makes skeptics queasy

[click image, video, forty minutes]

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I know there is a tendency out there to shirk responsibility for how things go around here, but, well, it really is shirking... no other way to put it....
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I have been noticing a marked disinclination to read things in recent years. I'm not a hundred percent positive this isn't my delusory self forsaking one of its very favorite pastimes in favor of keeping "me" happening, but I think, really, that this isn't honestly the case. I find myself desiring heavily to HEAR my teacher, at least as much as I want to see my teacher, and maybe not as much as I want to feel my teacher's presence. I find myself continually hunting for lectures or tv appearances from people I want to learn from... even when there are oceans of their writings available to me online. There are moments when I will just pull up that fabulous Readability program to read something that particularly grabs me... and even sometimes when I just move the window over to blank out the blinking ads and grab another pair of cheaters to get the nitty-gritty as quickly as possible, but on the whole, there is a very, very heavy bias to listening here. Even when it's a video documentary—sometimes even a movie—I don't want to look: I want to be doodling or playing solitaire while I listen to it.

My brain is extremely impatient with you. Don't ask me how I can love you so much and be this impatient, but it's true. I just somehow don't have the time for your folderol... but it's not usually of the character of dissing you. It's mostly about trying to yank you onto the wavelength where real communication with me can come out for a spin, where positive progress can occur. I remember doing poorly in some classes at school, which, I'm not bragging, was very weird because I don't do poorly on any subject. Nothing on which I've decided to cast my attention can resist yielding up its secrets to me, if that's where I've decided I'm going. So when I am doing poorly in a learning experience, it's a function of how the information is coming in, not what's there to be learned.

I remember having to cast aside completely what my high school geometry teacher was saying in order to grasp geometry at all. I was frickin' sunk so long as I was listening to a word he said. Same with my biology teacher. I started out getting D's because of my dumb tendency to listen to all teachers, instead of resort to something more informative when their input was impeding me. I remember having to resort to switching out all the important nouns for geometrical shapes in a few paragraph's of Gödel, Escher, Bach before their meaning would finally emerge, and wishing in between the few hundred attempts to understand and the resort to these shapes that I could have Hofstadter in the room with me to just spit it out for me. So it isn't always that I have to hear so much as I need to feel it and I have to have my attention on shapes or patterns or busy hands of some sort to get the information into my consciousness the way it can get in there.

What I'm saying here is that, any way you slice it, if one mode or another is creating a block—terminology, phrasing, bad chemistry, whutever—I gotta get around it or give up. The thing that determines whether I choose to do the work is how productive of good things I feel it will be. If it seems to me to only be a drill, a time filler, a means of becoming worthy of scholarly recognition, just trying to please someone else, just too much work for not enough return in the positive contribution range, I don't go there. Can't make myself. This happened to me in an assignment from my teacher, whose word is sacred law as far as I'm concerned. I got the assignment to learn Cherokee... since it is from my ancestors. Well, the entire library of ancient knowledge set down in Cherokee was burned to the ground by wasichu long ago, and most of the Cherokee Nation is peopled by a bunch of Bible thumping maniacs these days. On top of this, Zen teaches you fairly quickly just how much total bullshit ideas of race or ethnic heritage or national identity really are, so I ended up figuring that the assignment was to teach me not to agree to stuff just to be agreeable, companionable, wishing to please but not willing to actually go there. I thought I was learning the hard way how disingenuous I could be while believing myself completely genuine... avid even.

Well, last night, and we're talking quite a few years later, I landed on a lecture from Ingo Swann that snapped me out of that particular delusion. He managed to illuminate me on something vital, that in fact my teacher had not left out, but had nonetheless not made sink in... that damn feather where my mode is ton-of-bricks thing... ending up shooting me right between the eyes, dropping me in mid-neurosis some fifteen years later. It is important to activate new neural pathways, programs, in the motor cortex of the brain in order to gain some control over certain vital "attainments" in my field, and the learning of certain languages is a way to light that up.

Fuck.

I have long believed, and I don't think I'm wrong, that in order for me to learn another language I have to be immersed in it, plopped down in the middle of people using it. The basis for this is ten years of French in school. And I started young. I think we started me in French in the third grade. I can't speak French. I can't read French. I am only pretty amazingly good at pronouncing French... even having had a fresh-off-the-boat Frenchman for a boyfriend way back when. I'm pretty damn sure I gotta be stuck in the middle of it before my brain feels it vital enough to attend to this business. I've made myself very unpopular in certain circles for admitting that I think everyone on earth, or in the cosmos, should just speak English... and I don't really mean it because that's my language. I mean it because, as far as I know, it's the language with the most ability to convey information, though Sanskrit may have been far better at that.... I just think this fruitful communication between sentient beings is too important to keep glorifying the diversity of all these damn languages. I don't think I'm wrong about that, either, even though we'd have to keep linguists for historical purposes, at least for a while.

Far preferable, though, is just to directly read each other's minds and completely forget this stultifyingly obtuse and insufficient business of language itself. Mustn't leave that out. At the base of it all, language is baby rattles in the communication imperative.

Deal with it.

So, anyway, at this LATE date I have to figure out how to light up and make stronger my motor cortex or everything I have devoted myself to—abounding every other earthly consideration—painfully, harrowingly, beyond intensely for decades—was for naught... or not much.

I have some people to email and beg. I have a lot of work to do. Maybe not a language. Could be other means that will be more amenable to my impatient brain. Gotta find out instanter. I don't know what is going to happen here on my blog, but, well, this is a bloodcurdling emergency.

Truly, I might very well be still so damn impeded in my writing thing strictly because I've had to get this puzzle piece in place and the mode of understanding raised to my true level. I can't even slow up to shoot myself over my horrifyingly too much time wasted wallowing in abject stupidity.
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