Fozzy Logic
God and I got into one of those rambling conversations today. The kind that seems to wander from subject to subject following a vein but attaching anything and everything to that vein in an attempt to just keep things moving and to score rhetorical points along the way. It’s the kind of conversation that you might expect to have at three in the morning when you’ve been drinking much of the night.
I’m not going to try and reconstruct the conversation, because I find it hard to write that incoherently but also because trying was one of the things that the conversation railed against. For some reason, and I’ve forgotten now what it was, I dredged up my childhood programming and spouted at God, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, the old standby “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” God, of course, pointed out that that old rhyme is just one of the many lies that we tell our kids.
The truth is that names do hurt us. Words in general have much power, which is summed up pithily in another old aphorism, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” which God wasted no time in pointing out to me. Of course the real power comes when you have words backed up by swords, as governments have known for thousands of years. In any event, going back for a moment to the power of words, the proponents of Neuro-Linguistic Programming say that words are so powerful that they can literally be used to program our behavior. Then again, sometimes the words themselves can just get in the way, sometimes the real meaning in what we say is hidden behind words that taken literally don’t say the same thing at all.
I think a good example of this is when Yoda says “there is no try, do or do not.” Taken literally the statement is absurd. Anytime we do something it is because we tried to do it and succeeded, so for there to be a “do” there must be a “try,” but we get what Yoda means, we look past the words to get to the real meaning. This led me, then, to think about the opening sequence of every episode of Pinky and the Brain. At the beginning of each episode Pinky asks, “what are we going to do tonight Brain?” And Brain answers, “the same thing we do every night, Pinky, try and take over the world!”
And every night, Pinky and the Brain fail.
So then, maybe Yoda’s seemingly absurd statement actually is the answer to Brain’s problem, maybe if for once Brain answered simply, “take over the world,” refusing to cite the previous failures and refusing to add that Yoda-hated modifying “try,” maybe then he would succeed, maybe then he would simply “do.”
Or maybe this is all just so much intellectual wanking. Maybe this is just someone enamored of words ascribing to them more power than they actually warrant. After all, consider that Frank Oz does both the voice of Yoda and the voice of Fozzy Bear, and consider how little different those two voices really are. Now imagine it was not Yoda saying “there is no try” but rather Fozzy. How profound would it seem then?
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