Brain Space
Do you think about what you think about?
I’m not talking about the big “defining” thoughts. Just the regular day-to-day thoughts.
Through the course of your day, how do you use your brain space? What thoughts do you think when you aren’t actively thinking?
Have you read Murakami? He writes fantasy in a very poetic way. Fantasy based on history, thrown together with some philosophy, written in a dream-like manner. I’ve been reading “Killing Commendatore”. It’s a story of a painter who finds himself painting a lot of boring portraits to make a living. Then, his wife leaves him and he ends up living in an isolated life in a cottage in the mountains of Japan and encounters an “Idea”.
The following is an excerpt from the book of the conversation between himself and this Idea.
When I opened my eyes a while later, there was the Commendatore.
He was sitting in the leather easy chair across from me wearing the same Asuka-period clothing, his sword still on his hip. Perched on the chair, his two-foot frame looked quite demure.
“It’s been a while,” I said. My voice sounded strained and forced, as if coming from somewhere else. “How have you been?”
“As I have told my friends in the past, time is a concept foreign to Ideas,” he said in a small but clear voice. “ ‘A while’ thus lies outside my understanding.”
“It’s a customary phrase. Please don’t let it bother you.”
“I cannot fathom ‘customary’ either.”
Fair enough. Where there is no “time” there can be no “custom.” I stood up and walked to the stereo, lifted the needle, and returned the record to its sleeve.
“As you may have surmised,” the Commendatore said, reading my mind, “in a realm where time flows freely in both directions such things as customs cannot exist.”
“Don’t Ideas require an energy source of some kind?” I asked him.
The question had been puzzling me for some time.
“It is a thorny question,” the Commendatore answered, frowning dramatically. “All beings require energy—to be brought into this world and to survive. It is a principle that holds true throughout the universe.”
“So what you’re saying is, Ideas have to have a source of energy too. Right? In accordance with the universal principle.”
“Affirmative! It is an undisputed fact. Universal law binds us one and all—there can be no exceptions. Ideas are felicitous insofar as we possess no form of our own. We materialize when others become aware of us—only then do we take shape. Though that shape is but a borrowed thing, for the sake of convenience.”
“So then Ideas can’t exist unless people are cognizant of them.”
The Commendatore closed one eye and pointed his right index finger in the air. “And what principle can be deduced from that, my friends?”
It took a long moment to wrap my head around that one. The Commendatore waited patiently.
“This is what I think,” I said at last. “Ideas take their energy from the perceptions of others.”
“Affirmative!” the Commendatore said cheerfully. He nodded several times. “You have a good head on your shoulders. Ideas cannot exist outside the perceptions of others—those perceptions are our sole source of energy.”
“So then if I think, ‘The Commendatore doesn’t exist,’ you cease to exist. Right?”
“Negative! In theory, you have a point,” the Commendatore said. “But only in theory. In reality, that is quite unrealistic. One is hard put to will oneself to cease thinking about a given matter. Namely, to determine to ‘stop thinking’ about something is itself a thought—as long as one follows that path, that something continues to exist. In the end, to stop thinking about something means to stop thinking about stopping thinking.”
“In other words,” I said, “it’s impossible for people to escape Ideas unless they lose either their memory or their interest in Ideas.”
“Truly, dolphins have that power,” the Commendatore said.
“Dolphins?”
“Dolphins have the power to put the right or left half of their brain to sleep. Did my friends not know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Affirmative! It is why dolphins have so little time for Ideas. It is why they stopped evolving, too. We Ideas tried our hardest, but I am sad to say that all of our efforts led nowhere. It was such a promising species, too. Proportionate to their size, they had the biggest brains of all the mammals until humankind reached its full development.”
“So then you managed to establish a rewarding relationship with humans?”
“It is a known fact that, unlike the dolphin brain, the brain of the human species runs along a single track. Hence, an Idea that enters such a brain cannot be easily brushed aside. That allows us to draw energy therein, and thus sustain ourselves.”
“Like parasites,” I said.
“Nonsense!” said the Commendatore, wagging his finger like a schoolmaster scolding his wards. “When I say ‘drawing energy,’ I mean the tiniest amount. A shred so infinitesimal the members of my friends’ species are unaware. Too small to affect health, or hinder lives in any way.”
“But you told me that Ideas possess nothing like morality. Ideas are an entirely neutral concept, neither good nor bad. It all depends on how humans use them. In which case Ideas can have a beneficial effect in some cases, and a negative effect in others. Isn’t that so?”
“E=mc² is neutral in itself, yet that Idea led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Then the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In reality. Is that what you are trying to say, my friends?”
I nodded.
“My heart bleeds for you—figuratively, of course; we Ideas have no bodies, and hence no hearts. But then again, my friends, all is caveat emptor in this universe.”
“What?”
“The Latin for ‘buyer beware.’ To wit, a vendor is not responsible for how the buyer uses his wares. Can a shopkeeper determine what manner of man will wear the suit hanging in his window?”
― Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore
Such a beautiful way to think about thinking.
I especially like this part “It is why dolphins have so little time for Ideas. It is why they stopped evolving, too.”
What do you think about?
Do you leave room in your brain for Ideas to enter?
What do you do with the Ideas that present themselves to you?
Think - Aretha Franklin