Capacity History and Sharpness: An Essay

When I "passed" my father in number of days lived, I decided to "cut back" on my writing. I would continue to write my US Supreme Court essays, but would only write other essays as I was so inclined. Thus, my life would gradually change from a research/production focus (two to three essays a day) to a more reflective/activist focus (I think a lot; I head up the work in OR to try to abolish the death penalty). This essay is a product of the new "reflective" part of me, and it particularly reflects on the way my mind works. The reason I write on this is that I have had a wonderful conversation in the past few days with a significant researcher on the so-called "savant syndrome," and his questions have made me think further about the flow of thoughts into and out of my mind. Three points I bring out in this essay are an image to capture the notion of "capacity" of mind; a story that focuses on the importance of "history" for my mind; and an activity that cultivates "sharpness" of mind. Capacity, history, sharpness--these three...

Capacity

When I think of the working of my mind, the following picture comes into it: I see an old circus or revival tent. You know these tents....big sticks/poles in the middle holding it up, then a series of seven or eight sticks/poles in a circle about 50' from the center stick, so that the tent is held up; then 20 or so sticks/poles about 100' from the center in a circle, so that the tent can be larger, etc. This could go on forever, if you just had enough poles/sticks to support the tent and you had enough material to stretch over the poles. This, in short, is my mind. I constantly am putting new "sticks" in the ground--enlarging capacity. I do this through primarily through my mastery of words, in several languages. As you may know, I have placed high in the national spelling bee each year 2nd and 3rd (CBS came to my home and did a story on me last June), but I consider myself more of a wordsmith than a speller. I have hundreds of essays on words on my site. I spend a few hours a day with dictionaries in English--OED, Unabridged, Century, medical, others so that I can continually expand my categories. Actually, I often write about how limited I feel the dictionaries are--and I often find mistakes in them. Words, then, become the way for me to instantiate my capacity, but the tent image gives me a visual picture of what I am doing. Another image that comes to mind on that score is from the great banyan tree in the Lahaina (Maui) city park. It keeps spreading, sending down new roots into the ground as it spreads, so that eventually it might become as big as a city.

Thus, I have images of capacity, but as my savant colleague tells me, often the "problem" is not capacity (they know that), but the ability to store and retrieve in an efficient manner. I also have images of that (such as a reception room, of caverns and filing cabinets or desks with many compartments) but my focus here is on capacity. Since I am conscious each day of capacity, it is almost as if this consciousness is a lure that says, "Fill me."

History

In the last two days I have been trying to do two things: unravel a crime sequence and get to the bottom of a controversy over a medical researcher. In both instances the questions that people are asking relate to what happened and when it happened. But in both instances I find that people are confused in how to frame the appropriate questions, and they don't quite know how to proceed in analyzing a problem. My point is that in order to get to the bottom of things, your mind has to be constructed (or you have to convince yourself to see things) with a chronological focus in view. In unraveling a crime sequence, then, I ask not only "what happened when?" but "since we have to posit that this happened first, let's freeze the action here and ask a lot of questions about other things." A strong commitment to chronological thinking allows you to be free to discover gaps in others' thinking, shoddiness in method, errors that were made and, occasionally, decisions that were made that seem quite reasonable and good. Rigidly adhering to a "chronological" view of life, a "historical" view, allows you to probe gently and persistently, and ultimately to come to almost all the important questions about understanding a phenomenon. I think this mode of thinking, like learning how to write well, can be developed. And, just as skill in writing is a thing most to be desired, so is a historical mind. It is just that we don't pay people, in general, to develop their minds this way--nor does it receive much encouragement "out there." Chronological thinking is the best way to clear up the fog which normally sets in pretty quikly into people's minds as they/we live. And it has this extra benefit--once you do this seriously for life today, you begin to do it for things in the past. When that happens, you find yourself a better historian than most historians that write--you just are "alive to" or "alert" to so many other things...

Sharpness

I wrote an essay at the end of 2007 on "Hi-Definition Learning." All I need to say here is that when you combine an awareness of capacity and a patient focus on chronology or history with a sharpness of mind, a mind that distinguishes between hairs with as much skill as a surgeon slices through the narrowest of bodily cavities, you have a rare threefold cord. I cultivate my "sharpness" by reviewing and presenting the current cases before the US Supreme Court. Nearly every one of those cases fits into one of two categories: it is either a "big" or "visible" case politically as well as legally (i.e., the detention of detainees at Guantanamo) or it wants to resolve "splits in the Circuits"--disagreements among the Circuit Courts of Appeal on specific legal questions. The latter category of cases deal with such things as the proper quantum of evidence needed to pursue an action, the proper standard of review by an appellate court of a trial court's action, the parsing of the meaning of a statutory phrase. I increasingly don't "do" the Supreme Court cases to "learn the law"--I really don't plan to "practice" law in any area for the forseeable future. I do it, I am now convinced, because it helps me always keep aware of the distinctions that are or can be made in analyzing human life. One has various approaches to interpreting human action, for example, and an ability to make analytical distinctions means that you are better able to present, for example, a state of mind or the struggles of mind faced by a person.

Conclusion

Though I love now the time I have to develop these three aspects of mind, I look forward to the day when I feel I can "leave them aside," not because I ignore them but because they are so internalized in me that I can then focus on the real challenge in life--describing the manifold ways that humans decide to do things...

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