In Zen there is the concept of mushin (Japanese, “mindlessness”), primarily a form of martial arts training whereby the mind/body “unknows.” It is not far removed from the concept of an athlete being “in the zone” and achieving “flow.” At such times, movement is effortless. Basketball players “see” the court. For baseball hitters, the ball seems to slow down. They can “see” the pitch, get the sweet part of their bat in it, and everything falls into place.

Those who strive for mushin repeat an action thousands of times until they no longer have to think about it. It becomes muscle memory. It ceases to be effort. Ideally, mushin leads to a breakdown in the boundaries between the body and its motions. There is no body. There is no motion. There is mushin: flow. It is most apparent in what Howard Gardener in his theory of multiple intelligences would call kinesthetic, or visual/spacial intelligence. Warriors who achieved “flow” in ancient Greece were said to be in the state of arete (Greek, “excellence”) – they were thought to be possessed by a god, who fought within them. They were, for all intents and purposes, no longer there. The more frequently this happened, the greater the warrior.

This idea of arete had its counterparts in Celtic and Nordic battle fury. Cú Chulainn, the great Irish hero of the Tain, was said to have grown to enormous size. His eyes bulged beyond human limits. His face and body took on epic proportions. This phenomenon, in less exaggerated form, has been observed in contemporary soldiers. “Beyond the call of duty” often translates into a state of battle fury in which adrenalin and endorphins appear to refute the usual physical limits. The Colt .45 was developed to assure that American soldiers could bring down Filipino troops who, in such a state, were often able to keep fighting after being shot by lesser caliber bullets. Any intelligence in its pure form – “pure” meaning that it does not act in accordance with willed effort or thought – can easily be perceived as much a form of stupidity as intelligence. In point of fact, we might say that mushin is the event threshold in which the binary of intelligence/stupidity breaks down.

Usually, great effort goes into being effortless. “Making it look easy” takes a lifetime of training, but not always. We all know the stories of housewives who have lifted cars from the bodies of their children. We have all experienced mushin when we have driven to work, and not remembered the drive, or the route we took. So much in life depends on a sort of habitual “unknowing.” Men and women train for decades to experience in meditation the willed equivalent of this effortless state: the driver, the drive, and the path do not exist. One is, and that translates into a thirty mile commute.

To speak of Gardener’s multiple intelligences, a current fad in education, is to speak of properties that are usually not isolated. In every kinesthetic act, there is almost always some degree of the other forms of intelligence at work. Any “pure” form of intelligence can be seen as a sort of savantism—an extraordinary reduction. A math genius may be an emotional (intrapersonal) idiot. In point of fact, it probably will greatly aid and abet his or her career, at least in terms of results, if his or her mind is so limited. While we strive for balance, we reward remarkable imbalance with fame, fortune, and hero worship. Very often, the athlete who can sink a three pointer from thirty feet out on a consistent basis may be deficient in all other respects, and, so, when he gets caught shoplifting, or shoots his lover, we are dumbfounded. How can a person with such extraordinary skills, with all the millions of dollars those skills have earned him, throw it all away? This is the comedy of human contradiction: we take a reduction we have aided, abetted, and encouraged, then take that reduction to task for not being expansive, for not having the ground sense of the normal.

We are fond of saying that there is no such thing as “normal,” but this is not true. While there is no precise equation for normality, there is always an approximate sense. If not, we would have no idea of anything being out of sorts. Normal is, most likely, a balance of different types of intelligence, a balance by which none of the intelligences sticks out to any extraordinary degree, either by word, deed, or temperament, for good or for ill. Occasionally, a normal person might rise to an occasion – accidentally sink a jumper from fifty feet out, hit a ball perfectly, have a good day playing the piano – but this is not likely to happen with any frequency.

To be “good” at a task is not the same as being talented; and to be remarkable, a “genius,” is an order varying not only in degree, but in kind from being either good or talented. In a sense, genius is always a form of stupidity in so far as it breaks down the binaries between effort and grace, between the striven-for and the God-given, natural, or genetically predisposed. It is not a willed act. The “pure” form of any intelligence puts the others in the shade. It sticks out. It is grotesque, unearthly. It can not even be said to belong to the person who is possessed by it. Here, we may borrow the term charism. One possesses talent and ability, but one is possessed by genius and charism. It is something beyond normative event thresholds: the mutation, the aberration, the freak.

Sometimes this “mutation” changes the course of whatever field of intelligence it enters: Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan with sport, Beethoven with music, St. Augustine with theology. Most of the time, as with most natural forms of mutation, nothing much changes. It appears; it reminds us that something exists beyond our understanding, that there is in the midst of our knowing, a great mystery, one which is not always entirely pleasant to our sense of normative reality, one which is not always welcomed, and may even be ruthlessly persecuted, disparaged, repressed. This “thing” can arise at birth, or it can suddenly occur through a trauma—a brain injury, a moment of crisis in a life that triggers an adaption or extraordinary maladaption. Certain forms of “conversion” share a common thread with brain damage.

It is, in the language of mystical oxymoron, the “stupidity” that is wise, the folly of God. Brokenness makes things whole, damage leads to perfection. It is in this light that I wish to meditate on the life of St. Joseph of Cupertino, a man, who in every one of Gardener’s multiple intelligences, could be said to have been severely lacking. He was, in effect, very stupid, an embarrassment to his family and himself, a man with certain traits similar to the Russian tradition of the Holy idiot, or to Issac Bashevitz Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool.”

All the contemporary learning disabilities: dyslexia, ADHD, mild autism, aspergers, impulsivity, seem to have been visited upon him. If he had been born in our era, in this time of labeling and drugging, Joseph might well have been ritalined, aderolled, and prozaced into something resembling the norm. Besides being stupid, he had, as with many cases of brain damage, a violent temper. He was no fun to be around, and yet, and yet, before any of his famous levitations, something in that age of faith, something that allowed for the mystical intimacy between the lowly and the royal, inspired ordinary people to realize they might have a saint within their midst: this broken, and failed, and stupid and utterly annoying oaf was the embodiment of Christ on earth. They began to surmise this before Joseph took a single flight above their heads, before he levitated in front of the pope. With such a saint, the man is not what people see—but the God made manifest through the man. It is on this form of charism, and on the nature of grace (gratis) and its relation to damage that I wish to dwell.

To be continued.

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