On Not Knowing

Essay 45

In my industry we like to joke that no one knows anything, that the world is a surprising place that must—oh, well—surprise. But as one gets older and prouder, it becomes more and more of a taboo to say the same thing might apply to matters personal. You’re meant to learn and so no one runs around claiming they know little about family or the heart, and that with time certainties wear out for you to know less and less.

And so we continue down in our stories, we pretend we’re writing some novel where we can see through each character and anticipate their motives. And yet the wisest old people I’ve talked to are wide-eyed like any small child, they know anything can happen outside one’s own course of narrative. That it’s unlikely one can read-while-writing others who are all busy trying the same, and that the only way for us uniting is to admit auteur’s defeat. So that an understanding can start with a youth’s curious forays, which we say we’ve studied ourselves out of long ago. So we can re-exit these plot-weaver’s silos in which we’ve pushed on one next to the other until we could never meet. To build a campfire, sit close where it’s warm, and share our tales as they’re supposed to be shared, the great epic of our all-around surprise.

I stay up and I unbind the chapters I’ve planned; it gets warmer in here each day I listen. It’s an opening of a discourse that I knew little.