Let Us Recuse Ourselves Awhile

By LANCE MORROW

The mind, Holmes told Watson, is like an attic. "You have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out." Holmes stocked his own mental attic with a detailed knowledge of chemistry and cigar ashes. Knowing about cigars helped him solve The Boscombe Valley Mystery.

Holmes believed in a sort of Doctrine of Discriminating Obliviousness. He professed ignorance of the Copernican design of the solar system. "What the deuce is it to me?" he asked. "You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

Perhaps this is an idea whose time has come. The intellectual attic is stuffed now. Urgent, exotic pieces of lumber (like Nagorno-Karabakh and Baku and Soweto and Tadzhikistan and Violeta Chamorro and Yegor Ligachev and Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Sisulu and Umberto Eco, on and on) are gathering in the mind from all over the world. They are tumbling out the windows.

It is difficult, of course, to "choose" our knowledge, as Holmes advised. We live in inundations of information. The air is dense with billions of fleeting names, images, factoids, electronic dust. Information jitters round in a Brownian movement. But there is a way to impose order on this incoherence. The mind must be a discriminating host. It needs a bouncer at the door.

When judges and prosecutors decide that they must bow out of a case, they "recuse themselves." (The phrase cannot be uttered without conjuring up the ghost of Algonquin J. Calhoun, the lawyer in Amos 'n' Andy.) Judges recuse themselves because of conflict of interest. Perhaps all of us ought to be able to recuse ourselves from subjects in which we have no interest whatever.

Which brings us to Donald and Ivana Trump. I recuse myself, on the grounds stated above. While I am at it, I should mention Geraldo Rivera. Also professional golf. The baby-boom generation, at least when it puts on its self-regarding tribal panoply. The collected works of Sylvester Stallone. Deconstruction. The Super Bowl. The northward migration of the killer bees. Magazine articles that describe "Blank's Lonely Fight Against Blank." Anything that Jean-Paul Sartre ever wrote, said or thought. The intellectual life of Roseanne Barr. The works of Erica Jong, who once composed a poem with this line: "Actually we believe the carrot to be/ God's penis." And so on.

Make your own list. This intolerance -- the only form of discrimination designed to protect the discriminator's sanity -- is a natural reflex that can be trained. The individual's list of recusals conforms to his interests and prejudices. Customized recusal is superior to those presumptuous recitals, regularly published by Women's Wear Daily and others, of "Who's In" and "Who's Out."

Armed with the right of recusal, the individual achieves Emersonian self- reliance. He becomes something like a Third World country that has nuclear capability: he can commit the annihilations of his choice in the privacy of his own mind. Every man a king.

The dark side is that slapdash recusal can degenerate into a form of internal book burning, a crank's bonfire. The hyperactive recuser lives next door to the know-nothings and crackpots. He is liable to mutter to himself in public. Intelligent recusal must be elegantly done. There are rules. No ethnic slurs. Avoid recusing yourself on entire countries, such as Canada. Do not go scything down whole fields of knowledge. (On the other hand, I long ago recused myself on the subject of economics, about which I am a moron, and have not suffered a day's unhappiness because of it.)

Creative recusal means that you refuse delivery on unwelcome items of knowledge. In a world of intrusive information, it is rewarding to turn off your hearing aid in the midst of a particularly cretinous and gaudy aria. In an epoch when fame is the coin of the globe, it is satisfying to slam a mental door on Trump.

Recusal does not discourage curiosity. On the contrary, it allows curiosity to breathe and put down roots. It clears some of the junk out of the garden, pulls up a few weeds. In my garden, I say, weed out the Trumps. You may choose to cultivate the Trumps. Let a hundred flowers bloom.

The average citizen has no power over Trump except the sovereign right to ignore him. The exercise of optional knowledge. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, if a 90-story grandiosity occurs in Gotham and no one is there to witness it, then have either of these events occurred? The second event undoubtedly has. Trump involves certain pharaonic consequences. He sprays his name on buildings and airplanes: a very, very rich graffiti artist. Trump is a man whose ads speak of his apartment buildings as enactments of his "philosophy." Hugh Hefner is another man who has a "philosophy." We live in a Periclean age.

History proceeds in gossip and fractals. Fractals are the mysterious and apparently irrational forms proposed by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who says that reality has shapes undreamed of by Euclid and surprises that ridicule the idea of order. The shape of a mountain is not a cone. Clouds, coastlines, tree branches, commodity prices, word frequencies, turbulence in fluids, stars in the sky, reputations, fame, the passage of history itself (think about the past ten months) -- all these are fractal shapes.

The mind is the grandest, most mysterious fractal. It takes its shape from what it holds, and therefore, Zen-like, sometimes grows more graceful because of what it has kept out.