Slow Havamal: 57

[kylec]

In the 57th verse, a flame is passed to a torch by another torch, just as a wise man must speak with the wise, and a fool avoids them.

For the last three weeks, we’ve learned not to become too wise if we value our happiness. Now, for those of us resigned to that sort of misery, we learn how to grow wiser. Wisdom spreads like a flame. If you want to light your torch, touch it to a torch that’s lit. There’s no mention of wisdom being kindled entirely from within. We possess the tinder, but we require a spark from another source.

Why is that? Assume that a closed system is possible. What can the whole learn from the interactions of the parts? Initially, quite a bit. But as time goes on, the main lessons have run their course, and any future learning becomes commentary on smaller, more marginal aspects, and then commentary on commentary. There is no novelty. This pretty well describes the way a philosophy, or a civilization, takes a spark of an idea and works it out in elaborate detail until it flowers into something beautiful, then in the later stages, fails to solve certain problems (which are themselves formulated in terms produced by the system), putrefies, and mumbles to itself in senility. An isolated system can only elaborate. A paradigm shift requires something external that shatters the basis of understanding and forces something new to emerge, which it will, because there are no closed systems.

We have to get outside our own heads. That’s not a knock on our heads, which might be very fine, any more than it’s an insult to say our bodies require food and water from outside sources to survive. Even something random can gift us with a limit that, when considered in relation to the things we already hold dear, sets of a string of fresh possibilities. The courses we run within ourselves may be complex but are highly patterned. It’s a lovely nested image that just repeats itself, in all its brilliance, its flaws, and those things it never considered. That external encounter is both disruptive and creative.

Once again, a gift is a limit. It is also a responsibility for that thing, perhaps a responsibility to reciprocate, and of course it is what it is, a singular thing, not any of the other things we hoped it would be. If we got to choose from infinite possibilities, we’d be right back within our closed system.

We prefer to keep to ourselves because it’s comfortable. Everything that happens makes its own kind of sense, and there’s a ready habit for classifying and dealing with whatever may come. No one criticizes us, which is what the world does when our actions don’t work as expected. When we share our thoughts and our art, or explore our surroundings, there’s always a chance that Nature will say, “Not good enough,” or “Your map has led you astray.” That’s existentially painful. But it’s also the collision that forces us to reconsider and grow. Wisdom, as I haven’t yet tired of defining it, is a matrix of experiences that we relate in various ways to predict future events and guide our actions. The more times we expose ourselves to our peers, a hike, the laws of physics, the more data points we accumulate, which allows us to reorder those constellations that guide us.

I’m fascinated that wisdom seems to arise out of an area of overlap, or something shared. At first, it doesn’t make sense, but then we sense it differently until we find a place for it, like a strange gift that changes the character of the room. Maybe none of us “have” wisdom in the same way that we possess an object. At most, he have half of the ingredients, and need to meet another thing on its own incomprehensible terms before either of us can benefit. If that’s true, then wisdom truly is “shared.” It’s a giving and a receiving, and a cooperative use of the result. A symbiosis, without which two fools would wander alone.