DFW

Creative Forums Creative Writing
1

just a few notes on artistic process, for those interested in creativity in gen, followed by a few lyrics…

so my desire to write (songs) often coincides or briefly follows my desire to listen to music, which is now fleeting at 42

So if I discover a song or recording that makes me excited, albeit briefly, and feel that I have ears and a heart again, and this coincides with a temporary fascination about a subject, then a song can ensue.

I can’t ever ever force it anymore, it only comes out as an act of silliness at first, I start to play something for fun and say “hey, that’s actually nice,” and that’s the process.

I’m not interested in writing anything that doesn’t feel magical. I used to contrive songs strictly from my brain as a form of playing and puzzling out melodies based on influences, and I was able to do that very well for a while.

There are a few songs that feel like magic to me: I Am The Cosmos, Something In The Air, Crimson & Clover, Hey Jude, Take It To The Limit, Whiter Shade of Pale, and probably several others.

If it was easy to write/record like that people would do it all the time. In between these flashes we are left to contrive and construct, and I’ve been okay at that over the years, but I’m fucking tired of it.

I will never do that again. What I WILL do is if I get a flash, I MAY pursue it.

DFW is a song I’m working out, stands for David Foster Wallace. I have been fixated on his writing and personage for a while. It’s a cliché, exhausted and somehow not okay to be interested/impressed with Wallace in anything but an ironic way, because so many lit geeks and hipsters are infatuated with him and his writing, most agree that the whole thing is just overblown and nobody has anything new or useful to say about him.

To even like him is sort of a form of patting oneself on the back. DFW was a genius, a polymath, compulsively self-effacing and reads like a heap of deep hyper-awareness, familiarity and aliveness, and it seems like a lot of people want to own him and appropriate what he had going on, and feel like they are like him or something.

He killed himself at 46, he was severely depressed, and his depression was of course a very deep, existential form helped along by a nasty bundle of neurons and medication issues that backfired.

I can’t help but feel like I am like him in some ways, and that he spoke for me while also teaching me how to think and speak better, at times I feel like his pale doppelgänger, and in all this there’s a pang of uneasy shame knowing that this is the exact feeling that people make fun of w/r/t to DFW fans. DFW was himself interested in irony if somewhat opposed to it, and would probably forgive me for liking him, while understanding my reticence.

And so but I started writing this song, so far I have a few strains that sound cool and pure, a kind of astute & sexy simplicity* in chord/melody for verse/chorus, coupled with a few lines in the chorus:

DFW
What we gonna do with you
We’re not thru with you
oh no

DFW
Off to God above with you
He’s gotta be in love with you
If not you
Who?

*There are only a few ways to write a pop song, and a lot of them have already been taken. To come up with a melody that’s both simple and distinctive is no easy task. Most songwriters, especially amateur ones, recycle bad melodies, they’re not even smart enough to recycle good ones. The trick is to come up with a good melody, simple, elegant, as to be hummable and transportive and new, without reinventing the scale or reverting to too much vaudevillian chord play.

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I found Wallace to have hit the high points of humaness. Compassion, mindfulness in an existential setting. Everything else is just fucking around. The simplicity of that amongst all the chatter is the greatest irony. But most run right past that in order to be the loudest clunk of cheap spoons in the dish pan…

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I’m familiar with him, through iambiguous’ thread. Doubtlessly, he’s brilliant, but doubtfully successful. If he inspired thousands of morons (that’s what your were implying with the effacing names you used to describe the majority of his followers, right?) to continue being moronic, then there’s no success in that. And he died from mental illness. I don’t know what it’s like to die from mental illness, obviously, but I know what it like to be dying from it. I have spent this last year on a fast track from a self-effacing semi-nihilist (such as I gather you are), to not; simply out of the desire to not experience all those good times again.

You established that who you are is who you don’t want to be. Which is a good starting place. Better would be to say; who you are isn’t who you would have inspired to be. And why is that? Because, there are many people who have what you wish you had and yet lack your intelligence. Some of them wish to have it all; the good times (this time I’m using the expression seriously) and intelligence. They wouldn’t claim to wish to have your intelligence outloud, but their actions are often loud enough.

Those who are unintelligent can’t tell the difference between those who are and those who want to be. So one who is intelligent is cautious to wish to be what they are - intelligent - lest they should only be one who wishes and be thought lowly of by the crowd. And those unintelligent who inspire towards intelligence are unconcerned - if not stupidly unaware - of the possibility of being thought lowly of for that reason, because they happen to be in a position where they will face worse stigma for the exposition of there stupidity than they would for the exposition of their hopeless aspirations. For example one who is incapable of deep thought, but is paid to do so. must act as if they are capable of such, but one who isn’t paid to think hasn’t that concern and therefore is free to publicly take joy in their stupidity.

For you to have any job that actually requires deep thought, you will have no trouble with the actual work, so you may become concerned with being pretentious. If you don’t have such a job, then you would also worry about pretention, so you likely would pretend to be as stupid as the rest. And then here online, where other people who are very intelligent - such as myself - can see through your self-deprecation (that is they won’t be fooled into thinking your stupid), you feel the need to ask such questions as if the stupid and happy are better off.

But, it’s a hypothetical where speculation comes to no good. What’s important is you’re not stupid and happy, but are very intelligent and you know that you aren’t deluding yourself, because you wouldn’t have even inspired to be who you are. So now you no longer need to bother with this daydream of happiness through stupidity. And you no longer have need for mock humility. You are who you are, very intelligent, and that is what makes you qualitatively better than most (unless you would claim that no qualitative judgments exist) and if you still must worry about humility and what you are deserving, then let the pain you’ve had, that other’s have lacked, be proof that you desrve to be qualitatively better.

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Hey stuart: here is a caveat: intelligence can be a hindrance as well as an advantage. An intelligent being, will not even try to mask or block irrelevant, un useful for the moment type of experience from his field, contrary, he will the more ascribe to more and more. If it’s a tossup for a person like that, he most probably choose insanity against letting the whole thing in.

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That intelligence is disadvantageous - in this place and time - to those who have it is not in dispute, but they are qualitatively better. The symptoms of sever mental illness such as insanity or death are always a risk, but one can’t wish away intelligence, they can only be proud of it and proud of themselves and therefore value themselves enough to help keep those symptoms away. It may be easier to be a humble yet very intelligent person for a long time if others respect you, but if those others are average the effect of the respect will wear thin. One really needs to be respected by their peers, and to do so they mustn’t value some philosophy where they are impelled to hide behind the pretense of humility; to pretend to be lower than their peers.

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You are right againn no wonder I think thought processes can barrell down parellel tracks.  In fact you can see this in children who excel, who are ashamed to do so, because socially they would be left out.

Intellectual development at the cost of unacceptance, though,is a tough cookie!

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There are certain fields of intellect or arts that are so loaded with baggage that one must start very young to hope to compete as an adult. I’m not necessarily against this, but it isn’t necessary. An intelligent child only needs access to books and the like and he will have no choice but to develop intellectually - even without, he may find a way. For the truly intelligent child to be accepted among the average would take constant outside intervention, such as paying the other children to accept him. As I was saying earlier; the intelligent person who imagines what it would have been like to be stupid and happy is only engaging in pure hypotheticality.

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The baggage you are talking about, can be an evolving awareness of focusing on general applications as they apply to the parts within contexts.  He(the intelligent kid) may not "know" how and why there may be consistency within the seeming disarray of ideas, without the variable experiences he goes through.

The other smart kids, start of with the singular experience, connect the dots, to the point where they can form sensible ideas, are only worried about consistency, up to the point, beyond which, their appreciation of what is sensible drops off.

That is best illustrated as occurring between the earlier Wittgenstein and the latter: between Wittgenstein and Polanyi.

But the application here is obvious. Smart may not necessarily mean intelligent, although it may.
And an apparent abdication of intelligence, (as in your example of the kid hiding it) does indicate what it is: whether it is a conscious masking, or a built in but unconscious defense mechanism, or in fact the result of an un learning of sorts.

So the question of the relationship between smart and intelligence has little what Frege calls “truth value”.

The tacit, or essential knowledge Polanyi talks about has more correspondence, to what the early Wittgenstein meant to say.

This fits perfectly with my notion of existential “bundling” of seemingly irrelevant fact~propositions~existentials, and it is essential in it’s every sense. (And fits clearly within the scope of common sense philosophy as Wittgenstein prescribes it)

Point in fact: philosophers form out of an essential need to utilize various descriptions within a consistent structure.(Very generally, and this is not a pre scription to IQ, not a prescription about getting smart, and not a post sription either as in the case of pure dis assemblage of existence~states~facts:
But if there is no such a word, a per-sription, of specific assignments of a gamut of ideas of various levels of complexity to simple contextual ideas at hand, one should/could be invented just the same?

This is why Polanyi seems intoxicatingly alluring, and very hard to counter. That’s why there is dissension among smart and intelligent children/people, because the dissemblers work on basis of exact meaning, (that goes for the assemblers as well) and they do not see changes of meaning which essentially and imperceptibly change as they are used, and either become relevant, or fall off into the non sensible.

Stuart: part of the above consists of related issues and I am talking to myself, please omit those, they are just notes to myself for later recall. But please apply any part of it which seem sensible and relevant to You.

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All very interesting and I think I understand for the most part. Early Wittgenstein being somewhat obtuse to later, right? I don’t know, I find early Wittgenstein to be uninteresting, or at least unappealing with other options available, then later Wittgenstein, having been compared to a non-continental Heidegger, certainly sounds impressive (though, let me find the time to study Heidegger first). And then I know nothing of Polanyi. But, then to relate to education, which I realize is only part of the subject matter here; are you saying that without a specific education a child will be limited to early Wittgenstein or perhaps the reverse, I would think the reverse, though, that only sounds bad when speaking of non-artistic education. To educate a brilliant student in music at an early age may be the best chance for that student to excel, though I only assume that do to antidotal evidence, Beethoven, etc.

Then, I recall a discussion here, that I have not been taking part of, someone stated that one of the most intelligent is not likely to have the most intelligent offspring. And that makes sense. that of course means that none of the most intelligent are going to have an education planned out by the most competent. And then they shouldn’t, it is their being caste adrift, that allows them to fulfill their potential. So I no longer concern myself much with the subject of education in general. The issue I wished to make clear si that intelligence can’t be hidden if it really is there, though certainly intelligence can flounder. I’ve been lately looking for a plank to hold onto, and if I’ve found one, that is the plank - the recognition, more like unhesitation to admit - my own high intelligence, then I’m not going to let go unless I find an actual raft or wash ashore.

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As far as washing ashore I don’t much think You have to worry a whole lot, it is important to hold on to something though.

I can relate something analogous in this respect Stuart: my own father, of whom volumes could not be written enough of, and who passed 10 years ago, and who by sheer coincidence called the day He passed, and who was terrified of goin into the beyond. And I was totally unprepared for the call, not having heard from him for over a month. Al I could think of is the now seemingly inadequate quip something about one has to believe in something, thinking he had a good grasp on his beliefs. I knew he was a skeptic, so my retort was warranted, however insufficient. He passed that night. Maybe it helped. Or not? I will never know.

 The early wittgenstein is more intuitive education as a possibility based on a focus on actualizing potentials, as in the 60's must read Maslow recommended.  It is a quest for hidden possibilities by insight, rather then with the later, as is now most routinely done:: by randomized, computerized testing.
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What in the who?

How did this veer into a discourse on intelligence and Wittgenstein.

This thread was intended to be about creative process itself, and in service to penning a song about Wallace. I have background about my orientation to Wallace’s work and legacy for the purposes of creative direction.

I can wax about him indefinitely but this is not the place. He liked early Wittgenstein better. Wallace was a Harvard philosophy student and published work on free will.

He was super intelligent in addition to being major depression prone on a biological level I believe. Sick.

You should all read Infinite Jest and all his nonfiction, too. If yer so damn smart read IJ. And fyi real smart people don’t marvel and gleem at their own intelligence. They marvel at how truly stupid they are.

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You understand the pace of this sub-forum right? Eight days after your one initial response (which you, in fact, never responded to) I gave some input related to your OP and then went into other issues simply as to avoid interrupting a thread of yours that had on-topic discussions going. If someone were to come here and start speaking directly to the OP then I will back out.

I already knew that:

All I need to do is read the many quotes in Iam’s thread. I have a back log of reading to do from people that overcame their nihilism (positive influences), but don’t get me wrong I’m not opposed to eventually reading the works of those such as Heisman and Wallace, to learn from there mistakes.

It is natural for people to marvel and gleam at what is marvelous and gleaming. It is an indicator of lesser intelligence (but, certainly not a conclusive one) when one thinks they must do otherwise.

I find it important to mention my intelligence as a comparison to others in places where it is obscured through anonymity. Why should one be against evaluating empirical evidence when it is very relevant; such as degrees of intelligence when one wishes to discuss ideas on a philosophy forum or degrees of athleticism when one is trying to organize a sport (where those involved hope to have worthwhile completion)?

The only reason to be humble is if it is justified or may be justified. Speaking of Mensa earlier, if for some reason I were to take the test I would go into it humbly, because it may have many questions outside of my knowledge. If I were to say I was the most intelligent person or in the top 0.1 percent in the world, I may be humbled later should it become clear through the glare emanating from these hypothetical superiors that I’m beneath them, (I’ll be humbled, but not upset for obvious reasons). But, in what could almost be called modesty, I will not claim to be above the top one percent.

Obviously one who is highly intelligent can’t help but marvel at how much they don’t know, but that doesn’t imply stupidity.

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I dunno you just seem a little too self-satisfied to me to be as smart as you seem to think you are but I could be wrong.

There are certain people who are too smart, just like certain girls are too busty. At some point it can be uncomfortable. I doubt u r at that point. DFW likely was. I’m glad you feel you can now admit to yourself that you are smart but be careful in assuming you are smart to where it matters or makes you better.

If you want to solve fermats theorem or crack literary theory wide open or cure cancer etc. then be my guest, or maybe try getting published in a lit journal if u r really possessed with a better than average mind, show us. Because no Mensa exam is ever going to prove that your brain is profound or alive or gleeming or gleaming, it only shows that you can nickel and dime quicker.

What you are, and what you will be, will have a lot less to do with intelligence and more to do with whether you are willing to do what it takes to turn pain into wisdom or art that the rest of us can use. DFW was and did all the above. You or I haven’t.

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Certainly, you’re wrong. But look, I’ve been bothering you of late because after reading your initial posts in the mensa thread I read some of your archived posts and it turned out you were being less than honest about your intelligence. I still don’t know if I would rank you in the top one percent, I’d have to read more of your old posts to determine that, but then I’d have to find sufficient reason to invest my time in that way. I’m confident that within my archived posts there is sufficient proof of my intelligence.

It’s extremely uncomfortable.

I don’t know the details, but I doubt I would be wrong in guessing that his intelligence killed him, so uncomfortable would be an understatement for him as well.

It doesn’t matter to anyone, necessarily, but it definitely makes me better than most. But I say that in this moment, I may be humbled in the future as I have been in the past, but there’s no reason to be careful; I’m more likely to be humbled if I take a step back for every two steps forwards, than if I just be direct.

It’s not even an issue for me; I’m incapable of those types of concern. You see, whenever I try to undertake such a common endeavor such as writing something that would be widely accepted I develop extreme anxiety. Here’s an analogy; some people who do actually have the ability to digest certain foods, such as dairy products, will vomit (despite themselves) if they are even in the same room as some of those foods, so they they’d have to be unconscious and injected with those foods in order to actually accomplish the feat of digesting them. - If I was rendered nearly catatonic, then in theory I could write within the required parameters without such anxiety.

I never said a mensa test would prove anything, I only said I would be humble towards it, like I would be humble when playing a cheap board game against people who have far more experience at it than me, or I would be humble about my chances of accurately predicting the weather.

Is there a difference between having a use and being used? But I agree, except for the sake of brevity I’ve been using the term intelligence to actually mean the ability to turn pain into wisdom and art, or to be more precise the potential.

I’ll take your word for it, for now; after all I have no reason not to respect your opinion on that matter.

From what little I know about him I believe I have the potential to surpass him in actual intellectual and artistic works (which has nothing to do with the renown or common perception of those works). But it’s far from a guarantee. Keep in mind, though, I’m not boasting just for the sake of it, I’m just being honest. I have no personal stake in being intellectually and artistically innovative other than the fact that for me personally, being who I am, I either will be extremely innovative or I will die (or become catatonic).

That is what my unconventional honesty is about. I cannot be other than I am, I can’t wish myself into mediocrity, I must simply live the only way I can. To use another food analogy; it wouldn’t do one with food allergies any good to claim he didn’t have them and/or try to eat the food he’s allergic to, he must simply admit to his allergies and realize that he either will find the specific hypo-allergenic food he needs or die.

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My only claim was meant to say that the Mensa test was so easy to me that I bet I scored in the top 1%. They don’t tell u your score, it’s pass/fail.

OK mister smarty. Good luck with all your endeavors. Thanks for reading some of my posts. Posts here are a poor way to convey iq – there are so many variables. So I won’t hold your last few against you.

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And one more thing: if your goal in life is to be acknowledged for your endowed intellect, you can’t simply tell people, or write in a high-falutin detachment, like a porn-watching chips-eating Spock.

You can name anxiety and lack of interest as the cause for not completing certain “common” endeavors, even if true (and they can be) will be seen as fear of failure, of a bubble being burst, or lack of true ability.

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It doesn’t prove anything, but it doesn’t disprove anything, either.

That was a good one. And seriously, these aren’t my best posts, so I hope you won’t.

I only wish to be acknowledged by other intelligent people. I actually realize the need for pretenses offline in some situations. But, those pretenses aren’t obvious displays of hypocrisy where I say something very intelligent then say I’m an not intelligent in the same conversation. I simply speak as if I’m not intelligent among those who aren’t intelligent, any intelligence I may show would be very subtle. If done right I won’t accidently say something that makes them suspicious and have to deny being intelligent if asked, but I will actually occasionally say something so stupid that I have to pretend to have hurt pride when they call me an idiot and then act as if I’m trying to convince them that I’m not stupid.

I honestly would rather you acknowledge your intelligence than/before-you acknowledge mine. It is very recent that I’ve started to acknowledge my intelligence openly, so when I ask you and others to do so I can’t yet really state my goal, I guess I’m just interested in learning from the responses and through the debate on the subject - such as we are doing here. If I fail to convince you to acknowledge your intelligence, then it is to be expected being that I’m a beginner, but I’ll learn from my failures.

Certain perceptions are to be expected. You didn’t say you see it that way, but only know how others would see it; maybe you have experience with this. Among the possible perceptions you listed, the fear of failure is the most insightful. I don’t actually fear failure, as I fear success that will result in pressure to waste my time, which, honestly, would be failure, so the perception would be right in a sense.

19

That’s sad to me, for perhaps reasons you didn’t intend. Here’s why: my iq such that it is means I’m in Mensa and can also perform certain tasks and thought processes quicker and deeper than most average people. However, I love people, and connection, too much to allow myself to get in the way of being myself, regardless how smart I diagnose them to be on the surface. So what I do is try to communicate openly. That means that if, just for instance, politics comes up, I’ll try to explain the epistemological problems of throwing in with either side, at least yet; I’ll try to explain to them, in simple terms, the subtle version of the problem, rather than just spout the expected mid-American mid bell curve bromide that I heard on TV. This is just one example, but it could be about anything, health, relationships, science, religion, whatever.

and but so here’s the beautiful thing Stuart: They are always able to understand me. They get it. And they turn out to actually be smarter than I thought. Sometimes there’s pushback, but it’s not because they’re not smart, it’s because they’re doing the same thing you describe, they are dumbing it down for sundry reasons. What happens is a bond is formed, I let them know they can trust me to go deeper, that I am a seeker, that I am safe to talk to, argue with, disagree with. It almost never comes down to pure intellect. We are not, after all, parsing the fucking W. Tractatus all the time, we’re talking about what it is to be human. We’re instead analyzing Breaking Bad or something. And what we wind up being is plenty smart enough to satisfy the smartest of the smart. So what I’m hoping to leave you with, in what I hope isn’t too clumsy or flippant a way, is the idea that we’re all kinda smart, even the dumb ones, and we’re all kinda dumb, you and me included. Especially you and me, in a sense, because we get tangled up in a lot of discursive theory about who we are and what we’re doing/thinking, and this is a kind of cloud that blocks other things, other truths from simple to profound.

So if you want me to acknowledge your intellect I’ll be happy to, and I’ll start by saying, bro, because I respect you and your big beautiful sloppy brain, I’m telling you, don’t waste a second of your life not connecting with those you know and love, whether you want to label them dumb or not, (they’re not), fight the good fight, they will rise to the occasion and love you for it. As long as you do it from a place of wanting to connect instead of wanting to show off, you’ll be fine.

I don’t see it quite that way because being like you, it’s almost impossible for me to internalize the idea that I’m afraid of failure. What I experience, as I’m sure you experience, is that whatever it is I don’t do, is by choice. It starts with the idea where you feel you could get straight A’s. and even perhaps educate the teachers in the process, IF YOU WANTED TO, but instead you had no motivation to even bring your book home. You find yourself using “motivation” as the reason for not doing or achieving, and feel the urge to make sure everyone knows you could if you wanted to, or in your case, you want smart people to know, which I grant is an easier task, because I empathize with you, etc, And all this could be true and is very logical OF COURSE, because you’re very smart, even smarter than yourself, because you convinced yourself you don’t really care about those petty common things. That’s how it feels. But I’m 42 and I can tell you that a lot of that is in fact bullshit. What might be happening is that you have no interest in producing anything that isn’t perfectly reflective of the brain inside. You don’t want to create anything except brilliant work, because why bother making anything less? It wouldn’t be WHO YOU ARE.

And now here comes the rub: Producing brilliant WORK only has the smallest thing to do with being brilliant. Brilliant thinking is innate. Brilliant doing takes sweat, practice, failure, diligence, risk, because birthing all that brilliance into another format is just full of thorny issues. You fear that moment of hatching something slightly deformed. You don’t fear how others will see it, you fear how you will see it, because that deformed baby looking back at you will suck you dry, ruin your life, shatter your very identity. That’s the thing we need to get over. Brilliant people have to do sub-brilliant work for a while and get past it, and we’re terrified of sub-brilliant work. Until, if we’re lucky, we learn to love our deformed babies.

I don’t know how else to tell you that A. dumbing it down for your friends/family, or B. not producing work for fear of “failure,” are just two of the exact things brilliant people shouldn’t be doing. And guess what, yes, you’re very smart. Anyone can see that. But you’re not so smart that you need to be lonely or hide, not so smart that you can’t be humbled by regular people once in a while. What you’re doing right now is romanticizing a version of yourself and glorifying it because it feels good, but it goes nowhere, what you’re doing. Unless, that is, you are nothing like me, and really do want to talk solely to people about Wittgenstein or abstruse logical formulae for the rest of your life. If that’s the case then heaven help you. And by heaven I of course mean Dunamis.

20

You have a subtlety that I don’t have. Being that selective listening is harder than selective reading, to the average person offline, I can hold back my intellect like I’m trying to keep an over-stuffed suitcase closed, or I can leave them feeling like they were born yesterday.