“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist”
- Rene Magritte
It has been many years now since I have discovered one of the greatest weapons in facing down the inherent pain that comes with the overwhelming totality of existence.
It is the simple phrase “I don’t know”.
It can be a salve and a shield, a lance and an olive branch, this simple phrase, when understood and meant sincerely, is also a door leading to the best place we can hope to visit in this life:
Understanding.
This is not a place of absolute certainty. Quite the contrary, it is very unstable. It is very much like a good number of places you may have actually been - places so utterly beautiful, at a moment of contentment, or joy, or relief, with fresh air and a stunning view of, say, a river snaking its way down to the shimmering sea, sitting as though cradled by mud-red cliffs in the distance. Your enjoyment of that place, that moment and, most importantly, your understanding that whatever positive emotion you’re experiencing is a grace that you are lucky enough to feel, is in no way hampered by the facts you probably don’t know: how old are those cliffs? Why is the sea that colour? How many blades of grass are there in the fields that run along the river banks?
Sometimes such questions, usually much simpler questions that we feel we should know the answer to, will creep into our minds and spoil the party.
Much of the stress we suffer with, many of the unpleasant encounters with others we endure, all the seemingly awful things that occur to us and stay in our minds, replaying over and over, forcing us to suffer again, like the dull ache of a poorly healed fracture of a femur, swingeing whenever the weather turns cold: it comes from our urge to be right, to win when there is no need for competition, to be the main character in everyone else’s stories as well as our own; this is the true cause of so many issues we tend to externalise.
When Socrates realised this, and found a way to alleviate it by showing the world that questions are far more important than answers - questions can always be asked and get us closer to understanding, whereas answers may be impossible - his incessant adherence to this model for clarity revealed a more unbearable pain than what I’ve outlined above, a pain which forced his fellow citizens of Athens to eventually kill him (and for him to willingly accept this fate): this is the pain of realising that you don’t know.
The pain of ignorance.
Instead of considering a state of ignorance as a necessary starting point on the journey to understanding (or knowledge, or wisdom), people will often consider it a failing. Sometimes a moral failing. Most destructively, a measure of worth.
Let’s think of this concept externally for a moment of contrast:
‘Stupid’ is often used as an epithet, hurled at someone mockingly. This only works when society applies a value to intelligence (here defined simply as how much stuff one knows). It is not entirely unreasonable to apply a measure of value to intelligence - it can aid in building and accruing wealth, in aiding your community, in solving problems. But this has always caused a lack of intelligence to be viewed as being lacking in value.
Why?
Could we not retain a vaunted position for those who display consistent, demonstrably high levels of intelligence, whilst refraining from denigrating those who do not? One is not contingent upon the other. A ‘stupid’ person can be many other ‘valuable’ things - kind, wise, funny, strong, fast, and any other trait that we can universally consider good. Hell, if we’re speaking in the language of generalities, a comparatively unintelligent person can just be a good person - ‘Unintelligent’ does not mean ‘bad’.
Maybe we can do this, but we currently do not, and probably never have. This not only results in any given person’s displays of ignorance being treated as a moral failing, but it causes this to be internalised when encountering ignorance oneself.
For me, at least, saying “I don’t know” out loud, meaning it, and seeing if that can be remedied, has cured me of this particular pain. It has rendered knowledge as the treasure that could potentially be won at the end of an exciting quest, rather than a hoard to sit atop, like a lonely, greed-possessed dragon.
The Parable of the Invisible Gardener is an illustrative tale outlined by the English philosopher Antony Flew, having adapted the tale from another English philosopher, John Wisdom (the perfect name for a Prof., I’m sure you’ll agree. His brother was also a philosopher, by the way… named John Wisdom).
It goes like this:
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Skeptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"
- Flew, “Theology and Falsification“, 1950
A great many academics, undergrads, and various readers of philosophy, have taken this tale as a thought experiment. A literal thought experiment, one that all but negates the claims of the faithful, rendering their beliefs, if not falsifiable, utterly pointless to express aloud. The sceptical jungle explorer, it seems to them, is the hero of the tale.
Is that it, though?
Let us consider something curious about this ‘story’: the final question in Flew’s parable remains unanswered. Why? Such ‘parables’, as Flew has deemed the tale, usually have a definitive conclusion - the lesson, or moral, is stated, not to be inferred. Despite a storyteller’s role often being to provoke questions from the audience, it is also customary to actually end a story.
Perhaps then it is merely a rhetorical question, one that belies and answer by dint of being posed? “Of course not, idiot! Now let’s gather up our barbed wire and attack dogs which we brought for some reason and find our way out of this bloody jungle. My wife is going to kill me - I was due home 4 years ago. That’s if the malaria doesn’t get me first, you jerk!” could be assumed as an answer, and thus, an ending.
It certainly is often seen this way, however this would be rather unbecoming in the work of a distinguished philosopher, much less one whose academic pedigree can be traced directly to Ludwig Wittgenstein. So, I don’t think the question is of the rhetorical variety. It is just as it appears - a question. One that, crucially, mercifully even, remains without an answer.
The parable highlights a universal problem. The two jungle explorers are employing two very different language games here: the believer is using the language game of faith, the other employs the language game of empiricism. Both are valid games, quite fun to play, and good for you mental fitness. But, if you’ll indulge me in a brief sporting analogy, gentle reader: one cannot play rugby union whist adhering to the rules of cricket - the referee would surely penalise you for carrying a wooded bat around the pitch (conversely, the umpire in a cricket match wouldn’t be best pleased if you tackled the wicket keeper as he tried to catch the ball!).
The mode of discourse, and indeed the very meaning of the words used, differ so fundamentally that they cannot reconcile. Not without understanding.
(For further consideration, here is a link to a discussion of Wisdom’s original Parable as discussed by the philosopher D.Z. Phillips, my grandfather, as it relates to the conceptualisation of God - until 22:50. I watch this video, and the second one found alongside it, very regularly. I miss him dearly).
I’m reminded of the Irish psychiatrist Maurice O’Connor Drury recounting a conversation with his teacher, the aforementioned Wittgenstein:
An examiner once said to me: ‘Sir Arthur Keith once remarked to me that the reason why the spleen drained into the portal system was of the greatest importance; but he never told me what that importance was, now can you tell me?’ I had to confess that I couldn’t see any anatomical or physiological significance in this fact. The examiner then went on to say: ‘Do you think there must be a significance, an explanation? As I see it there are two sorts of people: one man sees a bird sitting on a telegraph wire and says to himself: “Why is that bird sitting just there?”, the other man replies “Damn it all, the bird has to sit somewhere”
The reason why this story pleased Wittgenstein was that it made clear the distinction between scientific clarity and philosophical clarity.[…] Scientific explanations lead us on indefinitely from one inexplicable to another, so that the building grows and grows and grows, and we never find a real resting place. Philosophical clarity puts a full-stop to our enquiry and restlessness by showing that our quest is in one sense mistaken.”
- Drury, “The Danger of Words”, 1973
One can, conceivably, learn all that is. But, as the infinitely-repeated question often posed by 5-year-old children begs:
Why?
Here’s a good answer, maybe the best one. Maybe the only answer:
I don’t know.
“Mysteries”, a staple genre for authors and storytellers alike, are anything but mysterious in the end.
It was, as we all know by now, the butler that did it. Always.
As I mentioned before, it is customary for storytellers to actually end a tale. So can we bring some real mystery into our telling without leaving an audience cold, to bring forth a sense of that oh-so-useful “I don’t know”, perhaps?
There is a way that I have begun to develop - it has proven useful thus far when I am donning the (very stylish) hat of the Cyfarwydd (half storyteller, half discussion lead: here’s a slightly longer description of the role), but I’m uncertain quite how it’ll play as a straight-up performance storyteller… fingers crossed that it can.
Some ancient stories, and even some newer urban legends and folktales, have strange, random, but most often, fragmentary elements in them. Odd bits and bobs that have stuck fast to the otherwise coherent narrative; maybe remnants of a fuller version, perhaps even elements added on once that haven’t fallen away - think of walking along a very tidy main street in a quaint little town. All the shops are clean, the pavement straight, the sun shines on the perfectly-spaced poplar trees lining the road. You look up and see a pair of shoes, one boot and one tennis shoe, laces tied together, slung over a telephone wire above a road. How’d they get there, and why did someone do that? That’s how these bits seem in a tale when they appear.
Here’s a prominent example I have dealt with before:
In the First Branch of the Mabinogion, the tale shifts quickly, almost randomly, from the main action in the realm of Pwyll, Lord of Dyfed, and the travails of his otherworldly wife, Rhiannon (who, alongside Gwydion and Efnisien, are the most complex and wonderful characters in our canon) to the other side of South Wales entirely. There we find Teyrnon Twf Lliant, the Lord of Gwent. He has a mare whose foals disappear when she gives birth every year. Having had enough of this strangeness, and not wanting to lose more valuable livestock, Teyrnon decides to guard the stables so as to catch the foal thief when the mare next gives birth. That night, an unnamed, undescribed beast comes to take the foal, its long arm reaching in through the window to grab it. Lord Teyrnon cuts off the monster’s arm, causing it to howl as the limb flops onto he floor at his feet. Teyrnon gives chase, but quickly remembers that the stable door is open, so he returns to close it. There, swaddled in a shawl outside the stables, is a baby. The story continues in a far more conventional, mythic fashion.
(For a decent translation - and the beginning and end of the tales - here’s a link)
On telling this part of the tale to a group of children, I was met with the inevitable question:
“What did the monster look like?”
We explored what we already knew from the tale, then imagined aloud what it could have looked like (from gory to gross, fantastical to whimsical), then another question about the tale was asked, and we moved on. Before the session ended, a girl came up to me and asked the sort of question that very clever children like to ask:
“So, what did the monster really look like?”
I answered with the full extent of my understanding:
“You know what? I don’t know. Maybe that’s the point, that we aren’t meant to know… or maybe it’s just been forgotten”.
She went to leave, her mam waiting patiently next to an open car door. But I couldn’t help but call after her:
“Why do you think that we don’t know what the monster looks like?”
She thought for a moment.
“It’s scarier that way”.