Beguiled– At West End Gallery
Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
–Wisława Szymborska, Speech for Nobel Prize in Literature, 1996
I don’t know…
I would guess that I’ve said or written that phrase a couple of hundred thousand times in my life. Or maybe even a million times.
I don’t know, of course.
As years pass, I am constantly fascinated by how little I know despite consciously trying to obtain more knowledge. It turns out the only thing I really know is that there are an awful lot of things out there that I will never know.
That doesn’t make me happy, of course. Who wants to know they’re not as knowledgeable as they once thought they were? But I have learned to live with it and take some comfort in knowing that I am not alone. I don’t think any of us really knows as much as we let on. Oh, some speak with absolute certainty and an air of confidence but that’s just bravado or a simple failure to recognize their lack of knowledge.
Stupid doesn’t recognize stupid.
I do know that.
From personal experience, unfortunately.
So, I cringe a bit now when I spot that arrogant certainty in the declarations coming from myself or others. Then I cast a darkly skeptical eye towards these claims, my own included.
I borrowed most of the few paragraphs above from a post from 2017. If you’re a regular reader you know that I often make that statement– I don’t know— quite often and that absolute certainty runs contrary to my very being.
You probably also know that I often struggle to describe the why and what of my art. Why do I do it? What does it mean?
So many questions and never any real answers. Oh, I try to answer. Over and over, again and again. But it ultimately comes out like a long, extended belch– a lot of noise but nothing of substance.
I wrote in the paragraphs above from 2017 that I had come to accept my lack of knowing and had learned to live with it. That’s true to an extent, but I have learned you never really accept it. I might tell myself I am okay with it but deep down I am still trying to figure things out, trying to find some clue, some insight that exposes the whole of the puzzle to me.
I know I am a fool for trying, for spending days and weeks alone in my studio trying to somehow interpret unanswerable questions by pushing paint into images containing vague symbols that hold little meaning for most people. In the end, I’m okay with that. I wasn’t aware of it at first, but the decision to set out on this fool’s errand was mine alone. It turned out to be my passion and filled in all the emptiness that haunted me through the first half of my life. More than that, it provided an endless source of inspiration.
That might sound like an answer, but it has a lot of open air in it. Like I said, a long, extended belch.
This ends up being a long lead-in to the inspiration for today’s blog, which is that short quote at the top from the late poet Wisława Szymborska. It comes from her speech at the 1996 Nobel Prize ceremonies where she accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have read it several times over the years, every time coming away feeling as though it was written for me, always feeling better about my own uncertainty. It’s a peach of a speech. It evens mentions the perils of certainty that comes with those who have found their passion in being, as she put it, torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues, something we are seeing in real time these days.
Her whole Nobel Prize speech is available online by clicking here. It’s a relatively short speech so it’s worth taking a few moments to read it or, at least, the excerpt below.
I’ve mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself.
When I’m asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
There aren’t many such people. Most of the earth’s inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn’t pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there’s no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.
And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.
At this point, though, certain doubts may arise in my audience. All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.
This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.
–Wisława Szymborska, Speech for Nobel Prize in Literature, 1996
Her line, Fortune’s darlings, always makes me chuckle. Though I often feel that way in getting to live my life doing what I want to do, there are plenty of days when I think Lady Fortune was a little off her game on the day she chose me.
But then again, what do I know?
That’s just another way of saying I don’t know. You got to mix things up every so often. Here’s a song from R&B Queen Ruth Brown with the right title though it might not directly apply to anything written here.
Doesn’t matter– it has a good bluesy vibe for a May morning that is still a little hazy as I write this. Good enough for me.