What I Don't Know

by R. P. Futrelle

People who can and could write, don't. They know they don't know much, they have nothing to contribute, or maybe not enough, not enough to make the grade. It's probably better that they don't know the secret of the great writers: Great writers write about what they don't know. This opens up a huge range of ideas, topics, narratives, events, facets, details. There's hardly anything that doesn't qualify as something you don't know. You know that.

The two types of things that I don't know are things that I didn't used to know but know now, and things that I really don't know. Your goal may be to learn stuff, to carry a candle that cuts through the darkness of your ignorance. That's no way to proceed. First of all, you'll never learn that much anyway. Second, knowing the facts is limiting. It ties you down. It gets in the way. Don't confuse me with the facts.

As for what I didn't know, I lived in blissful ignorance. This is an awkward notion. You're not blissful about the things you're ignorant of, you're blissful in spite of them, you're wrongly blissful, you're mistaken. But it is elating. You have no reservations, no doubts, no concerns, because you just don't know.

As a child, it started early for me, with strings. I tied strings from my bedpost to my chair, from my dresser draw handles to my closet door handles. But the strings sagged too much, even under the slightest weight. The favorite weight was not a weight at all, but a little metal cart, made from Erector set parts, with a brass Erector set pulley that ran along a string, a gondola car, like a few I had seen in the Movietone News -- they seemed to be in the Alps or somewhere Out West. Started at the high end, if the pulley didn't fall off the string, the contraption would zoom down the string and a produce a great droop in the string, so much so that it hardly proceeded much past the middle of the string. Now it's not that I didn't understand why this drooping occurred. Ignorance is more profound than this. It's that it didn't register as a thing that happened at all. What did happen was that the poor cart wouldn't, couldn't get to the other end. This was especially hard on me when I tried to send a cart from my window to a tree outside along a tight string, as tight as I could make it. It never got to the tree, it quickly found its low point, creating a nice V shape which it punctuated by its slightly vibrating presence, only moved afterwards by the wind. The great failure was the failure to get the little things that that I put in my cart delivered to the tree, where I could climb and retrieve them. The cart was my messenger, my escape, my road to freedom and adventure, to the birds and squirrels, branches and leaves, quieter than inside inside the house where the yelling frightened me.

You can divide nothing into parts, and you get more nothing. We can analyze our ignorance this way. There's this nothing, another little nothing, a square or round nothing, they're all nothing. Of course, if I tightened the string things would work. That never worked. That's the try harder nothing. I could lighten the cart, and I tried, but then the pulley was the heavy part, so it wouldn't stay on the string. So another part of the universe of solutions, an alternate future of a perfect weightless world, was denied me. I would be forever ignorant of these things that could not be achieved. The nothing of unachievableness. I could make the string steeper, from an even higher place to an even lower place. That got me nothing, because it changed the rules. The alternate nothing. The most insidious nothing is the relegation to nothing of all things bewildering. The discounted nothings.

Now I know that there was even more that I didn't know then than I ever suspected then. String is elastic, it can stretch. That's where the droop came from. But I knew that the droop just was, it didn't come from anywhere at all. I knew that rubber bands were elastic, the only elastic things that existed, all I could stretch. Any fool knew that a string couldn't be stretched. It wasn't a matter of elasticity at all. It never entered my head. The nothing of the empty thought.

A book could be written on the things I didn't know about strings. As I grew older I realized that an encyclopedia could be written about the things I didn't know about strings. But now don't think for a minute that these books would be full of actual facts about strings. If you think this, you've again mistaken the writer's craft. The books would be full of fascinating stories and information about strings. Did you know that Leonardo da Vinci put strings in his shoes to irritate his feet so he would stay awake longer to invent and draw all the more?

Matters of the heart are the things that people say they come to understand as they grow. Great authors write compelling pieces about the heart, about the human condition. But of course they only write about what's in their head and all else is based on a happily profound ignorance of what's inside others'. I will tell you about a woman who worked all her life on a fishing boat around the tempestuous waters of the south Chile coast. She began it to help her husband. They had failed to have any children and working near him everyday was some compensation for not having children around her every day, for having around her nothing, in the way of children. Her knowledge of children was nothing. Nothing had come from her body. Nothing cried in their crib and was quieted by nursing at her breast. Her memory of herself at age one or two was nothing. She repaired the nets. They were coarse and tore at her hands and the salt stung her skin until it became so tough and leathery that it bothered her no more than it bothers a fish. You live on the sea and you can think like a fish and feel like a fish. You know nothing of the mind of a fish, but you know that you believe you know, though sometimes you know that you may not know their mind. You know the birds will guide you on the sea. They know where the fish are and you know where the birds are. The netlines react to the catch. She could see it in the way the lines ran over the stern. She could feel the tautness of the lines. She knew more than I ever knew about strings. Those strings held her livelihood. But she knew nothing of elasticity. If she thought her lines stretched she would have worried.

Neither she nor her husband nor I knew of the sine, that angle-based, mathematical, geometrical, trigonometrical thing called the sine. The sine is central to an explanation of tautness and the droop, the big V. The sine is what makes the strings on a violin sound their tone, or a piano, or a harp. The sine underlies the beauty of those sounds. The sine is a way of saying that if a string is straight, it's easy to push it sideways. A nothing of push will V it in the middle. We have problems with the sine. It is too exact. We think that because it's mathematical, we know next to nothing about it. But no great writer would pause for a moment in explaining to you how the sine is involved in peeling an apple or how it played a crucial role in starting the First World War, not to mention the incident between Chopin and George Sand about the vase on his piano. That lead to protracted arguments about the sine and then, sadly, to his early demise.

Much ado about nothing, that's nothing, he's a nothing, nothing to worry about. Indeed we do need to worry about nothing, because when we see nothing to worry about, it's because we don't see what we should worry about, and we'd better worry about that. We know nothing worth speaking of, we know next to nothing, we might as well know nothing, and we've got a lot to learn. Writers need to be cautious about writing too much about nothing. It can be overwhelming.