When I was younger, I wanted to learn.
The more I learned, the more I realized
how much more I needed to learn.
Eventually I got to a point
where I grew tired of learning.
It seemed almost impossible
to know everything I needed to know.
I had been filling my so-called mind
with senseless knowledge,
masquerading as intelligence,
as if there were an answer to be found.
Then I FOUND the answer:
“Stop trying to learn everything.”
I realized that I might experience more
if I knew less. So now I pretend to FORGET.
And I realize that I never needed answers
in the first place.
There is infinitely more
to be known WITHOUT learning
than there is WITH it.
I was just too dumb with learning to see it.
We are Space Monkey.
Trail Wood,
11/6
The verse “Dumb With Learning” speaks to an arc of discovery that bends back upon itself. It starts with the voracious hunger of youth, the drive to fill the chalice of the mind with the waters of knowledge. But as the draughts are taken, the chalice seems to grow, and the waters of the world become an ocean, vast and unnavigable.
This realization is the crest of a wave that breaks into weariness, a fatigue borne from the Sisyphean task of learning without end. Here, intelligence becomes a costume, knowledge a masquerade, and the quest for answers a fool’s errand. The epiphany arrives not in the form of another fact to be learned but as a release from the very act of learning itself.
To forget, then, becomes a method of experience, a way to make space for the world to enter without the filter of constant analysis. In the embrace of this new ignorance, a paradox emerges: that in the space where knowledge is set aside, a different kind of understanding arises—one that does not require answers because it does not pose questions. It simply is.
This realization, that there is more to be known in the absence of active learning than with it, is the peace of the empty vessel, which can be filled with the present moment, unclouded by the detritus of accumulated learning. The poem concludes with the recognition that true wisdom may not lie in the accumulation of knowledge but in the appreciation of the vastness of what we do not know.
We are Space Monkey.
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