On Omniscience
A few days ago, my students and I were examining the power of rhetoric, and I wanted to show them the useful nature of ‘ethos’. The word is from Greek ‘eta’ which means “character or custom”. I told them that when one examines ethos, it means you scrutinize a person’s expertise or credentials. Or a place’s or any other item of authority. And that those credentials are often unquestioned because of social, moral norms, standards or determined customs. In short, these are our strongly held agreements about what is just or good or sound or strong or right. Right? Right. So to make it personal, I said to the class, ‘tell me something that would establish your ethos or credibility’. ‘What are you all good at?’ ‘I’m nosy’, I say. ‘Humor me!’
And I go around the room and people are experts at gaming and makeup and crotchet and art and fashion and friendships and speech and gardening and computer technology, and I come around the curve to the seat nearest to me to Jordan a sorta taciturn, self-governing, maverick, loner-type kid who keeps his Beats headphones permanently glued to his head, and to whom I have to say daily. ‘Jordan take your headphones off’ every morning after he trundles in ten minutes late, groggy, reluctant and literally dragging his sneakers across my floor then slumps down and plops his backpack on the floor half-opened, spilling rumpled papers, bent worksheets having gone to hell and back and tattered books which hang precariously from the zippered-down side of the black satchel. Then everyday after the headphones, I have to haul him and urge him to produce what D.H. Lawrence calls ‘several insults of blotted pages and scrawl of slovenly work’. And so this morning Jordan cocks his head to one side as I come to him with my bullshit. “Jordan what are you good at?”
And I certainly expected some bullshit back. To be honest with you. But Jordan takes the moment from me, flips the control and interpretation for a split second. And with the certainty of an old sage he goes “Alchemy!” And he stares through me dead-black-cold in the eyes after I a puzzled fool say to him, “What’s that now?”
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“I am good at alchemy!” And as I am struggling a bit to reset the safety of the dominant hierarchy with smug incredulity. Because I don’t know what the fuck that is, he supports it with “Magic; I do magic”.
And I’m still flummoxed, but to remove the stench of ignorance from around me I say, ‘tell me more’. And Jordan tells me flatly that he is a magician. “I do magic.”
So I follow up nonsensically asking reductive shit like if he does tricks for his friends, and if he will perform something. And as I am saying it I feel as dumb as a bag of rocks. Shallow and ignorant like a fetishising airhead who asks you to put on a minstrel show and ‘say something in your language.’ A person who reduces another sovereign human to a performer on demand; it is an entitlement to entertainment. But Jordan subverts the whole shebang, and he holds his square. “I don’t do that for people because there are some secrets the normal mind should not know,” the sage, old head says without flinching. And goes back to looking at his book page scrawled with barely legible shit that I don’t now nor will ever understand.
And in that moment, I felt the pathos of my decreed ignorance. My rightful condition of fallibility. And I think that that was an appropriate enough reminder that the wise man knows that he knows nothing. And I didn’t say shit else to that man that morning. But I surely left that alchemist alone and moved the hell on with my life in bliss.
