On the importance of not knowing
"I wot not by what power,
But by some power it is"
Even Demetrius, privileged, arrogant and versed as he supposes in courtly graces, admits, in his moment of illumination, that he does not know. And this is true for each of us, not less but increasingly as life proceeds. And there is comfort in it, for it characterises the wisest: Socrates and Christ put questions to those who listen, because only when tried against experience does man know anything at all and only when he has accepted responsibility for this can his life be truly meaningful.
Speak with a polymath of today's world, like Jonathan Miller, and all his scholarship and understanding is brought to the acuity of his attention, to his not knowing. The temptation for most of us is preparation of a reply, battalions of knowledge that will protect us from the charge of ignorance. We gather facts and strategies to marshal a defence or support a technology. This may happen for reasons of good intent, not only laziness, vanity, ignorance or fear. Somewhere usually, though, fear is at the root of it: fear of being at a loss, fear of forgetting, fear of losing face, fear of another's claim.
Reflect a moment on what happens when the result does not matter, when the subject is central and not our self, when ideas are carried alive into the heart by passion and whole bodies of knowledge arise in the memory unbidden. We had not on first encounter consciously recorded these, but they were remembered freely because they were freely heard. The event belonged to life-relish and curiosity and enlargement, the very factors that hold us to life itself. Consider the joy of food and of those we love: our knowledge and experience of them, their rightness and wonder, give us constant surprise. Knowledge in its deepest sense is the trust we repose in what is forever fresh, forever now. Now cannot be if we think we know in advance. Now depends upon vigilant, generous, unselfsparing, not knowing.
Is the child magnetic to us because of his ignorance or his innocence? Surely it is because of his entire openness to the instant, his fearless unknowing. A child in the man, like William Blake, cannot be forgotten. The most erudite and unillusioned and searching, like Eliot, are clear and each of us, ultimately, must answer to this. There is no hiding place in knowing, no discovery; in not knowing all things are possible:
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty
desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast
waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end
is my beginning
June 2010.
