Counter intelligence

Learning to embrace the moron within

By Chris Wright

I think I might be turning into an idiot. I realized this the other day as I grappled with the funnies. The strip that stumped me was Arlo and Janis. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t get it, I didn’t understand it. Later, I read a movie review that used the phrase “a Rabelaisian romp.” A what? Rabba . . . Rabba . . . Rabba-dabba-doo?

I tried to cast my mind back to my college days. I was an English major, magna cum laude, an honor student. Rabelaisian romps were a walk in the park. Think, man. Think. Rabba . . . Rabba . . . In the end, the best I could come up with was Dagmar, a girl who worked in the Financial Aid office. She was adorable. And yet I’m pretty sure we never romped — at least not in any Rabelaisian sense.

Back then — back when I used terms like a priori and mimesis and quoted freely from the works of Northrop Frye — I truly believed I was an intellectual. On one occasion, a schoolmate and I assumed the identities of Rousseau and Voltaire to argue whether Reason or Emotion was the supreme virtue. Later, we sat around trying to decide whether a Bach piano concerto was sublime or merely good. Then we started in on Shakespeare. Hamlet, my friend said, is a Freudian text; no, I responded, scandalized, it’s existential. These days, Hamlet leaves me with a single question: “What’s a bodkin?”

I’m confused. I always thought you were supposed to get smarter as you grew older. It’s part of the biological contract: as your body gets flabby, your brain develops six-pack abs. The way I figured it, by the time I reached my 30s I would have developed an incisive, if somewhat melancholic, view of the world. I’d see a couple of 19-year-olds smooching on the T and I’d think, “Ah, callow youth. As the Poet once said . . . ” not, “Is it Wednesday?”

I forget things. Sometimes I forget what it is I forgot, and then I forget whether or not I forgot anything, and then I forget the word for when you’ve . . . when you can’t remember something. This sort of thing — dotage, I think it’s called — isn’t supposed to happen until your twilight years. And by that point you don’t care any more; you simply spend your days sucking lozenges, getting mad at motorists, and forgetting to put on underwear. Not a bad life. But being senile and in your 30s — this feels like some sort of cosmic swindle.

To make matters worse, I look around and see a lot of very smart, very old people. Take John Updike: that man seems to get brainier with every passing century. In fact, you get the sense that if one more penetrating insight were to enter his head, he would simply explode. There would be great thoughts trickling down the walls, sapience laying in puddles on the floor. (Or is that lying? Fucked if I know.) And don’t even get me started on Norman Mailer.

If age can’t account for my intellectual atrophy, what can? Sometimes I chalk it up to the few puffs of pot I had when I was a teenager — or the four hundred million puffs I’ve had since. Sometimes I think about my two grandmothers, both of whom began jabbering and laughing at wallpaper in their early 60s. Perhaps I’m being battered into senselessness by forces beyond my control. Right. The truth is, I got lazy. I willingly threw out all the original thoughts I ever had and replaced them with episodes of The Nanny. Life, after all, is a lot easier that way. Or at least I used to think so.

The other night, I found myself at a wine-and-cheese party in Cambridge, the kind where people sit around discussing Norwegian novelists and Algerian cinema. “Blah-blah is mildly derivative,” people said. Or “So-and-so’s use of visual metaphor is a tour de force.” As the evening wore on, I grew increasingly ashamed of my Keanuvian IQ. Besides things like “Mmm, cheese,” and “Wine, lovely,” my main contribution to the discussion was a spirited defense of the show Friends. “It’s funny,” I said before returning to the Gorgonzola.

Something had to be done.

In an attempt to halt my slide into idiocy, I vowed to read more and watch less TV. I sat down with a copy of the New York Review of Books. I crossed my legs and rubbed my chin and prepared to indulge in a bit of high-brow inquisition. “There are at least three Don DeLillos,” opined one writer. “There is, first of all, the poster boy for postmodernism — the wised-up child of randomness and incongruity; the Geronimo of vandalism, bricolage, and mediascape pastiche; the conspiracy theorist of corporate power, government secrecy, malign systems. . . . ”

I’m sorry, but I counted at least 18 DeLillos there, none of them comprehensible. Nonetheless, I fought my way onward through thickets of deep thought. I stumbled over “aphasic” and stubbed my toe on “glossolalic.” When I encountered “pomo lollipop,” I gave up completely. It actually came as a relief.

Maybe being an idiot isn’t such a bad thing. For one thing, I know I’m not alone in this. I have dozens of English-major friends who wouldn’t know a trope if it came up and bit them on the ass. And why should they? With jobs to worry about, and relationships, and fat arms, who has time to tackle Kierkegaardian paradox and Kafkaesque perplexity? And really, who cares how many Don DeLillos there are? There could be a thousand DeLillos and it wouldn’t make the slightest dent in my car payments.

And so, without a hint of self-loathing, I cast aside the New York Review of Books and returned once more to the rigors of Arlo and Janis. Suddenly, out of the blue, the meaning of the strip came to me. It’s clearly a pomo lollipop of Rabelaisian bricolage. It’s just not very funny.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright@phx.com.