experience is incompressible

brute force vs acceptance

Jackson Pollock

What unites me and many of my friends is a shared penchant for brute forcing accomplishment. We all learned in one way or another that you could accelerate your pace in the world, your velocity of being, by sheer willfulness.

The problem with this acquisitive mindset is it can be really disheartening when you run up against the limits of your own experience: the realization that actually you just don’t, or can’t understand something yet.

It’s like when you read a book too early and it just doesn’t make sense. You can pull at the contours of it, see its foggy shape take form. You get the definitions right, but its meaning rings hollow and empty. I read really complex books in high school and only half-understood them. Then I re-read a few this year and I was like, oh. I get it now. The experience was the point. The beauty and deep comprehension of those books could only fully materialize at some equivalent moment along my own maturity curve. All the characters I used to think were caricature, were in fact versions of me. I just hadn’t met her yet.

It requires great humility to admit there are many things you can’t brute force. I think that might be the main difference between intelligence and wisdom. One arises from exertion, and the other with the inexorable procession of time and reflection.

For one, taste is slow and accumulative. I once heard it described as fermentation: our thoughts need the right environment, the right conditions, and time to develop their full flavor. That’s also the very virtue of learning to love something: first to even detect it, to recognize it as strange and foreign to us, then finally allow ourselves to be taken in, enchanted by its peculiarity. You can extend this moment of your life by way of paying close attention, but perception requires painstakingly slowly peeling back layer after layer.

Earlier this week I was listening to a podcast interviewing Graham Duncan, and he mentioned this analogy I really liked, albeit in a different context:

The chicken needs to peck through the eggshell and develop the strength through the pecking in order to make it. If you break the shell for them, they will die. If you mess with the origin in any subtle way, it can affect the entire trajectory

I take this to mean it's important to 'go through the fire', or, pierce through the veil of experience. There are necessary developmental thresholds someone has to pass through, and there's no real salve or proxy for it. You can give advice from a vantage point of wisdom, but someone has to go through the experience in order to internalize the lesson. Transformation occurs through multiple collisions with reality. Almost everything that holds meaning, weight, and gravity, cannot be reached by a shortcut, by sheer force alone. But by acceptance. Acceptance that what you desire for can survive contact with the world, and will yield meaning. You have to devote the time it takes to inhabit the world, chip away at its interior. No one can break the shell for you!

Experience is incompressible. As much as my heart is impatient, I’ve come to see it’s less so an intellectual exercise and more of an emotional one. You have to run the miles. You have write the slop. You have to be awakened to the desire within and wrestle with it, with the irreducibility of feeling. You have to sit in the empty spaces, in the graceless void, and allow grace to rush in.¹

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1. Referencing this wonderful quote I read in The Rumpus, in an interview with Maggie Nelson: “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”