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The following article was written by James Taylor Foreman, the man and the mind behind the publication The Metaphor.
The modern hyper landscape is the water we’re swimming in. It seems inevitable; irrefutable. But, there are other places we could call home. Richer places. Paradoxical places. Places where everything is still alive. There are reports, rumors, and sketches from those hyper landscape frontiers. Welcome to The Metaphor. Mythic essays in your inbox (almost) weekly.
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This article originally appeared on The Metaphorhere. I’m sharing it with The BoldBrush Letter because in it, James has explored an important topic for creative people.
Editor’s Note: In two days, this post will be locked and is available only to paid members because we don’t want this duplicate content on the open web in a way that might draw traffic away from James’ original post. If you are not a BoldBrush paid subscriber, you can still read the entire post here.
'Objectively True' Is Not Very True, Actually
I know a toddler who gets angry when his babble isn’t received as poetry.
Before you're fluent in a language, it would be easier to point and grunt than to set out to learn the dozens of vocal postures, inflections, and how these inky marks correspond to those grunts. Each word, each letter, objects to you, like a non-Newtonian fluid, becoming solid by the force of you pushing on it.
But, as you gain fluency, the language melts, becomes fluid, and you phase through it. The object vanishes. Your desires conform effortlessly to the container of your language.
Think about all the objects that have vanished between me and you, right now. The computer, the pixels, the letters, the WiFi waves. All of that, hopefully, melts away and all there is left is me and you, communing (hello).
Ultimately, what you want is, your spirit — whatever has possessed you — to move through all objects (or, objections) toward its desired outcome. The spirit could be as simple as hunger or as complex as Christmas.
Trial and error is the way. Children wildly babble every single sound a human can make before finally settling on their native language. Their deviations falter widely at first, but over time, narrow and smooth.
Once fluency is found, “trying” slips into the background, and flow takes its place. Now that the language itself has vanished, you have freed up cerebral real estate to play at the very border of your fluency.
This is humanity in a nutshell. What you’re doing, always, is combining the primordial desires of eros, up to a unity of the word, logos. Doing that, you inspire images in the minds of others, literally casting spells that make men move objects around. “Get me a sandwich, would ya?”
Fluency seems to have no upper skill limit. Great writers mold the minds of millions. Their words infect others with their designs.
In response to fluency, not objectivity, people have cast millions of tons of concrete into forests of light, hit golf balls on the moon, and played music on the sinking Titanic.
Whenever people encountered the Buddha, they immediately asked him if he was a god. It's easy to look at that story now and think, "Oh, well, he must have been glowing or hovering six inches above the ground or something." But, maybe through his meditation, through his practice of fluency, he had such a divine way of moving that infected everyone around him with rapture.
See, fluency isn’t just about language.
Think of someone who is good at a craft — anyone from those street vendors who dole out ice cream to a concert pianist — when they express their fluency, our wills disappear, and we are enraptured. We can't look away. When Al Pacino acts, we instantly know it’s good but cannot explain why.
Fluency is the ultimate goal for everybody doing anything — the ability to phase through objections. When you do it well, you capture the imagination of others.
When soccer players score a goal, they kiss their hand and point up to the sky. Years of endless practice, all at once, dissolved into fluency. They know instinctively it has little to do with their will. So, without a second's thought, they point to the sky.
But, when interviewed afterwards, they say boring clichés about what they think is “objectively true.” Practice and teamwork and dopamine and ice baths. But, no matter how many ice baths I take, I don’t seem to be a world-class soccer star. So, what is really happening?
Modern parlance has an atrophied vocabulary. Even the way I’m talking about it here is kinda “poetic” and anachronistic, yeah? We used to have better words. Genius — root word of genie — didn’t mean “smart.” It used to mean: to be possessed by the spirit, genius. No one questioned that reality because, well, it's a more accurate way of getting at what fluency is, really.
All this talk of the “objective world,” is just talk of the world that objects to you. The ultimate goal is to leave the objective world behind. Or, rather, to phase through it – the way a swordsman’s consciousness phases through his sword, an extension of his arm.
At the beginning of Paradise Lost, John Milton begs the muse to inhabit him. He had been reading the greats of poetry his entire life. And now he was going to try to score a goal – to reach beyond. And he hoped it would explain the works of God to men.
He created how we all think of Lucifer and hell. And even though we've mostly forgotten that he did it, his images still linger. Can you imagine thinking of all that before it was ever thought of?
Our minds are populated with the artifacts of dead poets. Fossils of those who, with strenuous effort and high levels of fluency, managed to step beyond the veil for just a moment and bring something back, beautiful.
But ultimately, all of these artifacts we create are just that — artifacts. If they are post-hoc worshiped as “objectively true,” they will do just that — object. If they’re to be useful, they're to be mastered and then forgotten. Fluency allows them to inhabit you and then move beyond them. The spirit that moves beyond them is primary – not the objections.
Even the “object” of your self is meant to vanish. The last thing you want to be when doing standup is self-conscious. You want all of your consciousness, not stopping to admire or admonish itself, to flow through your “instrument” (you). To do it best, you have to be uninterrupted by visions of who you are or how you're doing or what others think of you.
Objects object. They aren’t reality. That doesn't mean getting too woo-woo spiritual and positive-thinking away all stumbling signs of failure. What we really want is a relaxation, a movement towards forgetting oneself that is so subtle that it cannot be willed into action; it must commence. That requires preparation. For the great swordsman, the object of his sword disappears and his consciousness flows right to the tip because he has mastered it, not ignored it.
It's like going to sleep—if you try too hard, you don't go to sleep. The only thing you can do is have a nighttime routine and set yourself up for success.
All this modern obsession with “objectivity” is impossible (there are infinite things to be “objective” about — so by simply talking about one thing and not another, you’ve introduced your subjectivity). The false fixation also inhibits what is primary about humanity. It makes us tinkerers, perfectionists, and bean-counters instead of artists. We have become like toddlers, screaming because our babble isn’t accepted as rapture.
Know it or not, we all seek higher and higher fluency. We want to forget ourselves and craft, bloom, find something good.
I don’t want to live in the “objective world.”
I want to live in a fluent world.
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Subscribe to James Taylor Foreman’s The Metaphor
By James Taylor Foreman
The modern hyper landscape is the water we’re swimming in. It seems inevitable; irrefutable. But, there are other places we could call home. Richer places. Paradoxical places. Places where everything is still alive. There are reports, rumors, and sketches from those hyper landscape frontiers.
Welcome to The Metaphor. Mythic essays in your inbox (almost) weekly.
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