“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” William Blake, Proverbs of Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The road of cool can lead there too.
It doesn’t hurt to be a little skeptical of the oh-wow, gee-whiz, how-cool gadgetry with which we’re surrounded, or by the same responses to information technologies and the latest-greatest therein.
But it may hurt to be a lot skeptical.
Sometimes we should take a look, maybe even try something risky, just because we think it’s cool. “Cool” taps into a moment of wonder, surprise, pleasure, delight, and intrigue that can lead to all sorts of encounters, with ourselves and with others. As Donald Norman very persuasively insists in Emotional Design (a very cool book full of pictures of very cool things), the pleasure we take in design need not be fleeting or superficial. Instead, that pleasure can be the foundation for deep, purposeful cognitive activity, an agent of lasting engagement.
Cool can be something to run toward, not away from. Seeking out cool need not be a sign of immaturity. Rather the opposite.
I was talking this blog idea over with my wife, a children’s librarian, who gave me the crowning story and urged me to post it. (Very generous of her, seeing as how she has her own venue–but she’s got lots of stories, so I don’t feel too bad about taking this one with her permission.) She told me of a storytime in which a young child, just learning to toddle, had obviously found his new walking powers to be so cool he just couldn’t stop ambulating around the story circle. He did his toddler walk. He did a Frankenstein’s monster walk. He demonstrated to everyone in that story circle just how cool it was — to be able to walk! As my wife pointed out, that moment of cool was an essential moment of maturation, one propelling that child into a lifetime of wonderful destinations. She spoke as well of young babies finding their hands for the first time, sensing their power to grip, to throw, to flex, to drop, again and again. How cool it is to have a hand!
Things of beauty, grace, power, and agency surround us. Some of them are built in. Some of them we find. Some find us. Some we share with each other, as we watch our faces light up in shared delight. From these moments we step forward, together. On the road.
Postscript: Don’t miss the William Blake Archive, one of the cooler sites I’ve discovered lately. In fact, I discovered it when I went to write this blog. I’d like the site’s words of welcome to be inscribed above my office and written all over my classroom walls:
“We are pleased to offer its resources to you for pleasure, study, or intensive research.”
Cool.
Great post, Gardner. Loved the story–walking is cool indeed.
It’s a shame that so many of us have lost the ability to appreciate the pure joy that comes from simple things like walking or the great design of the iPod unless it serves some sort of cognitive purpose. It’s good to be reminded that cool is OK on its own.
As always Gardo, you rev up those grey cells and get them thinking. Wonderful post and wonderful story. Gene, you’re right, many of us have the lost the ability to appreciate the joys that ensue from the simple things in life. Unfortunately, it seems a requisite to “growing up”, to “becoming an adult”, as if by doing so, we are no longer “children”. However, the real trick, in my opinion, is to be “childlike”, not “childish” so that we retain that sense of wonder, curiosity, and the ability to appreciate “cool”. Thank you Gardo, for being so “cool” ;-).
And yet there’s always the other Frankenstein spectre, the cool-obsessed mac-head who worships at the feet of jobs, fanboy for everything with an Apple on it, juking and bobbing with his iPod and iPhone wishing desperately there was an iFashion line of clothes so he or she doesn’t have to choose for themselves.
I pick on Apple, but only because as you rightly note, quality is what inspires. If you think about it, Cool is actually the soul of Geek and the opposite of conformity. It should be inspiring! What strange webs we weave…
Pain is your body sending you a message: “Stop! Danger. Houston, we have a problem.”
What if the perception of Cool is your brain sending you a different message: “Stop. Investigate. This could be useful.”
Playful exploration and contemplation propels the mind into a creative state. The question “What can I do with this thing?” is fundamentally a kind of tool-maker question. The cool thing about people is that they don’t limit themselves to solving practical problems.
P.S. I’d make a distinction between “cool” and “hip.”
What a great post! I couldn’t agree more!
(and…how did I NOT know that your wife is a children’s librarian???)
I confess that I first expected an essay on jazz, and was even more delighted to read about play & exploration & joy. It’s a shame we often stifle these thngs in our attempts to BE cool. Curiosity and creativity are at the top of the list of what makes us so divinely human. (Maybe that brings us back around to “cool jazz” and the exploration that went with it!) A mind must be open to grow. I think that’s very very cool. Thanks for a thought-provoking essay, Bro!
My initial thought was that you must have been responding to today’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle on the essence of cool: How the concept of cool changes … and stays the same. Then it struck me that you were unlikely to be reading a Bay Area paper.
Just to be contrarian, I wonder when we should run towards cool’s dour obverse. You get lots of cool in interesting times but is there also pleasure to be found in the banal in sour times?
sidenote: there’s a similar paradox in something you wrote on solitude a while back… Still pondering that one – head-scratching toli to follow at some point. Cheers.
I, too, expected a reference to jazz! I immediately thought of the Robin Kelley essay on Miles Davis that appeared in the NYT a couple of years back. I think he called him the “granddaddy of cool” or something like that. But I love your wife’s analogy with the baby’s discovery of her hands. My 5mo has just discovered that her hands can grab things. She is so excited about it. I’ve just discovered my very first Mac and although I hear Chris L’s previous comment, I’m letting myself enjoy the “coolness” of it. In terms of teaching, I’ve always wanted to be the “cool” teacher, but it has never quite worked out for me. I once had a very “cool” professor–Philip Brian Harper. He wore all black to class everyday, had a major NY attitude, and was as smart as a whip. Maybe if I learned some magic tricks or something…Great post, G!
Oh, wait. I just noticed something cool about your blog. You can insert an audio comment?
experimenting with your audio comments…
Then again, dear Sister, what if the perception of Cool is your brain sending you the message, “This could be FUN!” Being a pragmatist most of every day, I spend hours trying to be usefully creative in my activity. I do like the fact that human beings sometimes accidentally stumble into something useful when we’re having fun. But I also like creative play for the sake of fun itself. If it weren’t somehow ‘fun’ for him, I doubt Miles Davis would have created such cool music. Driven, yes; rewarding on many levels, sure. But the result of creative play being endorphins – now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
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I delight in the way you embrace inovation as a friend and still question its usefulness and validity, It will keep you from growing old.