“Dad, what’s a concept?” my son asked.
He’s five years old, and I don’t know where he heard the word concept, or why it stayed with him. When he asked, we were in hammocks in a park. It’s something we both like - he swings maniacally, and I have a chance of getting through a few pages of reading.
“A concept is an idea.”
“What’s an idea?”
Kids will do this - challenge you in a ruthlessly Socratic fashion (see “Why Teenagers Win Arguments”). The questions can feel like attacks, even by a five-year-old. In my experience, the best way to handle it is head-on, and answer the question as best I can. The exception is the relentless repetition of “why?” which I recommend cutting off after the third straight why.
An idea, what is it? Okay, here goes.
“An idea is something that doesn’t exist physically - you can’t touch it or see it or hear it. An idea exists in your mind.”
“Only in your mind?"
“It can get into the world, usually through language - by speaking, or writing.”
The household state of abstract reasoning
Walter’s still new to the world, and concepts aren’t a big part of how he interacts with it.
My daughter, on the other hand, is ten. She can be conceptual to a fault, especially when she can get something out of it. For her, I often have to trot out the timeworn parental chestnut that “the world isn’t fair,” which is a concept wrapped around a concept.
Concepts, simple or complex, require effort, which require desire. Comprehending a concept that you’d rather not understand can take years or decades, even if it’s fairly simple. For example, Walter still claims ignorance when it comes to the concept of “not right now,” no matter how lengthy or loud my explanations. This can make any conceptual activity, like thinking or writing or reading, hard to get through.
“Here’s some candy and a gun, please leave me alone,” I say to my beloved son, in vain hopes of finishing the page that I’m on.
Suspension
Concepts can have incredible power. The park where my son and I hung our hammocks sits in the shadow of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The bridge is the product of a few hundred concepts having to do with everything from metallurgy to aesthetics to aerodynamics to civic planning. All those concepts fall into the service of one another to form a single monumental object.
Bach and Schweitzer
That day in the hammock, I was reading a book about Bach. In that distant past of the late 1600s, in chilly Germany, Johann Sebastian took up the family career as a musician, amid what seemed like an unrelenting tide of death. The guy’s mother, father, brothers, sisters, would-be aunts and uncles were dropping like flies. Half of Bach’s twenty children didn’t reach adulthood.
Maybe there’s a mournfulness in Bach’s music, or a rage, but I don’t hear it. I hear ideas. I hear concepts unfolding with a grandeur that ennobles the mind.
Hear me knockin’
That week, I opted to take the ferry part of the way back from work. It was dusk and one half of the sky over the harbor was pink-orange sherbet with a mostly full moon rising in the east - a perfect New York night. I had my headphones in, and the Rolling Stones were playing “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin?”
It’s a pushy, shouty, hungry love song, about wanting a lover’s attention, and losing patience. Like any good love song, it can be addressed to a person, or to G-d, or to something even less identifiable, like a concept. It reverberated through my own efforts that week, that month, these last thirty years, to make something truly great as a writer. And having made at least something, then demanding of the larger world: Can’t you hear me knocking?
Mishima
The week before, I was at a bar in the East Village, having drinks with a fellow writer. This kind of get-together makes me momentarily forget my age and the steady string of responsibilities the next day. And so I tend to drink more than I should.
We were in the East Village, talking about films and publishers, when we stumbled onto the subject of Yukio Mishima - a Japanese author of dozens of books who orchestrated a doomed coup at an airfield as part of his very-assisted suicide at 45 years old.
To be a writer is to be in thrall to concepts. And Mishima was an extreme example - he talked his buddies into chopping off his head. It took two pals more than three tries to get it done. But was he so strange? People die for concepts all the time, even ones they don’t necessarily recognize as such, like money, honor and status (see “Accidental Religions,” later this fall).
The difference between the average writer - or even the average nine-to-fiver - and Mishima seems to be more a matter of degree than one of type.
Who do you love?
Some concepts, like religion or nationalism, have a history of inspiring murderous or suicidal devotion. But people can become equally devoted to all kinds of concepts.
The concept that describes how that devotion develops is sublimation, popularized by Freud. The idea is that sexual desire, repressed or discouraged, focuses on other objects. Sublimation is why you have artists and saints and suicide bombers - people passionately devoted to things that don’t seem to do them any immediate good.
Sublimation is why so many love songs can sound like a plea to G-d, and why the Song of Solomon, with its seduction and ravishing, is in the Bible. At some moment, longing becomes so strong that its subject and object vanish, or at least blur.
A 93-billion-light-year-wide stepmom
As a baby, a parent supplies everything. Then the broader world creeps in to supply what the parent can’t or won’t give. Eventually the child has to go into the world to seek out what the parent used to.
This isn’t news. One of the oldest written works is a Babylonian story about an oceanic mother named Tiamat whose children kill her and then construct the entire world from her corpse, like a couch fort made of cushions and blankets.
The replacement of a parent by a world is a rough switch, and we don’t get everything we want. A concept fills that gap, explaining why our needs aren’t being met - it’s the capitalists, or it’s the government, or it’s the fault of Adam and Eve. A truly catchy concept also makes a promise about how those needs could be met - if only we shared better, or if we only pretended to like each other better, or if we only stopped being so boring all the time.
Jack-and-Jill vanities
Longing, when it’s yours, is urgent - a dire state of affairs. There’s a famous story that one of Plato’s characters tells about how some of us got this way.
In an earlier age, he says, there used to be happy people who each had two faces, four arms, four legs and deep thoughts. Zeus cut them all in half as a way to hold onto his Olympian real estate. Each of those halves became very unhappy people with the same number of hands, feet and faces as ourselves.
In this story, the erotic and emotional desire for another person is a lingering aftereffect of this primordial wound. When this wound goes unhealed, it hurts. Loneliness hurts. Solitary confinement is an extreme punishment.
But in solitude, something interesting can also happen. Consider the 40-days-in-the-desert or Bodhi-tree story where a truly new concept comes into the world through an intense bout of solitude.
If the human condition is the wound, then what’s a concept? Is it a balm or an infection? The Verrazzano Bridge and Bach would argue that it’s a balm, and possibly even a slow-acting cure. A look at the day’s news could argue that concepts are a poison that tends to buttress and extend what’s worst in us.
The gap and the coin slot
On the same day that my son asked me what a concept was, he also wanted something badly. He’d gotten his little hands on two quarters - the price to activate the fiberglass Mickey Mouse ride stationed on the sidewalk outside a small family-run pharmacy in our neighborhood.
We went, but the pharmacy was closed. The ride was there, but unplugged. I told him that without electricity, it wouldn’t rock back and forth and play music the way he wanted. I explained the concept of electricity and electric motors. I explained that without electricity, there was no energy to make the thing move.
“Let’s just see,” he said.
Selected bibliography
Albert Schweitzer playing Bach
Plato’s Symposium (p. 19 for the Androgyne Myth section)
“Let’s just see,” he said. LOL!