Jaden Smith descends from the heavens to explain some of his most baffling tweets

Photo: Pascal Le Segretain (Getty Images)

Jaden Smith, the young actor, musician, artist, and starchild of the endless cosmos, is known for tweeting fascinatingly bizarre nonsense. Somehow, even amidst the oceans of indiscernible garbage and bot-ridden missives barfed onto Twitter each day, Smith stands out. He is king of Mystery Mountain, figuratively walking around in a handstand while wearing pants on his torso, a shirt on his legs, and telling confused onlookers that only he has seen the truth behind all things.

At long last, after years of cowardly journalists failing to do so, Huffington Post’s Bill Bradley managed to convince Smith to explain what, exactly, he’s trying to say through his years of online philosophizing. 

Let’s start with a notable career highlight:

According to Smith’s interview response, this brutal critique of both mirrors and eyes actually makes perfect sense.

“This one comes from a study that a scientist was saying, that the way that the eyes perceive reality is not the way we actually see it,” he said. “So, like, we can only see three base colors, but there’s so much more on the electromagnetic spectrum of light that we could see, but our eyes are just not capable of seeing, which brought me to the realization that what we see on an everyday basis is not actually what’s there. It’s actually only what we can take in.”

“And I also took in another study,” he continued, “that ... our eyes are kind of like mirrors in a sense to where they perceive things and then they flip. We take in the information upside down and then the brain flips it right side up so that we can see it right side up ... and I was like, if we take in the raw visual information upside down and mirrors portray things in reverse, then they’re not real. We’re living in the Matrix.”

Well, there it is. Perfectly clear now. While we’re sure the above response satisfies every possible question, not every tweet received even the most opaque explanation.

Consider the following:

Smith admits, “I really don’t know where my head was at with that one,” but does say that it’s a good bunch of letters because the words end up feeling “like an abstract painting.” If you’re picturing question marks floating through your head still, don’t worry: that’s definitely intentional, too. Smith continued by saying, “The visuals that get created in your mind when you say that sentence, I created those visuals in your mind.” 

Don’t give up now. One last selection will yank your third eye right open. First, ponder the following:

Even this, a personal favorite from Smith’s oeuvre, was apparently typed and sent with clear intent. It is a guided missile zooming toward the heart of logic.

“That’s true! That’s true!” he said. “Because I’m not gonna be categorized as a human. Oh, humans are supposed to do this or act like this or people are supposed to act like this or people are supposed to be this. I’m my own thing. Don’t judge me off some standards that were made up before I was born. I’m doing my own thing.”

The rest of the article contains similarly reasonable readings of memorable Smith tweets, though unfortunately, it fails to address several other beguiling hits from the past few years. No one piece can be comprehensive enough for that, of course. Instead, we’ll have to settle with what we’ve got: a reminder of how valuable a formal, entirely Hubbard-free education can be to a wide-ranging, thoughtful mind.