I have great respect for autodidactry. I went to Hampshire because I thought I might miss something important if I didn’t try to stake my life on it. In my first year there I invested a lot of my energy and self-worth in this idea, Non Satis Scire. (That’s our motto.) The poem the line comes from says, “To know is not enough/ we must do.” The president of the college likes to jaw on about questioning being the necessary compliment to knowing. Passion, compassion, moral rectitude, or rejecting everything completely out of hand based on paranoia or utopianism are other possibilities suggested in the actions of Hampshire’s student body.
I still don’t know what makes enough. Creation maybe. Juxtaposing completely unrelated ideas and seeing what happens. I just wanted you to know that love of autodidactry and loyalty to the academic establishment are having an ongoing fistfight in my head. (Maybe I’ve already made this clear to you. I don’t know why I feel like I need to defend myself to you. aside from the obvious, I guess.)
Watching Thoth I can see what he has taught himself. His body knows how to draw a single long note out of a violin while spinning in a circle. Not something that comes without practice. His feet know, like a tap dancer’s, that when you strike your heel or toe or whole foot against the ground, they make different sounds. I could see him experimenting with the bellied-out drain cover, trying out the effects of an unintended crinkle noise its corner made as he stomped on it.
And no, this is not going to make him a lion of Wall Street — not something you care for anyway, nor do I — or untangle the mystery of the Big Bang. I’ll tell you this much: he knows when he’s about to fall over, and can stop himself. The man has turned his mental powers towards knowing how much space his voice can fill, how many steps he has to take to get to the other side of a room. I watched him and listened to him and wondered if maybe we’re wrong, maybe we’re not supposed to be solving all these problems that go on outside ourselves. Maybe we’re just supposed to figure out exactly what these bodies which our brains are stuffed into can do.
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