the spark

I realised that there are many terms in my conceptual toolbox like someone having "the spark" that I use a lot, and I'm not sure if I really know what they mean or if others do either. I actually really love that they are all fuzzy and have no boundaries, but I think it would be a good exercise to see what I mean by them.

There’s a quote by the molecular biologist Sydney Brenner:

I like to take things that are fuzzy, and turn them into something tangible.

So I will try to make the spark a bit more tangible:

The spark: The quality of a person who is curious about the world, does not settle for the ordinary and has a touch of transcendence.

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What is the spark?

My intuition is that the spark is a continuous quantity, that can probably wax and wane over time. It is agnostic to your origins and cultural upbringing, it is more like a mental architecture of readiness to invite beauty, mystery and greatness into your life.

However, you could think of someone who is living completely at the margins of conventional society, shooting up opioids and thinking about God and saying fuck society. They have the unruly part of the spark that is constantly on edge and unsatisfied, but that is not what I think the spark is about. The spark is about inviting the realm of this beauty and uncertainty in the armature of a highly codified society and tempering the pull towards freedom with a willingness to accept the “social game” anyway, to navigate through it knowing that it is perhaps only a surface level stratagem, but that you decide to operate through it anyway AND see beyond.

So, the spark is maybe an attitude of throwing your credit card in the lake and then a minute later saying to yourself man that was a stupid thing to do, and getting drenched to go pick it back up again and the next day going to the art store to buy a canvas with it and make a painting about the scene.

Further on the continuous aspect, I don’t think that there really is a discrete OFF state to the spark. Perhaps only if someone has been so withered by existence that they are reduced to a shell of a human and operate in survival mode. That would be infinitely sad though, I hope that no spark can ever be irreversibly stolen from someone.

It is important to add to this definition of the spark some notion of compatibility. Nothing gives me the credentials to evaluate someone’s spark, I am not apt to judge that someone doesn’t have a spark. The spark is not some superior attribute that divides the world in haves and have nots, I think it is simply a quality that makes me resonate with some people more deeply. So I think the definition needs to factor in some conception of sparks running in several axes and some idea of spectral overlap with my own.

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How do you tell if someone has the spark?

Because the spark refers to the domain of the affective, the aesthetic and the perceptual, I am allowing for it to have runny borders and to accept that it must be "sensed". But I still want to formalise it a bit, because there are probably some objective qualities to it.

I think all of the following aspects are neither necessary nor sufficient, but they make good tell-tale signs. Ranked in no particular order:

1. You will spontaneously stop when your eye catches something beautiful in nature, like a peculiar sunset, or a bright constellation or a tree softly interlacing into another, and you will look. Maybe you will point and show to someone else, maybe you will keep it to yourself. But you will see it.

2. There are some ideas nagging at you that you come back to, almost as if you liked struggling with them. You want to have your own independent view on them.

3. When you are confronted with a new idea, you may be unsettled, or laugh it off, or try to contradict it. But you will craft at least a tiny little space for it to fight in the arena of ideas. You know it’s fair game to give it a try. No ideas are out of bounds, however violently they collide with your worldview.

4. You enjoy spending time in museums and looking at paintings, or more generally have an appreciation for beauty

5. You have a style, whatever that means. This does not necessarily mean you have a collection of branded bowties or asymmetric designer earrings. This just means that there is something about the way you are that is deliberate.

6. You enter a conversation with a willingness to listen to what people have to say

7. You try to come up with your own take on ideas like God, Death and Love

8. You do not see culture and knowledge as trinkets of social status and virtue signalling.

You will not raise the volume of your voice in public when speaking about the philosophy book you just read or the future of natural language processing, you will carry on talking just the same way you did before when you were saying what time you went to bed last night. Knowledge for you is not a Potemkin village. It is a source of awe and curiosity- you know that it must come with radical humility and a level of self-derision.

9. You feel admiration for other people

10. There is something that is not output or productivity-driven that you love

Maybe the qualities I have stated above are like dinosaur footprints, in that they are all subtle and ambiguous traces trying to approximate something that can never actually be observed (not because the spark is extinct but because it is an idealist reconstruction)

I must realise that there is a big bias when it comes to culture and "appreciation of beauty". You may have been gifted ideas about art through “canonical” channels like museums and classical music but that does not mean you are more apt at judging those matters. Instead, you should open your eyes to how people have received the same wisdom and gifts in another shape or form and recognise the beauty in two people, although having walked down different paths, somehow ending up smoking outside together and agreeing on the same ideas, understanding that the other knows what they are referring to. For example, someone may have reflected about moral responsibility and freedom without ever having read Sartre or even heard about existentialism but through anime instead and you should be able to detect the underlying concepts without being stopped by the absence of the TM label on that body of thoughts and feelings.

So the sparks out there that will be most fun to find are probably those from a different cultural milieu, and with people from different experiences and backgrounds. And that takes some vulnerability and some vision to perceive. Because the spark is not something that people owe you, you must make yourself receptive to it, and this may mean shedding many of your barriers. I actually find it incredibly humbling and fascinating that people have trodden very different paths to get the same stable attractor state of having the spark. Maybe they will not share my literary references, hell not even like literature, study a completely different discipline, and have a completely different substrate for their thoughts.

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Who has the spark?

So from everything above, when I consider who has the spark ( if that is even an interesting question to ask), I must remember that I am embedded in a cultural framework that has made me receptive and valuing of certain things and that I must stay lucid to this bias.

I will try to start from examples, and then generalise (logicians can get triggered).

Well, I have my list, and I have a told a few of these people when I initially wrote the document. One who has the spark a lot, who is basically my better half with more control and more poise and way more intellect. One who has a spark that surprises me all the time, because every single time I am struck by how he is not only profoundly intelligent, but also deeply wise and has this yearning for the spiritual in his own way. One who unambiguously has the spark and possibly is the one who most guided my thinking around the spark, and brought me to think of it in these terms.

I don't know if I should continue this categorisation though, because I have connected with people in my life in many different ways. Before I get side-tracked, an interesting way to think about this might be, who has the spark that I met before I conceptualised it in those terms (which is very recently, so leaves the space of choices very wide)?

And I have another short list that makes me realise something.

The high-functioning, middle-parting, family evening to the opera house, reads Camus and perhaps even has a print of his quotes hung up in the living room type of attitude is not enough. Now, I must be wary of sounding like I am a student in '68 because of course I am also moulded in social conventions in my own way. For example, I still send my homework on time and finish with *Sincerely* at the end of the email, and slightly recoil at the idea of getting a tattoo because it's *not proper* and wear shirts and golden earrings. So I am also a pure cultural product trapped in convention and should not think I somehow have emancipated from that. But the point I was trying to make is that the spark requires some level of pushing back against this external framework of propriety. You can let the social rules permeate you but, in embracing them deliberately and on your own terms, claim a form of freedom. It is not about leading a rash existence, but always striving for something more.

Before I get side tracked again, I will try to generalise from what I most vividly remember of some of these people on the list.

I guess when I say someone has a spark, it's the deepest way of saying I love them and that this love is not just a stochastic thing, but a mark of respect for their journey as a human being. It’s not an affection that was just imposed by circumstantial conditions like spending weeks on end with someone and them just rubbing of onto you such that their presence becomes tolerable, it’s someone whose choices and attitude to life I not only respect but am impressed by. But a constant is that it is not just about being someone who clearly has a density of thought and a breadth of interest, because there is an abundance of such brilliant people everywhere that maybe don’t stick with me as having the spark. The spark comes with an edge of being unsettled, a degree of self-confusion that is both outside of their control and cultivated as a willingness to be refuted. I am not saying the people who have the spark are messy and scrawny and chaotic. I say this absolutely not in a pejorative way- I think it’s people in which I have glimpsed the imperfection of the human condition, and I see them grappling with it in such a way that makes the process beautiful.

I think this is what draws me to them.

I am talking about curiosity that flirts with obsession and admiration that crashes into melancholy. A vulnerability that way swivel into self-doubt, or an openness that turns into uncertainty, and a willingness to change their mind that sometimes precipitate hasty life decisions. I think this is what it means to be human, and when I say people have the spark, it is perhaps that this part of them was revealed to me with particular salience.

So I think I can update my definition:

The spark: The quality of a person who is curious about the world, does not settle for the ordinary, has a touch of transcendence, and has an "unresolved edge"

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Limitation of The Spark Formalisation

Earlier I mentioned the cultural bias. I must also be aware of two cognitive biases of my mind

1. My personal reference frame, namely being limited to an understanding of human nature extrapolated from myself and what I consciously think I value as the spark qualities. This could preclude discovery. It would be worth drawing a parallel to research done in “hypothesis-confirmation” mode to research done in “discovery mode”. There are parts of people or even entire people I didn't even know had things I would love. And yet I love them. So I can't restrict my definition of the spark to the confines of my current mind, I have to engineer in some loose space in there for it to expand.

2. Seeing what is contingent as necessary. Because this lust for discovery in my mind is mixed with a degree of chaos, messiness, and uncertainty, then I think this mix must be so. It may not. However, I think there are a few good precedents to think this messiness is part of the picture. So I want to include it and maybe this bias is less a problem than the first.

By defining the spark, maybe I am approximating love, or at least one facet of love.

Is it a wrong intuition that two sparks are like matches burning from both ends? Or do you need someone to continually re-ignite your spark so you don't wither to ashes? Are sparks dangerously additive?

Maybe the spark doesn't mean anything, but if it’s something that can make me more excited to discover other human beings, then so be it.