Sometimes you discover the knot because you could, and sometimes you discover the knot because you realized one day the knot will find itself around your neck.
Recently, I was fortunate enough to watch a documentary about the largest known group of chimpanzees [1]. Aside from being a fascinating and superbly well-put together documentary, a new aspect of the study of this group pops into mind in the days since I watched it.
The filmmakers and researchers did a great job bringing the individuality of each chimp. No surprise, as these were individuals they got to know on a pretty deep level through the years. The one who stood out to me the most was named Bartok.
Without giving too much away, Bartok could have been considered the philosopher king of the Ngogo Chimpanzee community. Often in the film we see Bartok in a manner that I could only describe as deep in contemplation. For a period, he takes his place high up the rungs, but not on top. However, it seems to me like he did that mostly to bide his time and let close allies draw the spotlight that being the alpha carries.
In a sense, Bartok’s dilemma might seem rather simple among the grand paradigm of the challenges of humanity, however weighing the knowledge that the Ngogo chimpanzees are the largest community of chimpanzees that we’ve ever known of – by several times, then Bartok – having played an instrumental part in their growth – knew all too well the human struggles of identifying the greatest problems of the time, confronting them, and in the rarest of cases, conquering them.
One of the many aspects that struck me in this study of this clan of primates is that with all the parallels between man and ape, this ability to introspect beyond our greatest problems and the milestone achievment that comes with are foundational to the very idea of humanity.
Bartok and the Ngogo Chimpanzee’s are not human, but multitudes of their struggles, desires are at the doorstep. Bartok seemed to be the one knocking at that door – trying to lead the rest there. I can’t speak with authority what he was thinking about all those times he’s shown contemplative, restless from his troublesome thoughts, but my mind can’t get past my own curious thoughts of his thoughts.
Recognizing the cyclical, exhaustive churn of the pecking order. Struggling to establish your place among your own. Struggling to protect your own from your biggest enemies – who also happen to be your most similar neighbors. The struggle to maintain that position. The inevitable challenges crashing upon you like waves beating down rock until the next generation takes their swipe. The struggle of decline and slowly falling through the cracks like Plinko. And the cycle churning on and on. Nothing really gained. Just stasis.
My imagination lends me to believe that Bartok saw this, and he saw that he could do well and probably challenge for the top, but somewhere along the way Bartok wondered why did he – and his mates – have to settle for the ephemeral churn.
Bartok’s blank stare into the void, contemplative eyes serve a window into the foundry of ambition; all the machinery churning away at what I’ve identified as The Slow Tying of the Gordian Knot.
For Bartok, it wasn’t just ambition propelling his rise to reign, propserity of his kind, and expansion of territory. There seemed to be a fundamental question of the limits of his little civilzation, and how he, and only he, could orchestrate it.
Not every chimpanzee is a Bartok just like not every man is an Alexander of Macedon. There is a filter that clogs up most beings of higher intelligence separating everyman from multi-generational, multi-cultural legends. Before that rests a filter which precludes those with both the contemplation and the ambition to try to solve the unsolvable. A short, but impossible step beyond that lie those who actually achieve it. Yet, before all that is a filter separating the commoner from those who can even perceive the face of their greatest problem.
While we have observed various primates discovering and regularly using tools, they’re only at the point of the menial task or action, but if those Chimpanzees could – they’d, at least for a time, construct crude effigies of Bartok.
As an analogue, there’s a primal and subconscious layer to an ape challenging for authority and growing his tribe to numbers that stretch (and demonstrate) Dunbar’s number [2] that kindles a natural commiseration and excitement – much like seeing the protagnoist triumph in an underdog story. Likewise, I think this is why an Alexander is ‘the Great’ and such an air remains somewhat unwaivering throughout generations, cultures, and civilizations. Much like any other ancient conqueror from Xerxes to Khan.
While such feats are mired in bloodshed to mass subjugation of fellow humans, remaining still is a level of grandiose achievment that something primal within us admires. Dare to take on the world and win. There is a fundamental truth to this that, no matter the level of civil society we try to pile over it, we can’t escape. It was best said:
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. [6]
While such viscera stretches beyond the stakes of conquest, this is why legend of Alexander and the Gordian Knot [7] – the unsolvable puzzle – resonates so loudly as a metaphor. What do you do when you’re made aware you share space with an impossible puzzle? Or put another way: what is it you think about when you’re not thinking about anything?
Part of me likes to imagine that every single milestone achievment of humanity is simply compound interest on every single man and woman who invested, toiled, troubled, and thought, without rest, on how to solve their Gordian Knot.
Sometimes you discover the knot because you could, and sometimes you discover the knot because you realized one day the knot will find itself around your neck.
For Alexander, the breakthrough was sheer might. Ambition. Tactical, strategic advantage giving path to the solution; cleave it. In modern times, technology and scientific discovery often replace the sword as the missing vowels needed for that single, “Eureka!,” rendering untangled heaps of impossibility into a discarded, flimsy, retrospectively pitiful rope.
The amalgamtion of the past 5-8 years unveiled what I have to identify as my own set of Gordian knots. The problems, to my own mind, so pressing that I see them without solution, yet demanding of one.
On many levels, I envy a man like Alexander because when leadership required some level of might and physical ambition it was something that the entire world could understand. For at the end of the day ideas are pillars, but there’s no structure which to rest without the sheer force of will to erect possibility into existence.
The nature of our current world inverted that paradigm. The dual constructs of civil society in tandem with mutually assured destruction leaves little room for might. Or at least has put it on ice for a time being. If anything, this operates as an almost artifical constraint that creates new problems and approaches; much like a subtractive sport such as soccer, which restricts use of our hands.
To that notion, I can only envy my historical predecessors whose problems were no less than mine, yet the game on many levels much simpler.
The discovery of a knot intractable comes with a secret twin.
For all who face a solutionless problem, the result of that problem going unsolved is not always equal. A Bartok or Alexander may not have been battling against their very survival, but more an answer to calls of legacy. However, that spark of realization may often occlude what may actually unlock as a result of overcoming one’s dilemma. It’s easy for me to say as a member of mankind observing from afar that Bartok doesn’t yet realize what can come from a collective expansion and forming of a society simply beyond your small tribe, and while he and his species may never know nor reach – I don’t believe he would have acted as he did without sensing it.
Much like, for instance, our feverish efforts to reach the moon in the mid 20th century. There was not only an impossibility, but an unfathomable nature to it. Today, in many ways the expansion of what could be probably hasn’t fully manifested or even revealed itself, but the pursuit has objectively paid dividends (despite likely being vapidly political).
Likewise, for an Alexander, matters may not have been so pressing that his own people’s survival was fully in the balance, but there was an element of existence at play. He famously touches on this, chronicling his people’s past troubles in his speech at Opis.
Let me begin, as is right, with my father Philip. He found you wandering about without resources, many of you clothed in sheepskins and pasturing small flocks in the mountains, defending them with difficulty against the Illyrians, Triballians and neighboring Thracians. He gave you cloaks to wear instead of sheepskins, brought you down from the mountains to the plains, and made you a match in war for the neighboring barbarians, owing your safety to your own bravery and no longer to reliance on your mountain strongholds. He made you city dwellers and civilized you with good laws and customs.
Those barbarians who used to harrass you and plunder your property, he made you their leaders instead of their slaves and subjects.
Perhaps Philip’s Gordian Knot concerned his countrymen advancing from subjugation to rule; rednecks to respected. And perhaps Alexander initially sought longterm security of that newfound status and as a result rode that out. Perhaps the forging the foundation of the western world was merely collateral that just happened to serve as a blueprint for human achievement.
As I alluded to earlier, sometimes the Gordian Knot orients itself around your neck, and it isn’t just a matter of ambition but survival.
In light of this, the gloom of, say, the Cold War is an entirely different result. When the flame of all humanity could very possibly be extinguished over mere misunderstanding, those facing the knot endure a different tone.
To oversimplify, maybe there is a dichotomy of expansion and preservation (I feel I might be entirely wrong on this part). One knot an opportunity, the other an impending doom.
Conjoined to this idea of a Gordian Knot is the temporal aspect. The sands slip through the hour glass, but those sands are not endless.
In a sense, it’s akin to an out of body experience allowing you to witness the knot enveloping everything you know, and helplessly you watch with growing dread as it slowly creeps around the collective consciousness like a boa constrictor. Your brain racks, idle cycles fire, formerly free space becomes preoccupied, but no realistic solutions come. In horror you watch as this intractable knot creeps along, constricting until the last sand falls.
Maybe it’s my imagination performing its own addition to a few moments in a storyteller’s documentary, but when I see Bartok the Chimpanzee’s eyes I can’t help but think, “yeah, I know that look. He’s trying to undo the slow tying of the Gordian Knot. I know that. I know that too well.”
2 - Dunbar’s Number
3 - Bartok
4 - Bartok
5 - George Hotz - Gordian Knot thru 3h1 “I got 18 years, what can I do? … Nothing matters… human extinction is inevitable – No guys! You can choose today to fight the power. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s sure better than being a doomer man.” “What if mainstream society is a death cult? What do you do? What do you do if you build a cult where the cult pursues honest rational truth. It would look like a cult though – isn’t that scary?”
6 - McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International) (p. 247). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Recent Posts