By Michael Tyler, EJS Poet-in-Residence
“He who increases knowledge, increases pain.” I was fifteen when I first heard that maxim, a surprising fact to me at the time considering that I had been attending Catholic schools my entire educational life. The quote comes from Ecclesiastes, a book in the Old Testament, and is attributed to King Solomon. It was told to me by my mother’s first cousin, Jimmy Rivers, an exceptionally clever man who was a career, Chicago police officer and a person I regarded as my surrogate father, especially when receiving life lessons and the development of my social-political perspective. Rivers shared that biblical citation with me as an instruction to juxtapose with the adage, “Ignorance is bliss.”
He told me that he wanted me to recognize and understand the complex, contradicting and confounding realities of life; the many inconsistencies, incongruities, and inequities of the human existence hidden behind the public curtain of structured societies. Rivers supported that description of a curtain by quoting Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage.” He told me that when we’re born, we enter the first act. When we die, we take our final bow and most scenes in between are from a script we perform written by others, to allow us to think we’re the directors of our own drama — but we’re often only playing roles in someone else’s comedy.
Those were very sobering and disorienting words to hear at fifteen. They were an atmospheric distance away from the soda pop and potato chip conversations I was having with my peers. But such were the conversations I often had with Rivers, through my teen years. He went on to further explain that the script is called “indoctrination” and that most people are lambs for the slaughter of its plot, rather than wolves who hunt for the truth in a story. I had never heard the word “indoctrination” until that day. Rivers defined it as the ways and means of getting people to accept a collection of beliefs, ideas and stories without questioning, no matter how erroneous, illogical or untrue they were, as the foundation for how they are to think and act. He also often referred to the adherence to indoctrination as “being stuck on stupid”.
That conversation took place on Friday, March 12, 1976. I will later explain why I remember the date so specifically. A couple of weeks after my talk with Rivers, I read something that I picked up from the floor of a train car while riding the “L” (the elevated train for those not from Chicago). It wasn’t a newspaper, pamphlet, flyer, book or magazine, but instead a stapled thesis I found. The first few pages had been torn from it, and it had been dirtied and damaged from being stepped on. What drew my attention to it was a word on the page that was showing: “sexual”. As a stuck on stupid teen gargling testosterone for mouthwash, I thought fate was gifting me with some entertaining reading material for my ride home.
Far from it. It was a study about sexual reproduction in plant and animal life. I was still intrigued. What I remembered most from reading it was that roughly 99% of all life is comprised of single-cell organisms like bacteria, algae, protozoa and some amoeba and that they have asexual reproduction, fission. Another thing I read was that more than 99% of all multicellular organisms like moss, snails, orchids and us, humans, have sexual reproduction, fertilization. It went on to state that in 99.9% of all animals (from insects to primates) fertilization, conception, and gestation take place within the female, meaning that the vast majority of the energy and effort for reproducing a species is almost entirely a “female expenditure”. That’s how it was worded in the thesis, which led me to conclude that it was the handiwork of male input. The only exception given was the sea horse. The male has a pouch in which the female deposits the eggs that he subsequently fertilizes and nourishes until they hatch. Then he expels them from his pouch fully formed. This is an actual example of male pregnancy and birthing.
When I read that information, my mouth dropped and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. It was from that point on that I became fascinated with the life sciences. It was an incredible concurrence that I came across that thesis when I did. At that same time, we were discussing Genesis in theology class. As I laid in bed that night, waiting to fall asleep, an unsettling question was born in my brain: Why would God put a model of procreation in 99.9% of all animals, demonstrating that life comes from the female, only to then completely contradict his own methodology for producing humans, having woman come from man as demonstrated by Adam and Eve in the creation story? The rib explanation was suddenly a dilemma of logic and faith for me.
The next time I saw Rivers, I told him about this. He laughed and responded, “Now, you’re undoing the doing.” I promise, I’ll explain that later, too. Rivers next shared a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “Gods always behave like the people who make them.” In addition to going down the rabbit hole of a theology discussion, that was the day I discovered Hurston, for later I went to Tuley Park Library in my southside Chicago neighborhood of Chatham, on 90th Street and Eberhart, and checked out There Eyes Were Watching God.
In the weeks that followed, I came to experience what Ecclesiastes 1:18 meant. As I began to increase my knowledge about the life sciences, the verity of the Bible and Zora Neal Hurston, so did I also increase the amount of pain I was putting myself through from reconciling the indoctrination that had already shaped me. It was the agony of shattered innocence and became a relentless frustration that lasted for years. At times, it led to estrangements and alienations from my family and friends and even tortuously impacted my mental, psychological, emotional and spiritual continuity, as I internalized much of what I was learning and unlearning. But I endured it and by so doing also learned that he who increases knowledge, also increases empathy and the courage to make changes in the world based on discovered truths. Now, to what I promised.
During that initial conversation with Rivers in March, he mentioned another term I had never heard before: “critical thinking”. When I asked him what it meant he said, “It’s everything you need to do, to undo indoctrination.” Then, he told me exactly what I needed to do first. He boosted my ego and self-confidence by telling me that he thought I was different than most people my age, because I could think beyond my years. However, I would never get beyond thinking like everyone else unless I dealt with the “crazy”. He told me he had learned that the human eye can take in millions of bits of information every second, and that the human ear can detect and process nearly 1,000 different cues and sounds every second. He added that our brains are constantly processing and storing all of that information, simultaneously.
He stated that trying to make sense of it all can drive you crazy, which is why most people elect to shut down their brains and remain stuck on stupid. But Rivers didn’t want me to be “most people”. He advised me that in order to get clarity on what I wanted to do in life, and to undo the indoctrination I was living with, I needed to write the crazy out of my head. He said that writing was like taking out the garbage and that if I didn’t do it daily, my thoughts would be littered with the trash of meaninglessness. So, he told me to take a “Crazy 15”. This meant that every night before I went to sleep, I had to write for fifteen minutes. When I asked Rivers what I was supposed to write about he said, “That’s what you have to figure out.” He further explained that the question I had asked him was me “undoing the doing” — that indoctrination doesn’t want me to question anything, so in order to undo it, I must question everything. He told me that if I practiced doing this every night, eventually I would learn how to do it every day, all day, when my life was happening in the moment because indoctrination was going on every moment.
My mind exploded. That moment was tantamount to a galactic point of singularity for me. As I processed what Rivers was telling me, I literally felt a big bang of cerebral expansion in my head. Almost immediately, my conscious awareness of everything that I had been told and taught began racing out into the interstellar dimensions of my thoughts, accelerating at a pace that made me feel like I was aboard the Starship Enterprise doing warp speed. It was then, on that day, I had experienced the birth of intentional curiosity — the universe of my own critical thinking. It was exactly because of my conversations with Rivers, and his instruction to do a Crazy 15, that I became a writer. That night, when I made my first entry into a composition book, I dated it: March 12, 1976.
There was one more very important thing Rivers told me on that fateful day. He said that the pain that comes from increasing knowledge is caused by the pursuit of knowing, but that the pain of indoctrination is caused by oppression. To make sure that I would remember that, he quoted a lyric from Redemption Song by Bob Marley. Rivers was incredible at mimicking African and Caribbean dialects and so with a Bahamian accent he said, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” It worked. I never forgot what he told me. Crazy, right?
Note: This essay was written to have a word count of 1,666. It was in that year that racial chattel slavery was legally and formally codified by the Maryland Provincial Legislature as the Perpetual Enslavement Laws, which mandated that all existing slaves and the children born of them were to be enslaved durante vitae — for the duration of their lives. Indoctrination.