Me Wise Not

I’m by no means a wise person – have never considered myself one, and could most definitely not recognize myself even close to being one. Never been much for wisdom. Making sense is more my thing; and of course, I presume, wisdom goes beyond merely making sense.

Eric Clapton use to say that he found wisdom from the solitary bluesmen when he was growing up; him being without a father and all. I can dig that – or at least part of it – the solitary bluesmen part; unlike Clappers, my beloved father has always been around and is still alive and well. However, my wisdom gurus was not exactly the booze-soaked, smoke-filled, broom-dusting, woke-up-this-morning, hellhound-chasing, cotton-pickin’, porch-rockin’ bluesmen. Wisdom for me came more from their ‘devil-child’ disciples such as Nanker-Phelge, which in time became Jagger/Richards.

“but what can a poor boy do, but to sing in a rock n’ roll band…”

I would have liked finding wisdom from sources closer around me, like from those who have many, many years ahead of me, hence much more experience of life and its many lessons; but the times they have tried to impart their version of wisdom on me, I could barely fathom any of them. It was all clichéd, contrived and even callous gobbledygook; which I eventually confirmed after experiencing enough of it to realise that between them they all sound the same. If there was any inkling of any wisdom to be had from them it was from what I call deriving wisdom through inversion – I would see the wisdom from not following through things they say or their course of action – by simply not doing what they say or do; and I’d always be all the better for it

Now thanks to being aware of fallacious discourses and differentiating between rhetoric and truth, I really am so much the better for not giving their pseudo-wisdom any more than the courtesy of listening despite being mind-numbing, eye-wateringly tedious. Oh the yawns I had to clamp my lips down to suppress; I even wondered if stifled yawns would escape through the ears and worried that I might blow my eardrums out. Come to think of it, if that did happen it might have been quite an act of grace as I would not have the hearing implement in place to hear them with.

Of course they must’ve meant well; even those preoccupied with their own pride and ego when sharing or imparting their wisdom; but like I said, it all just sounded the same. It’s as if they’ve made their general conclusions quite early in their lives and coded the rights, the wrongs, the how-to and how-not-to’s, the what-to and what-not-to’s, etc., into the body of code by which they will base their making sense of the world upon. So all they are imparting upon you as quasi-wisdom is their hold on to these codes throughout their lives; and how they have held on to them as examples for you to ponder on even though they have no bearing or semblance to any situation or circumstance you’re in.

Their quasi/pseudo-wisdom’s just full of passive verbs – be patient, be strong, persevere, soldier on, caution, beware, etc., but never the how’s – how to be patient, how to be strong, how to persevere, etc. That is where for me it falls short; and telling you that you should figure it out for your self, for your own sake, is simply disguising the fact that they have not a clue. After all, what they are doing is all part of the code; telling you those inanities is actually under their code as offering wisdom; as is telling you non-familiar or dissimilar examples of theirs is coded under sharing their wisdom from experience. So under the code, wisdom is offered, and under the code, that all comes under the ‘manifestations that we care’ category. Never mind that it did bugger all to alleviate your concerns or worries, because under the code if you do not benefit, you’re just a hapless dumb schmuck; and if you say that it doesn’t help, you’re just an ungrateful so-and-so. [Of course all this is without even opening discussions how wisdom is not just about outlining passive verbs. They’ve even coded what wisdom is just as they have coded the forms that are associated with it; such as the white haired, the wizened, the bearded, the ascetic, Oprah, etc.]

So in the absence of any guiding light or beacon of wisdom of any real benefit, what else if left to do but to be left to one’s own faculties and devices to make sense of whatever comes our way; and somehow, life is all the richer for that methinks.

Life through apertures at the speed of shutters.

In the hands of teenagers around me, the laptop is a RM3K digital photo album. It’s where they store all those pictures taken because them young ‘uns way of enjoying their moments is capturing and recording it to be enjoyed later and in anticipation of posting ‘em up for others like them to join in the merriment.

It’s not that the pictures need to be displayed so as to weed out the more desirable from the lesser ones. No, that narcissism starts much earlier. Thanks to the technology of digital photography, the selection is done instances after the photographs are taken. After every shot, the consensus will decide if the image is to what they always imagined they’d look. If not, they’re more than prepared to go through the rigmarole again, with their catalogue of semiotics for the necessary poses, expressions and gestures till their expectations are met. It’s kinda bizarre that people actually freeze themselves in order to be captured and frozen by fractions of seconds with the shutter; to freeze for a phenomena that would freeze you anyways. Why, in Asia they’ve even devised a sign to indicate when they’re ready to be captured -they portray the number two with their fingers to announce their readiness for the shutters. The degree of readiness is further indicated in direct proportion to the number of hands indicating the number two.

I don’t know about you, but i would have thought that with all this I would enjoy conversations with them young ‘uns more cos their stories have got pictures as well. But I find that what makes for narration and description are just captions, and the illustrations are so much of their persons that it obliterates all else around obscuring any sense of place. If there was a landmark, you couldn’t get to know much about it apart from the simple fact that they were there. If it was a picture postcard scenery you could not look further than them in in front of the lens hence obscuring the wonderous view around them. But you could probably have a hint at what food tastes like cos that gets a sapient-free picture; and it’s only because they are the prologue to images of being devoured in various states.

It seems like this will be the mode of communication with them for awhile. They’ll probably say that you can’t get to know them better than this where all is recorded and captured. Memories start early. They are setting up and pre-selecting for recollections and ruminations later. The enjoyment is not just in the now, but also set up for the later.

Everything is set up to be captured in order to be related through still life. But i’ve always felt that no one and nothing exists in the fraction of a second. Everyone and everything exists in the realm of continuous time. So how much of a person is in a photograph, except for a fleeting illusion cos a captured image cannot be much more. So are they simply just setting up illusions for others to perceive through those illusions? I only lament that I could not get to know the real them, and despair that when not being frozen in time, there might not be much of  real them behind the images.