Understanding not necessary
Me and Jimmy left the cinema and he said to me, “Wow. Do you remember the bit with the dancing unicorn in a tutu? What was that about?” I paused, thinking, at what point in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive did that happen? Looking confused I asked him, “When was that?” He said, “It didn’t but it certainly could have happened, and you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.”
We loved the film. I still do. It’s Lynchian to the Lynchian Nth degree. Did everything make perfect sense to me? Probably not, which is probably why I liked it so much. It didn’t need to make sense. It’s a ride. I remember during my MA at Brunel, Tibor Fischer saying, “Just go with it.” And sometimes that’s what you find yourself doing. I’m currently re-reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, in preparation for the series coming out later this year. I don’t think I’ve ever fully understood everything that’s going on. As a companion, to see if it becomes less confusing, I started listening to the audio book. And I never do that. Listening to someone reading it actually ruins it a bit for me. One thing I found was that the voices, of the protagonist, and every other character for that matter, took me out of the world I was imagining, and into the world of someone reading the novel to me. This is an issue with audio books for me.
It’s only in reading books that you see the world how you want to see it. You can’t go completely off script, but you do have to use your imagination more, particularly when it comes to characters, how they speak and how they interact with the world around them. There’s a noticeable difference between when you read a book and when you have one read to you. When hearing someone else read a book I feel like I’m hearing someone else’s interpretation of it, not my own.
Will I understand Neuromancer any more than I did on the first read through? Maybe not. But I will enjoy exploring it again. That’s something about art, and in particular reading and theatre and opera, those being the main culprits, that people should embrace. Not understanding is fine. When you start from a point of view that you’re not going to try something because you don’t understand it, then… it’s fucking sad.
It’s a byproduct of education, where you “study” Shakespeare, instead of enjoying it. You get forced to read it out loud in front of class and you have no idea what you’re saying. A friend of mine told me that he can’t handle all the “thee and thou” stuff. I told him, “You might want to steer clear of Thor then. Chris Hemsworth only speaks in “thee and thou” for most of the first film. I think that school makes you feel dumb for not understanding what’s going on. I guess it wouldn’t make much of a class if the teacher says, “Can anyone explain this to me?” and the class looks blankly back and then the teacher says, “That’s fine. I don’t actually understand everything either. But it sounds good, innit?”
We apply to music a principle we don’t apply to other arts. We feel the music, a sense of what it is, before we understand what’s being said. We understand an attitude, a mood, a feeling. Anyone who doesn’t like Shakespeare should be forced to watch David Tennant doing the “To be or not to be” speech. Even if you don’t have a full understanding of what’s being said, you certainly get a feeling that he’s in some melancholic funk. Also, this is the twenty-first century, if you like the sound of it, Google it and find out what’s being said. I say this with caution though, keeping in mind that I once looked up my favourite parts of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly and found that what was being sung did not live up to my lofty expectations. All that power and passion, saying something that I imagined to be the most important thing you could express through song, and it turns out that she’s just telling you what her name is. Sometimes knowing more helps you enjoy more and sometimes it doesn’t.
Interestingly, there are a lot more people who would listen to music, never knowing the lyrics of a song but listen anyway but they’d never touch Shakespeare or opera because they don’t understand it. Yes. I’ll put it out there. I’ll put Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech in the same conversation as Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit.”
You do have to think, when writing, how much you explain and how much you trust the reader. As an example, I could choose to write that, “Tolstoy, the Russian novelist who lived from 1828 to 1910, and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, used to say that manual labour was good for the soul.” I’d prefer to write, “Tolstoy used to say that manual labour is good for the soul.” Would anyone be put off reading that sentence if they had no idea who Leo Tolstoy was? I could say, “Someone once said that manual labour is good for the soul.” That way I get out of being condescending to people who know their nineteenth-century Russian novelists. And those that don’t know who Tolstoy was, they can know that someone once said it. But it’s part of it that it’s a novelist who said it, that he’s a philosophical thinker, someone you might not associate with manual labour. If I said my mate Barry the brickie says that manual labour is good for the soul, you’d probably say, “Of course he did. He spends his days labouring on a building site.” Also, Barry the brickie would probably see it as a way of making money, in a way that Tolstoy the philosopher and novelists wouldn’t.
What we have to go with here is honesty. I know who Tolstoy is. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I never expected to know anything about Russian literature. Russian lit wasn’t my thing for a very long time. My bookshelf used to be a lot more “pop culture,” more so than anything else. It took me some years to get into reading Russian literature and classics. I think I must have had them pitched to me in such a way that they seemed appealing. So, that means it probably was not through school. Because I would naturally refer to the stuff I know casually, I’m going to do so. Not to be aloof, not to prove I know something you don’t. Although, if I did know something you don’t then surely that too is good. What’s wrong with learning stuff?
I know that there’s a lot of stuff I’ll never get my head around. Maths, Science, Languages, dancing (I swear I was born without a sense of rhythm), there’s loads of ignorance in my life. I’m not saying I’m proud of any of it or that I never wish things were different, but we need to get over our ignorance being something to be ashamed of. Maybe we embrace our ignorance. Maybe instead of seeing ignorance as a bad thing, we reframe it as the starting point for all curiosity. It’s a point I wish I’d made when I went to see Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” Keeping with what I’ve written here, do I need to say, “Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play ’An Enemy of the People’, written in 1882?” Nah. You’d have Googled it.
I actually went to see the play because I love Ibsen plays. The fact that I grew up on Doctor Who and Doctor Who actor Matt Smith was playing the lead actually had nothing to do with it. In this particular version of the play, they had a really cool part where the house lights were turned on, and the audience were asked to participate and give their responses to various ideas in the play. The town hall meeting scene is turned into a real life town meeting. The debate centred on the central plot of the play in which Matt Smith’s Dr. Thomas Stockmann has discovered that the town's medicinal baths are contaminated. His brother, the mayor, suppresses the findings to avoid economic ruin. Stockmann's crusade to expose the truth makes him an enemy of the people. It pits morals against money. It’s surprisingly relevant to the Covid years where money was often deemed more important than human life.
Everyone in the theatre was obviously of the mindset that Matt Smith was right. Not only does the play lead you in that direction, but if you know your Ibsen, and you’ve forked out a hundred quid to see the play, then you’re likely to be leaning towards the Doctor being right. Or you’ve completely misunderstood the play but still like it anyway. So, the questions and points raised were not that revealing. And that’s why I wish I’d piped up.
When asked, “How many of you would take a financial loss to do the morally right thing?” A few hands went up. I’d argue that it shouldn’t fall on us to make that morally right move. In the play it’s the mayor who should be deciding and doing the right thing. When we were asked if we feel that “people get the politicians they deserve” a lot of people agreed that this was the case. A central issue to all of this was – are people stupid to elect these “politicians we deserve?” That was my window of opportunity that I never took. I wish I’d put my hand up, been handed the microphone and said: “Yes. We are stupid and we should embrace that. We should recognise when we’re ignorant and respond accordingly and maybe as a consequence, we don’t feel so stupid. Do I know whether or not the town’s medicinal baths should be closed down, costing many of the townspeople their livelihood? No. On that matter I am ignorant. I’m not a scientist. If there was a disease killing people in the twenty-first century, we’ll call it Covid, do I know what’s best for us all? No. But I can ask questions. I’d ask, what do scientists say? What do politicians say? Do either of them have good reasons to lie? Who do I trust more? What does Barry the brickie say? What does someone who’s dying of water contamination in the play or Covid in real life have to say about the matter? I could ask all these questions and still be stupid on the whole matter. I accept that. Staying on brand as ever, I’d say that I’d listen to whoever has the best case to put to us. I know I’m wrong here, but I can’t help but think that no one is ever clever enough and we’d all be better off if we admit that more.
I naturally pick the words stupid and ignorant and dumb, because I wanted to turn those criticisms on their heads. Most of what I know about Descartes’ philosophy comes from the excellent Mark Steel lectures, where comedian Mark Steel makes historical matters damn funny and informative. This is Cartesian thinking for you. His idea that everyone will have heard at some point in their lives is the one that goes, “I think therefore I am.” I’d never stopped to think what it all meant. I probably had it down as – I’m alive and therefore, I think. Or more basic: “Thinking gooood.” What it’s really all about is the idea that the only thing we can be sure about is that because we are thinking we must exist. This is your blank slate to start from. Everything else we question. Thank you Mark Steel for explaining.
Would a modern-day René Descartes come up with, “I like being dumb because that’s how I learn stuff?”
Sadly, not knowing something, not understanding something, does not get met with encouragement. Take this for example: There was class debate and I remember thinking how the class had drifted into semantics and the debate was becoming pointless. The discussion was about how the author had used the word “different” and what they meant by that. I chipped in with the following words. “Perhaps instead of different they meant differing.” There was a pause. Then the class laughed. I remember one girl saying, “Duh. They’re the same thing.” But they’re not. I didn’t have the words back then. I could have done with a prop too. Bananas would have done the trick. I could have held up two bananas that looked identical and said, “Here are two different bananas. They look the same but they are two different bananas.” Then I’d swap one of the bananas for a mouldy one. And proudly announce, “Now these are two different bananas, and you will also notice that they differ a lot. Notice how the word different and differ work in this respect.” And then I’d eat one of the bananas and hopefully I don’t accidentally eat the mouldy one and ruin the whole cockiness of the moment.
I feel that there is an environment that teaches us to shoot down anything that might seem dumb. The teacher could have stepped in and said, and would have known instantly, that different and differing can be two separate, although closely related things. If we start with the acknowledgement that in ways we are all dumb then we’d rid ourselves of the instinct to shy away from anything that we don’t understand. Dumb is our default starting point.
We’re a long way off where we could be. People think it’s ok not to understand what’s being sung, but they still feel dumb for not knowing what goes on in a book or a play, or for that matter, anything they deem as clever. Usually, it’s nowhere near as clever as you think it is anyway. Like so many things it often comes down to speaking the same language and, even if you’re good at languages, you’re never going to speak them all.
Reading Russian literature, understanding what’s going on in a David Lynch film or understanding William Gibson’s Neuromancer, they are experiences. The level of thinking you put in is optional and some things you get and some you don’t. And even the stuff that experts will tell you to consider as absolute, other experts will disagree with. You may as well go with it and read or watch like no one else is reading and watching it with a better understanding than you. Earlier I said, “embrace your ignorance.” That doesn’t mean celebrate it or ignore it. The best example I can give is this: I was reading Wuthering Heights on the tube. It’s a book by one of the Bronte sisters. Maybe one day I’ll remember without checking that it was Emily Bronte. A woman sitting opposite asked me if I’d read it before. I hadn’t. She said, “I envy you. I’d love to read it again for the first time.” That’s a million miles from, “Duh. How have you got to your age and never read one of the greatest works of literature?” It's a celebration of the possibility that lies ahead when you don't yet understand. Don’t worry about understanding. Have the experience.
Where next?
→ If you want to explore why great culture belongs to everyone, not just the people who already understand it, The Simpsons did not make me part of the intellectual liberal elite
→ If you want to stay with the idea that some experiences are richer when we stop trying to control or explain them, Life is not a pop video
→ If you want to explore what happens when art affects us long before we fully understand why, The Noise Coming From Philippe
If the writing resonates, stay with it.