# The Field and the Fortress (_Howell Creek Radio address for Sep 22, 2013 -- _) There are two kinds of people in the world: those who, at some point in their adult life, have had their world view and their thinking radically changed, and those who haven’t. Regardless of what ideas you start with, and what ideas you end up with, the experience itself is deeply upsetting and wildly revitalizing: the whole world changes before your eyes and becomes new again. Every sight and sound is up for re-experiencing and reconsideration. One of my long-standing, slow-burning projects (which is pretty much all of my projects ever, especially these days) is to go over writings I posted seven or ten years ago, back in my early- and mid-twenties and prepare followups or rebuttals for them. For example, there’s this short essay on my website from 2003 called [_Art Fare For the Common Man_][afcm], in which 22-year old me basically argues (not very well, I now see) that “modern” poetry — meaning pretty much anything after the 1800s that doesn’t rhyme — is all of poor quality because modern poets don’t put enough effort into their poems to make them appeal to normal people on first reading. 22-year old me believes this pretty strongly; 32-year old me finds all kinds of problems with that essay. This is just one example of a consequence of having been on the web since the late nineties: I’ve left well-preserved trails of writing all over the place, and much of it is stuff I no longer agree with. It has value as personal history, but is otherwise, by itself, little more than a source of latent, lurking embarrassment. I could simply delete it, of course, but that seems both wasteful and a little dishonest, as though I might pretend to the world that I never held such a view. But, and here’s where my project comes in, what if I were to keep the old pieces online, but add a red asterisk to the title, and a followup to the end: an addendum explaining my new position and why I changed my mind. That way, what was once merely a disused opinion piece to be hidden in the closet now becomes part of a story of changed thinking. And I think there are few things more wonderful than changed thinking. * * * * * There are those who, at some point have had their thinking radically changed — not just a few opinions or tastes, but the whole lens through which they see the world. And then there are those who’ve never had this experience. A person in this second group lives his or her entire life, a life of experience neither more nor less limited than that of those in the first group, as a series of links in one long, unbroken chain of confirmation bias, always selecting out from each day’s events and information only the choice bits that fit their mental models. The thing is, it is nearly impossible to tell the difference, to know for sure whether a person is in one group or the other. They co-exist, like wheat and tares. That shallow-seeming nitwit you see arguing online _could_ be some inbred mall-rat whose ideas gelled at age fifteen and have remained in the fridge in all the years since; or it could be someone whose world view was suddenly re-shaped at the point of a gun, in the waiting room of a hospital, or on the road to Damascus. The experience of having your thinking radically re-converted ought to be a deeply humbling one, because it is a triumph of some outside idea over your own reason and experience; it leaves you, in a very real sense, naked and with nothing, nothing but a large wilderness of new ideas to play in. But it’s also true that the hardest people to be humble toward are those whose ideas you used to share. * * * Ideas are dangerous. They’re not dangerous because they might “change the world” or “go viral” or any of those cliches we’ve all heard. They’re dangerous because you can’t simply decide to give them up. An idea honestly arrived at through long thought and observation becomes its own fortress: it’s not something you can just decide to walk out of. You usually need help to do so. You might, at times, even wish the idea to be wrong, but the idea is so well-constructed that it is impervious to any attack, whether casual or spirited. So you wait for a worthy opponent to demolish your idea. But here’s the kicker: while you wait, you have a very strong compulsion to launch attacks of your own against anyone who passes by your fort. That’s the moral imperative that comes with ideas: if they’re right, you have a felt duty to persuade other people of their correctness. And it can be hard to keep the troops in line. Often you will enter what you believe to be a casual skirmish, only to find yourself in a heated exchange with someone else’s own massive fortress. This is why it’s so liberating to see your ideas honestly defeated: to have some fellow human expose your fortress’s weaknesses and walk you past your own defenses into the open air again. It’s a fresh lease on life. You long for it to happen, whether by surgical strike, patient siege, or deafening firepower. * * * “The Swimmer’s Moment” by Margaret Avison > _For everyone_ > _The swimmer’s moment at the whirlpool comes,_ > _But many at that moment will not say_ > _“This is the whirlpool, then.”_ > _By their refusal they are saved_ > _From the black pit, and also from contesting_ > _The deadly rapids, and emerging in_ > _The mysterious, and more ample, further waters._ > _And so their bland-blank faces turn and turn_ > _Pale and forever on the rim of suction_ > _They will not recognize._ > _Of those who dare the knowledge_ > _Many are whirled into the ominous centre_ > _That, gaping vertical, seals up_ > _For them an eternal boon of privacy,_ > _So that we turn away from their defeat_ > _With a despair, not for their deaths, but for_ > _Ourselves, who cannot penetrate their secret_ > _Nor even guess at the anonymous breadth_ > _Where one or two have won:_ > _(The silver reaches of the estuary)._ * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. I’m Joel Dueck The poem “The Swimmer’s Moment” was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1960, a few years before the author’s conversion to Christianity. There are links to read more about her, and to more thoughts about modern poetry, in the show notes at . This week’s music is [_Stubborn Love_][sltl] by the Lumineers, [_Life is Life_][lilnw] by Noah and the Whale, and [a cover of Bon Iver’s _Holocene_][hcvsq] by the Vitamin String Quartet. The text of this podcast is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, version 3. ## Synopsis Radio address for September 22, 2013. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who, at some point in their adult life, have had their world view and their thinking radically changed, and those who haven’t. Regardless of what ideas you start with, and what ideas you end up with, the experience itself is deeply upsetting and wildly revitalizing: the whole world changes before your eyes and becomes new again. Every sight and sound is up for re-experiencing and reconsideration. Mention is made of a pompous old essay I wrote when I was 22 called [_Art Fare for the Common Man_][afcm]. The poem [“The Swimmer’s Moment”][tsmma] by [Margaret Avison][mavis] was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1960, a few years before the author’s conversion to Christianity. This week’s music is [_Stubborn Love_][sltl] by the Lumineers, [_Life is Life_][lilnw] by Noah and the Whale, and [a cover of Bon Iver’s _Holocene_][hcvsq] by the Vitamin String Quartet. Iver’s own music video for _Holocene_ is one of my favorite music videos ever. The visuals, and the line “at once I knew, I was not magnificent” captures perfectly the sensation of having been let outside your own defenses. [afcm]: http://jdueck.net/article/art-fare-for-the-common-man [tsmma]: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/avison/poem7.htm [mavis]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Avison [sltl]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007M45R2I/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B007M45R2I&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [lilnw]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004RDJ7ZU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004RDJ7ZU&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [hcvsq]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006TDSCBG/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B006TDSCBG&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20