Shift
A few months ago I came across a passage from a book written by a Brazilian writer talking about ignorance in a very fresh way.
Unfortunately, the title of said book wasn't given by the person who recited it (an actor), and even though I looked for it it was nowhere online.
So... I'll post my next favourite from her. I like the idea contained in the quotation I couldn't find, which turns ignorance on its head, seeing the potential in it. (From memory, it is something like "knowledge is always limited; not knowing is limitless."
How many of us can honestly claim to not have wished for the opportunity to read a book, listen to a piece of music, or see a film or painting, all over again, for the first time? Only ignorance makes the first time possible.
“I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.”
Clarice Lispector
There is a certain, specific kind of liberation in the act of shifting one's perception or body in order to look at the same thing and see something new.
The idea that prejudice comes from ignorance makes the ears of reason perk up in alert suspicion. I think this idea is incomplete. It's maimed or badly articulated. To me, prejudice comes not from ignorance, but from incomplete knowledge of a certain thing; it comes from failure to dig deep enough, or failure to understand. Not understanding and not knowing are two different concepts to me. There are many things one can know about or of, and yet not understand, not grasp the core of what makes the thing itself.
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I spent ten minutes gazing at her and realised, again, what I wanted and what I had to do. I was going to abandon narrative. All my life, ever since my earliest childhood that I could remember, I had wanted things to have a purpose, for actions to be connected, for one thing to cause another. When I was little I would walk from room to room describing my actions in the third person- 'Now she opens the door. She walks into the room. She sits down on the sofa and turns on the television.' I was not picky about the gender and I could just as well do 'Now he gets out of bed and puts on his slippers. His nose is a little colder than the rest of his body. He has an itch just behind his left ear so he scratches it with the nails he has bitten too close to the finger. His mother has told him not to bite his nails but he doesn't care.' As a teenager I would sit for hours in my room finding the motivations for each of my classmates, like some grand method actor moving to the director's chair- a habit I had not entirely given up, though I preferred now to freeze the world into different still pictures- and describe them. I saw now that I preferred this because they did not need to be narrated- like this lacemaker in front of me they could just be. And so could I, I hoped, if I could stop making the people round me into supporting characters in the drama of my life. I want to stop playing roles.
I wanted a world without narrative, and a world without backstory. I wanted to be able to touch Miller's shoulder without thinking of the others who had touched it before me and without thinking he was thinking of them either.
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