Knowledge and Ignorance, or Knowing and Not Knowing

Late in the day over the Atlantic facing to the west from the westernmost point on Sao Miguel, Azores. Photo by Jeremy Hinks

This picture, taken while on holiday recently, captures something I have been wanting to write about for a long time, ever since listening to the BBC R4 series called ‘The Long History of Ignorance’.  So many elements of the discussion from these podcasts resonated with me.  Their central theme was about how ignorance has a part to play in management of ourselves and our world, just as much as knowledge does.  Rory Stewart says “Ignorance and knowledge: they don’t cancel each other out.  Ignorance is not the negation of knowledge.  It is the contrary of it and together they form something new”.  I realised the irony of how I experienced this and similar thought provocations in the podcast.  I wanted to understand them with absolute clarity and found myself listening to them repeatedly trying to grasp knowledge, to be certain about what I was listening too.  I felt a bit sheepish when I realised my actions were, to some extent, missing the point!

When I realised what I was doing, I chose instead to relax into having fleeting glimpses of understanding, arising from synthesising something new from my knowledge and ignorance.  To me this is captured in my picture wherein the clarity of the sea represents understanding, and the cloud masking the sun, and the far distance, is a veil of ignorance.  Within all of this is a path of light, a way forward through this ‘coincidence of opposites’.  Taken together the picture is one of great beauty, each element complementing the other, working together to create a whole.

Of course, all of this is a flight of fancy, and you are likely to see something different as you look at the scene.  Nonetheless, this is my flight of fancy and I might well use the image in future when writing about things in which I combine knowledge and ignorance….which means everything I guess!

What is prompted for you by this image?  How do you think and feel about the importance of ignorance in your navigation of the world? 

Below are some stories of observations coming in which I feel equal comfort, perhaps equal threat, from knowing and not knowing...

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While on holiday I returned to reading fiction which for such a long time I have not done, instead reading worthy non-fiction and telling myself I was immersing myself in worthy learning! Truth is I often found it rather dull and uninspiring. Rather forgettable in fact, quite apart from my own capacity to remember seeming to enter a 'one in, one out' period in relation to the recall of facts.

My return to fiction focussed on Yann Martell because of one of those quirks of fate. I searched for books that related to the Azores (our destination) and the search engine took liberties with that and came up with Yann's 'High Mountains of Portugal'. No reference to the Azores at all except from the fact that they are a part of Portugal, albeit autonomous in their governance. Perhaps it came up because the highest mountain in Portugal is actually Pico, located on the Azorean island of the same name.

I read his 'Life of Pi' years ago and despite finding his storytelling spellbinding I did not seek out any of his other work. What I noticed in his back catalogue was book that was inevitably going to pique my interest. It was his first, called 'Self'. In this book I found so much of interest that seemed to me to resonate with knowing and not knowing, in one way or another.

Part of the book is about the story's narrator describing their earliest memories goes along with at a rollicking pace, spiced with occasional phrases that caused me to stop and pay full attention. One of these was....

'childhood, like wisdom, is an emotion'.

I am still not quite sure why but this fascinated me. I felt I understood it with absolute clarity at one moment then not at all the next. It it had been a stone on a beach I would have picked it up and turned it over and over to know it better. I wanted to pick it up shake it to see what is sounded like; to take it apart and understand its component parts. There was something about the logic of childhood=emotion and wisdom=emotion meaning that childhood=wisdom which manages to be true and absurd at the same time. It really does seem to be a statement in which knowledge and ignorance co-exist.