The
Brady Archive
LIving
Wisdom
By
Robert Brady, (KJ
53, Just Deeds special issue)
I’ve
learned a lot of things from stones, both from building with them and
from butting my head against their walls, the latter when I was mostly
younger and stone walls were largely metaphorical. The main thing I
have learned from building stone walls is that the process of building
with stone is that of the Socratic dialog, with me as the student and
the stones as the teacher. Stones do the Socratic thing very well; they
have infinite patience, impeccable honesty, and they know their stuff
right down to the ground. You can trust a stone completely; a stone
will never lie to you. So if you listen right, and don’t mind
a few of the pinched fingers and bruised toes that are the price of
stone knowledge, the stones and the wall will show you in true Socratic
fashion that you already know how to build a stone wall.
I seek to build it one way, and in learning I cannot do it that way
(the rocks will not stand for it, they have their scruples, after all;
rocks are not constrained by logic; they understand a much greater fundamental
than we humans do), I learn some small thing that only rocks can teach,
a kind of stony grammar, a petrosyntax; I focus on that and build...
no, that will not do either; that is not the whole of the thing, only
a part. Rocks know it cannot all be learned at once, and wisely do not
crowd me with knowledge. But with that part I go on, and try again,
and fail again, but when, after a week away I come back to the task,
I find I have learned another little bit, it too is now part of me,
part of what I know about stones and stone walls, part of what the stones
in their limitless patience embody. With that I go on again, begin to
build, and fail, and learn another thing, and so it goes on, as bit
by bit what I learn rises up like a stone wall. And when that learning
wall is at last all learned, it will be but a slight step to build the
wall itself.
If I want a wall that is a stone poem in stone syntax, I have to learn
the bit-by-bit stones teach me until at last I have a stone wall, not
a book wall, not a Bob wall. The finest mortar for a stone wall, therefore,
is patience in the builder, blended with integrity. No integrity in
the builder, no integrity in the wall.
But the bigger lesson comes later, when the wall is standing at last
and you go off into the world filled with the realization that this
dialectic pertains to EVERYTHING you do: that any worthy activity is
a dialog, that wisdom is a living thing, not frozen in time, not a doctrine
or a dogma, not a monument, not a library, not a printed book, and that
you are filled with wisdom ready and waiting to be known to you.
What does living wisdom tell us? Among other things, that the solution
is where the problems are: in ourselves. Loss of beauty, true beauty,
within and without our lives, is the sign, the lesson, the indication,
the marker, of our deviation from the living wisdom that comes god-given
from within ourselves. Lack of contact with that wisdom lies at the
heart of our problem, and if we continue this way we are ended: the
real thing won’t stand for it. Existence must be a dialog with
the present, as the living, thinking person is taught by any art, any
worthy endeavor. You are instructed and guided by the very task, by
the very ongoing. You are taught the true way most truly only by traveling
it, not by standing still and listening to others tell you the way,
or by looking at an old map of where others have gone. The way is vast,
and greater by far than we are, and it will prevail, no matter how we
treat it or view it. We either go as it goes or the walls we have built
will collapse upon us.
And as there is living wisdom, so there is dead wisdom. Dead wisdom
obviates the dialog by saying: “Do it this way because we have
always done it this way.” Dead wisdom souls a dead society. Living
wisdom, like all ongoing, on the other hand, is always and ever new.
Wisdom is green. The green of the grass, the green of the leaf, the
green of that living layer beneath the bark of a tree. It is the green
of youth and hope.
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held by the author
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