Idiot Wed, 11 Sep 2024 19:49:33 | [standalone]
An idiot is someone who either refuses—or is unable—to participate in a world larger than himself. His line of sight ends exactly where it ends (about three miles out, if you were to draw a line tangent to the Earth’s curvature and then take the projection of it). He is solitary, though whether this lifestyle is out of necessity or out of his own volition, he is no longer able to discern. His isolation is not one borne out of contemplation (like a monk’s) or in service of creation (like Glenn Gould, who once said “cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing” for an “artist who wants to do creative work”). His isolation is uniquely pointless.
A turn of phrase which is idiomatic is latched onto its language of origin, like a remora on a shark; the usual rules can’t explain it, and without its shark it is little more than an inconvenience. (But to write “idiomatically” in a programming language is a good thing! it is to use it fully—see “Pythonic”, which describes code that was written with the conventions of Python instead of against them, suggesting a lockstep between philosophy and design.) An idiosyncrasy, the loneliest trait, is defined by belonging to exactly one person.
The Ancient Greek “idio-”: pertaining to one’s own, personal, distinct, private. The German “eigen-”. (An eigenvector is a vector which maintains its direction under a linear transformation, preserving its “own-ness”, the idiot element.) The Middle English fossils of owe, ought, own. The Latin “sōlus”. Isola, island (the latter being unrelated, coming from a root meaning “in salt”).
When I first stumbled upon it, something about the etymology above paralysed me with fear. The farther back I went, the more dreadful the connotation of the word became, like looking at the gnarled ancestors of (what are now) mundane fruit, a thousand years ago when they were skeletal, full of venom, encased in spines and tough shells—though they have since become vestigial, declawed, and genetically engineered to never harm us ever again.
It’s incredible how the modern meaning is so much easier to digest. Someone stupid and uneducated—alright, I can handle being called that. But the urtext of it all—“private person”—feels like a death knell. When I think about it, it’s like a tickle to the limbic system. In prehistoric times, wouldn’t the idiot be the first to die, trapped inside his own-ness? Scratch that, you don’t even need to look back to prehistory to see idiots dying. Does it say something about me as a person when the fear of failing to assimilate dwarfs the fear of failing to understand?
Like looking at the geneaology of a word, a foreign language can rupture the thick, rusty skin which grows around our native one, briefly exposing the pure denotations to the world until it inevitably oxidizes inside speech. Words over-familiar to us, especially names, lose their power by virtue of their familiarity. Today in my Russian class we mentioned how strange it was that the Pacific Ocean in Russian is called Тихий океан, literally “quiet ocean”. Then it struck us, pacific, to be pacific, to be pacified, to be quiet. For a brief moment I envisioned that ocean, and I could imagine how calm it would’ve had to have been for Magellan to call it the quiet ocean, a perfectly flat, blue-on-blue bifurcation of the world, the place where all sounds go to die.
Seeing a word as it was used in another civilization, or in the context of a different language entirely, lets us simulate coming into brief contact with its core. Experiencing this brings me one tiny step closer to understanding the universal fascination with the Logos, which spans continents and millenia. The Stoics referred to the Logos Spermatikos: at once the generator and annihilator of the world, or in other words, the divine lattice which keeps it all from coming apart. There might be one solace. Even idiots, as full of their own-ness as they are, must be in thrall to this natural order.