Be stupid!

an equinox meditation

The equinox snuck up on me this year. It’s best this way, as I’d had no time to think about it and instead found myself forced only to experience it.

Too few things in my life have been this way. I think, and I think, and I think, and all that thinking clutters everything else. Like an impatient child asking “Are we there yet?” except we’d only just arrived and hadn’t even had a chance to look around before we’re off again and we don’t know why we’re suddenly leaving for somewhere else.

I’ve been back to the gym now for close to two months. Started slow, only once each of the first three weeks, then suddenly I’m at it all like I’d never fell off.

Except maybe I’d not actually fallen off, but took a long-needed rest. Already my barbell squats are three times the weight I’d left off at, while all the other weights have doubled. In November, when I’d dropped off, I’d not been able to increase any of these loads for weeks.

Funny this. I was so angry at myself for not going during the winter. My mind’s an asshole to me sometimes, the sort who’d kick a tired horse that refuses to keep running. Except that horse and my mind are both me, and I’m still not sure we’re ever really going to get along.

The best I’ve come up with is to lift so much, and so many times, and so frequently, that I become stupid. Not the insult kind of stupid, but the stupor sort, the blank contented stare stupid. Stupefied, like when something is so big and confusing and sudden that you can’t respond.

Stupid was stupere in Latin, meaning stunned, confused, and amazed. Wild vistas of startling beauty make you stupid. Intense sex makes you stupid. And so does the gym.

I’m particularly stupid after the gym. One time, years ago, after lifting with my brother-in-law, he and I took a bus to go back to his place. I sat down next to him and blathered on a bit about the workout, and why I liked that gym, and about something he’d said a week before. I took his 20-minute long silence for fatigue, until I turned my head.

He wasn’t sitting next to me at all, nor had he been. Instead in the place I’d thought he’d been was a terrified teenager, pressing himself against the window to avoid the sweating crazy man talking “to himself.”

The baker woman where I sometimes buy a post-workout sandwich is probably certain I’d an idiot who cannot do math. I’ve started just laying out all the change in my pocket in front of her so she can take what I’m supposed to pay. Worse than this is the self-checkout in the grocery store where I go when I don’t want to look stupid for the baker. I don’t speak machine even when not stupid, but yesterday the clerk monitoring the machines yelled at me for being too stupid to use them correctly.

Often, you need to cut off your head.

I love being stupid. Not “ignorant,” mind, but I like that a bit, too. My obliviousness to the signs of wealth here in Luxembourg has become quite the matter of humor for others. After being asked what make of car someone drove, I answered that it looked a bit roundish so maybe it was French? And I just learned Chanel makes more than perfume, and I still don’t know why anyone would need to know this.

I’m happy to be ignorant of some things, but I’m especially thrilled whenever I’m stupid. “Stupid” came to mean idiotic or foolish during the 1500’s, right in the middle of the transition to capitalism and at the beginning of the machine age. Awe became a mark of ignorance, being struck silent by wonder a sign of idiocy.

Stupid is when you cannot think and instead only experience, when the thought comes later, slower. It’s wisdom, isn’t it? It’s anyway not reacting, only being, feeling, holding back the ideas and narratives because you’re stupid enough — wise enough — to let them wait.

“Stupid” is the headless rite, the acephale, the cephalophore. To initiate into certain mysteries you must cut off your head. To reach a kind of wisdom, you must carry your head with you, lead it rather than letting it lead you.

One of the patron saints of Paris is a cephalophore, St. Denis. Cephalophores are the “head carriers,” decapitated saints who carry their heads around with them in their hands.

St. Denis is a funny one, one of the clearest places where all but the most fanatical Christian has to admit that many saints were clearly rebranded pagan gods. His name is the latinized version of Dionysus, and he was martyred alongside companions named Rusticus (peasant) and Eleutherius (liberated).

What’s so funny here is that the names of these two companions are also the names of widespread Dionysian festivals: the Rustic (or rural) Dionysia and the Eleutherius (usually city-based) Dionysia. Eleutherius is also one of the titles of Dionysus, meaning “Dionysus the Liberator.”

The Dionysia festivals involved phallophores, men carrying around large penises to bless each other. Later, the Orphic mysteries added headlessness to many of the Dionisian practices, a kind of initiation where the head is figuratively torn from the body.

So, St. Denis and his two suspiciously-named companions lost their heads, supposedly to druids, at the top of a large hill later named the Mount of the Martyrs. That’s Montmârtre, the red-light district of Paris now, where men lose their heads and carry their penises about to stop thinking so much, to let themselves be stupid.

Perhaps not so much as all that is needed, but the Dionsian and Orphic mysteries at least demand headlessness.

You have to get stupid, to let yourself do this, to stop thinking sometimes and just start feeling again.

Awe must shut you up, wonder must strike you dumb, and the only way this can happen is if you cut off your head.

Happy Equinox.

—Rhyd