Working with one’s mind or talking with one’s mouth can give a veneer of importance to our ape-ish natures. Yet, the input of symbolic stimulus is a far cry from the primal production provided by working with one’s hands, prestidigitating toy slime. or eating tasty finger food. The tools of language fall short when we think of what so raptly captures our human fascination. Witness the thumb-engrossing power of video games and the monkey game intricacies of Tetris or a Rubix Cube; the tactile world has much to answer for, in terms of how deeply it attracts our consciousness.
Consider the words of the prodigious industrialist John Lubbock: “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” During the 19th Century his banking prowess combined with his interest in the natural world such that cartoonist lampooned him as the money master who dallied with daffodils – proof that for every Elon Musk heading to space today there’s a long line of predecessors engaging in contrapuntal hobbies thereby to balance their lives. As students we’re wise to not take one part of our life too seriously, in other words, and to remember to be in touch with our more earthly realms. Why, though, does it feel right to indulge animal curiosity?
Maybe the answer begins in the primal womb, the evolved landscape whereby humans have come to such a unique sense of self and the world, the intimate I of oneself to oneself, and the fashion-conscious, and oft-miserable, me of interpersonal relations. During COVID-19, the home slime-making industry took off as countless kids learned the craft in their lockdown homes; hours of messy entertainment arose from learning, thanks to ubiquitous online videos, to make that viscous-yet-playdoughy slime. Whether the entertainment value arose substantially from the similarity of the slime to the infant’s first textural experience – wheedling around mother’s breast in search of sustenance, may remain a hypothesis only of this Fly on the Wall, but the simple pleasure of the slime world does parallel some of the finest things in life. Walking barefoot in grass, for instance.
Likewise, to just sit and play one’s thoughts, spooling them out to run the inner hamster wheel or spin the mental Rolodex without perpetually feeling the need to get somewhere, conclude some thing, or finalize some concern, holds a mental health value incommensurate with most other typical human tasks. Mowing the lawn, we might say, impresses the neighbours, but merely sitting quietly and seeing where one’s thoughts go, free of external and coercive stimulations and demands, just might be the toy slime of adulthood. But not all entertainment is created equal.
Now, it’s true that young youth oxymoronically tend towards a low tolerance for traditional television commercials. This even as legions of TikTok videos and online game screens whizz past their heads like a meteor shower of exciting, if a wince mindless, entertainment. Television is so pass-eh, so blahs-eh, so generally old school to legions of smartphone users barely into their double digit ages.
As social science education reminds us, within each and every cultural medium there lies gateway hints by which to better understand the society in which we abide. And so it was lately that, being too disinterested to reach for the channel clicker (and vaguely reminiscent of childhood days of yore where the literal physical trip, a journey of multiple long footsteps, across the room thereby to turn the boob tube’s channel dial, I allowed some TV commercials to, as the phrase goes, roll baby roll. A Montana’s Steakhouse ad derped to the surface: the punchline? Their saucy chicken wings were so juicy, sticky, and substantial that they would function as a built-in method to screen one’s call. No napkin’s brevity could provide the wit to encourage the eater to answer a ring-a-ding. Dangling within eyesight like a visceral reminder of the world out there, the jungle gym of societal needs and wants and ethical perturbances, the phone screen on the TV commercial lit up and the protagonist, for the protagonist seemed to recede like steam. Glistening with existential glee as well as animal fat, and grinning with delight, the commercial narrator announced that the wing sauce would “screen your calls for you”. It’s as though the sauce of adult dishes serves to stand in for the slime of childhood delights—the better to simultaneously remove oneself from any so-called productivity while simultanesously releasing us to engage in the most animal of all pleasures: play for play’s sake.
Our collective cultural arrival at this digital island of mutual delights and horrors, whereby we’re all ostensibly available on demand by way of wifi and zoom, betrays a direct line of ascent, or descent depending on who you ask, that parallels a comic T Shirt: a human ape learns to walk upright, marches forth with a club, learns to tame a horse for easier transport, and shortly thereafter finds itself given cosmic short shrift as it finds itself saddled in the mother of all lifelong miseries: the cube farm office building. One imagines millions of workers, today just as in the first years following World War II as the glow of victory receded, gazing mournfully out at the external world of nature and fresh air mere millimetres beyond the window. Only now, like goldfish forgotten in the trunk of a Camry, we can see the descent from the elevated skyscraper zoo of the traditional office, the windows have literally closed in and we each of us inhabit a 3.5 inch goldfish bowl from which our bulging eyes extrude to see the world. In the 90s there was nothing better to peer into than a big screen television; now, it’s as though our wishing well of digital desire has shrunk to match our culture’s self confidence.
Interestingly, Chinese dictator Mao Zedong made a similar allegory to explain his repressive ideology: “In approaching a problem a Marxist should see the whole as well as the parts. A frog in a well says, ‘The sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well.’ That is untrue, for the sky is not just the size of the mouth of the well. If it said, ‘A part of the sky is the size of the mouth of a well’, that would be true, for it tallies with the facts.’ We know that we only see and live a small part of reality through a smartphone but, over time, this part has, for many of us, come to be a big part of our little world. It’s no wonder, then, that in today’s claustrophobic online culture a return to simple, expansive, pleasures reaches the level of an advertising motif—anything that screens one’s calls is a good thing, not a nuisance to be overcome with a napkin.
It’s a small world, too, that online realm in which each peer or distant relative’s inner emotional landscape is laid out in a picnic of upsets, annoyances, pet peeves and hobbies. No wonder the Montana’s Steakhouse ad so gleefully plays on a deep desire to not be so very tightly in touch with the world of other people out there. It’s as though, from cave person origins, we have come full circle to realize that the pleasure of meat on a bone, mentally and culinarily, require a separation of emotional space enough that we can think. We cannot gnaw while we speak and, likewise, we can barely even think while being inundated with online videos in our newsfeed.
Our capacity for thought may truly be threatened by the perpetual incursion of foreign reality via social media. Indeed, thought itself, that navel-gazing dalliance that ranges from sheer inanity like asking comic questions (who invented two ply toilet paper, and why isn’t it soft as the ferny foliage from when the inspiration arose…and why am I sure?) to the stuff of heights untold, is by no means something we can understand at a moment’s notice. The pensive realm of gazing into space and embarking on a journey of sheer wonder remains the core of much innovation, philosophy, and creativity. Alighting like a songbird onto Snow White’s outstretched hand, and reminiscent of the painted hand of God reaching out to impart divine light and providence on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the nature of thought resists the certainties of any clickbait article or simple meme.
Perhaps that’s why so many digital headings invoke mindfulness; the one thing that a newsfeed cannot do, anymore than can a good feed-up at an early bird buffet, is provide true enlightenment. To glean such manna from intellectual heaven, access to which seems restricted to a few fleeting instances when a sweet spot of dalliance and peace, is reached, actual mind wandering is required. And from there, from the same wellspring that comics derive some of their best material and musicians their most unequivocally genius occurrence, anything is possible. Pico della Mirandola, at the tender age of 23, gave a rendition of the possibilities later enabled visually through Rodan’s classic statue titled The Thinker. He said “man’s place in the universe is somewhere between the beasts and the angels, but, because of the divine image implanted in him, there are no limits to what man can accomplish.” To do so, naturally, we have to pause our mental foraging to see what thoughts may emerge.
By contrast, an ironic anthropological trip to a doggie park reveals that many of us who love our doggos spend their time there watching, living vicariously if you will, the perpetual ramblings of their Bowser – perhaps paralleling their inner hound whose loyalty belies its independent streak.
Knowing that few of us are astronauts or descend to the monstrous levels of evil so prized by immense fandoms of crime and pathology podcasts, a singular certainty arises from Pico’s statement. Where we go, and how we get there mentally, above all begins with the most ponderous of footprints in the sandy beaches of our mind.
The willingness to sit, really sit, and think, really think, that our mind may truly wander and bear hitherto unknowable fruit is a life skill unparalleled when it comes to the discovery of epiphany. To channel our greatest impulses into workable realities, be they poetic as a pheasant alighting in a juniper shrub or practical as remembering how to change the fanbelt in our friend’s car, we have to allow ourselves the time and space and soulfulness to sit and really think. Maybe some saucy wings are required or keeping our hands busy doing some dishes or playing with one of those infernal (to me, just me!) fidget spinners, but somehow, some way, and for the bettering of our loving and academic brains, to enable our best mode maybe its; wise to take some time to just sit quietly and think.
References
Lubbock, J. (19th C.). Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32939-rest-is-not-idleness-and-to-lie-sometimes-on-the and http://scihi.org/john-lubbock-avebury/
Pico della Mirandola. (1486). Retrieved from https://iperceptive.com/quotes/pictures/giovanni-pico-della-mirandolla-quote-3.png
Zedong, M. (1935). ‘Mao Zedong on Why the Long March Was a Victory’. AlphaHistory. Retrieved from https://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/mao-why-long-march-was-a-victory-1935/