The best thing a person can do, as far as his position in life is concerned, is learn a skill or develop an innate talent. This is why I don't talk about IQ anymore. It merely indicates potential. However, it is necessary to say that every child should learn two languages beginning at a very early age, and every child should learn to play music beginning at the age of five or six. I wish my parents had taught me these skills.
If a certain shape follows from other shapes on an IQ test question, which note follows from a bar of music? There are good notes, bad notes, and perfect notes. Logic is not merely linguistic. There's logic in math, in music, and in visual art. And logic, as a system of patterns, is the master of ideas. All ideas follow logic. Certain things are right and others wrong. "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug."--Mark Twain --If you don't know the difference between a right word and an almost right word you will have a harder time conceptualizing and collating the world of ideas, since ideas are encapsulated primarily in the Logos.
So why read poetry? Because, as I always tell people, the greatest thoughts are passive thoughts--thoughts that strike one like a sudden bolt, epiphanies, thoughts that occur to us. It occurs to me I should wash my car. Plenty of naturalists had seen the beaks of finches, but in a sudden moment the idea of natural selection occurred to Darwin by thinking of different kinds of beaks. Darwin could not have seen natural selection simply by making himself see it. He didn't know what he was looking for. The faculty of passive thinking can be increased and perfected so that more great thoughts occur to us. Not everyone who makes great observations reads poetry, but if you can learn to read and digest poetry, it will help you read and digest prose, and it will cause you to be generally more observant. So, I would say one way of increasing passive thinking ability is by reading poetry. When you read a poem all sorts of images flood in. Poems contain ideas that are presented in bite-sized form. This is not as much the case with prose, where every aspect of the idea is fleshed out in the way that the author wants you to think about it. With poetry you get to think about it your own way.
“Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.”—Andrew Marvell, from "To His Coy Mistress"
We cannot keep from crashing into the wall, but we can control our speed. This is a compromise between free will and determinism. Who has an original thought today? I'm not supposed to say secrets are encrypted into the lines of poems, but I must say it, because it is high time we poets confess to it. Anyone who’s read Emily Dickinson knows this. But that is a great reason to read poetry. It's not supposed to be the reason we read. We are supposed to turn to poetry in times of struggle and grief, but there's more than one reason for reading. In fact, there are as many reasons as there are people.
Why do I say reading poetry can increase passive thinking capability? Because it has done so in my life. Because many of the things I notice in the world are either part of the contents of poems or settle and sift through me in the same way a poem would--wandering, but with a certain end that the thoughts move toward. We cannot anticipate when a great insight will come, but roses grow best in a garden.
It is also good to write poetry, or to at least attempt it. Different people go about this in different ways. You can learn to write sonnets. You can imitate the Greats. But whatever you do, you will always be looking for the right words and the right lines. By gaining a feel for this organism, you will be learning a logic like music. The more forms of logic you learn, the greater your passive thinking ability. Again, some people have a great knack for this, others not so much. But it is possible to change the brain, and the best way to do that is to learn logical systems, because they lie at the base of idea formations.
Finally, we must consider that the world is losing almost all of its craft thinking, which is simply the kind of thinking that goes into producing a work of art. Most things are done in a formulaic way today. We sort and stack all day in a way that is tedious and articulates no knowledge of an artisan verity. The modern mind is no longer dexterous. It no longer shapes unique worlds. It merely repeats actions by route. A factory job comes to mind, but today formula thinking, with its humdrum repetitions, permeates every part of society. This creates a mind that is blind to alternate possibilities. Little wonder that the fine arts have suffered so tremendously by the steep rise in formula thinking. IQ is a quick answer to what intelligence is. A slower answer—a more patient and nuanced answer—is skill and skill development. Be good at one thing.
Joel Fry
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