Ignorance: 3. Ignorance and Inspiration

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

英語 Sväng in, tanka. Alltid till ett hårt fri.

Yes.

Arbetsledare, enhetschef, projektledare, gruppchef, projektingenjör, avdelningssjuk.

Är du chef eller har ett lederansvar? Titel finns ledarna för dig. Ledarna är Sveriges chefsorganisation och det enda facförbundet bara för chefer. Bli medlem du också på ledarna.se.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcast.

Ignorance, in its simplest and perhaps most obvious sense, is a frontier.

This animation represents what scientists think is the brightest object ever found in the universe.

Knowing what they don't know is vital to scientists. It inspires, directs, and focuses research. It engenders humility.

This black hole has about fifteen to twenty billion times the mass of our sun.

Sometimes they may suspect that some things will never be known. Sometimes they even have to recognize how new knowledge can be dangerous.

I'm a researcher who studies AI's impacts on society. And I don't know what's gonna happen in 10 or 20 years, and nobody really does.

does.

But ultimately the aim of the scientist is still to eliminate ignorance. They're like an explorer setting out to fill in all the remaining blank spaces on a map.

There's thought to be about one to two trillion galaxies in our observable universe, which of course we have only measured a small fraction of so far.

But in this episode, I want to turn to insight, beauty and creativity. And here, ignorance is not simply a frontier to be pushed back. Something to eradicate, but instead something to be internalized, harnessed, or even treasured, not simply a deprivation or a challenge, but an enhancement of art and life.

Confusion.

Yeah.

EPISODE three IGNANS and Inspiration

the purity of simply concentrating on the breath. It was a release, a release from the burden of the value of myself, my identity, as being the accumulated things that I had learnt. And here was the precise opposite here was, as it were, direct experience of The ineffable, the incommensurable, the the indescribable.

In the Christian tradition, T. S. Elliot says of a visit to the church at Little Gidding.

You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to pray. Where prayer has been valid And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

In the Buddhist tradition, this retreat, meditation, and absorption in something like non knowledge is what allows you to clarify your perception of the world. Part of this is about gaining some distance from your almost instinctive reactions.

It's a different kind of knowing.

Anni Rinchan Khandro is a nun in the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

about discovering one's inner wisdom to come to an understanding because without that then whatever we discover it always be tainted by our view. For example, if we uh averse to certain things or we have quite a lot of prejudice, jealousy or grasping, hatred, aggression, all these things can sort of blind us.

Enlightenment is about true knowledge, but the Buddha also counsels against focusing on distracting yourself with useless knowledge. And enlightenment does not come exactly because you've acquired a new piece of information.

the method which we use in Buddhism is to study our mind and reflect on the teachings of the Buddha and to see if they ring true to us. But then we also have to meditate on them. And that's where we really get to taste them, to take them on board, not just intellectually, but through an understanding which is not easy to put into words. It's a bit like nothing has changed, but everything is changed.

But the religious perspective is very difficult to internalize in a world which is often about the amassing of facts, about reducing to atoms. And in which the perspective of science seems the only fundamental and true insight. Of course, great scientists like Carlo Rovelli challenge this.

If I look out of the window I see a hill with a green forest.

No.

It's a green velvet uniform. I know that if I walk there I don't see a green velvet uniform, I see trees. And if I look more carefully the trunks with incredible complexity, if I think inside there are cells with a complicated biochemistry and so on so on the atoms the forks whatever Am I going in going in small to more fundamental description? I don't think so.

But the very structure of our brains can prevent us sometimes from seeing the wood from the trees.

We don't often enough distinguish clearly between information or data and knowing. The left hemisphere is capable of knowing, of course, but its knowing is more to do with information and data.

The psychiatrist Ian McGillchrist.

Understanding is being able to put something into a whole context. that gives it meaning and and helps us to understand where it fits into everything else of which we are aware. And I like the fact that in Latin the word intelligence is the word from intellegery to read between.

That's why we need to have continual respect for the plurality of ways in which we gain knowledge. Poetry has truth and knowledge in it. And so we neglect poetry at our cost. Painting has truth within its grasp. I could go on, music the same.

Creativity in art often begins from a different relationship to ignorance and knowledge. Of course, every artist needs knowledge and skills to produce anything at all.

Mozart draws on an immense knowledge of music. Poets need to know a lot of words, and they operate in a tradition, aware that much of what they're doing has, in some sense, been done before. T. S. Eliot says.

But what there is to conquer by strength and submission has already been discovered once or twice or several times, by men whom one cannot hope to emulate. But there is no competition. There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again, and now under conditions that seem unpropitious, and

But creativity cannot be limited only by what is already known, or it would be simply imitation. Instead as the literary critic, Helen Wendler observes.

The poet is putting out tentative feelers towards understanding a world not yet delineated.

And as you examine this process, you realise that art is not simply an act of pushing back ignorance. Ignorance is at every stage of the creative process. Creative artists often begin by adopting the stance of someone who does not know and is prepared to listen. As the songwriter Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy told me, sometimes being actually truly ignorant can be very helpful.

Some of the most original things that I created were at the very beginning of my career. And I'm not annoyed by this. It's an obvious thing that happens basically when you don't really know what you're doing, then you you try things and you just sort of throw stuff at the wall and you go, Well, I like the sound of that, and you don't know why you like it. Because you you haven't really worked that out yet.

I can almost remember my lack of fear. You know, when I was young, I thought, well, that looks like fun, you know, looking at people on top of the pot. And I just started doing it and I didn't know whether I was doing it right. I was just trying to sound like m you know, my favourite band. And you always fell short in that pursuit. And that was really useful. Whenever you fell short, you'd come up with something much more interesting and much more you.

I find now it's much harder to sort of really get stuck into writing and be excited about it because I have accidentally learnt how to write songs.

Sometimes we all find the benefit of putting ourselves in a position of ignorance. The Dutch philosopher Rick Peel.

We have it because it's quicker, it's efficient. And um so you might think, yes, uh let's remove the ignorance, let's consult it. But that bit of knowledge comes with certain kinds of ignorance. That's a tricky thing. So imagine that I put my phone away And say, let you know, let's try to find this out by myself. I walk the streets or the meadows and find my way. And if I do so, I remember objects better. I have different sensory experiences. I'm not looking at my phone all the time, right?

In another way, the travel journalist John Hatt told me that he gets his best photos within two or three days of arriving in a new place. After he's been there a few weeks, he is desensitised. He ceases to notice or see as clearly. Neohannan achieved something similar through a different route.

Many musicians and songwriters will tell you that you often buy a new instrument and immediately you write a song or two.

Simply because you're sort of in love with playing this new thing that you've discovered. You know, with the classical regime of of learning your instrument inside and out and practicing and practicing for thousands of hours. It is a totally different mindset to that of the songwriter. In a way, the more that you learn your instrument, the more it sort of pushes out the possibility for imagination

Ignorance brings something knowledge cannot bring.

The first blush of first love, it's all about ignorance. Part of the massive excitement of it is the You're only sort of seeing the tip of the iceberg with this person and you're wondering just how much you've got to learn and how much to know about them. It's just tremendously exciting.

Sometimes the artist is very knowledgeable, but does not want to be restricted by a certain kind of knowledge.

I had to give a talk at the Royal Academy the other day and I said, you know, I'm n I don't feel that I'm an intellectual I don't want to defend my position by being able to talk about a genealogy of artists whose work I have, as it were, climbed on the shoulders of.

Anthony Gormley's sense that it can help to approach a subject without knowing too much about it was clear even to TS Elliot, who almost more than anyone else had insisted on art as relying on hard work, tradition, and deep knowledge, but who also says

The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies. For the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.

But it's not simply that the work of art can get its start through escaping knowledge about the world. The art is also inspired and shaped by drives, desires, fears in our unconscious minds. Places which are by definition not part of our knowledge. In the words of the psychologist Josh Cohen,

There is a core of your experience that defies certain knowledge. Asking who you are and why demands a potentially limitless effort to imagine yourself. The mute spot in your interior is the very source of your creative life.

The artist can then, having prepared, enter a stage of incubation, which is not about the acquisition of knowledge at all. This stage, Ian McGilchrist says, can only be impeded by the conscious effort and introspection. Much as it does a plant no good to keep digging it up to see how its roots are grown.

One of the important things in creativity is to stop the I've got it, I've gasped it, now I know what it is. Attitude of the left hemisphere stopping the process prematurely. creative art but also creativity in terms of thinking needs to have a way of guarding against too quick a collapse into this is what it is.

All creativity is a maintenance of childlike openness to experience.

I see lots. branches.

My producer's eight year old daughter loves to watch nature documentaries. She wants to be an artist and a conservationist when she grows up. She captures something of what Anthony Gormley describes.

And this is not about acquired competence. that relationship between life and art has to be felt, has to be lived.

I often feel the bark of trees. If it's autumn I hear the crunching of leaves as I walk on them. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok

Good artists I think they are as curious as anyone would be about things that other human beings have made, but they're also open to Well, the creativity that exists everywhere around us, you know, in the way that clouds form, in the way that a frond of a of a fern unfurls.

It feels like an interesting place and makes me feel little happy.

The final phase of creative illumination flowers out of the unconscious quite suddenly, again, unwilled. I sensed this in a small way with my first book, The Places in Between, where half of it was written in only six weeks in a reverie in which I saw no one, wrote all day, dreamt about the book at night, and woke up, writing about it.

The right hemisphere's knowing is more through experience. So there are different kinds of knowing and I think that the kind of knowing that comes from experience is particularly valuable, but they complement one another.

When one hears genius trying to explain their artistic success, One begins to realize just how much of this is unknown or unknowable.

Mozart finds another way of expressing how he arrives at his symphonies.

How do I write? I really can't tell you any more than this, because I myself don't know any more about it, and can't get any further with it. I see it all in my mind's eye in a glance. Much as one sees a beautiful picture, or a pretty woman. And I don't hear it sequentially in my imagination as it will have to be later on, but as it were all at once.

And the final relationship between the world and the artwork is not exactly one of knowledge either. In what sense does a piece of classical music know something? Ian McGill Christie.

There are things that are powerful and important. For example, a a very great piece of music is not irrational, it's just that reason can't encompass it and can't help us with it. Similarly, uh most people experience love or perhaps uh fewer people these days experience some kind of a a faith in the transcendent or in the divine or the sacred.

In creative art, ignorance is not simply a problem to be solved. It's something to be acknowledged, adapted to, and harnessed. in the way that we might come to know and harness the strength and weaknesses of our own body. But it can also finally be something which can be valued and treasured for its own sake.

as I've got older, I become much more aware of my ignorance. But the other side of that is a greater sense of wonder.

The very ancient idea that philosophy begins in wonder is, I think, of utmost importance.

Sometimes the urge to reduce and classify a phenomenon scientifically can destroy its beauty. Explaining a sunset as the interplay of light and air can make it seem on the page and to someone who's never seen a sunset identical to every other optical phenomenon in the sky, from a cloud to a rainbow. But in doing so we lose the wonder of this sunset. on this particular evening.

I got out at Regents Park and I I walked up to a tree where my wife and I when we'd first met, we met and we sat under this tree and it was one of the most important moments in both our lives.

The theologian Martin Palmer

And I went and took a photograph of that tree just now and sent it to it. I don't even know what species of tree it was. But I know what it means to me and what it means to her.

Fundamentality is a relative thing.

Carlo Rivelli.

For somebody more fundamental means more close to my heart, more close to truth, more scientific, more sociological. I mean, you can take fundamentality from all perspectives. And I don't think that one perspective is better than the others. I think that they each add levels of understanding. Sometimes these perspectives seem in contradiction with one another. but when they do this raises our curiosity because that points to something we're not understanding

By wonder, however, we mean something quite different from a temporary problem of ignorance, which we will go on to fix.

Yes, the treats wonder is just a matter of puzzlement.

What's the difference between puzzlement and wonder?

Puzzlement suggests there's a problem that if you're bright enough you can solve, and then you won't have to worry about it any longer. Wonder is saying I've no idea what's going on, and I know I'm never going to catch up with it. But let's just open up and swim with that tide for the moment.

As Rowan Williams suggests, wonder evokes our emotion when we encounter something that matters profoundly, even when we can't fully comprehend it. At times precisely because we can't.

Words strain. and sometimes break under the burden, under the tension, Slide, pass. decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still.

This is part of what I feel climbing in the winter in the Alps. Simply taking in the immense, intimidating facts of a mountain, and remembering guiltily how I live my life forgetting it. But of course it takes a creative artist to capture this. To express in the words of the critic Helen Wendler, the narrowness of the way in which people inhabit the earth. She quotes Wallace Stevens.

How utterly we have forsaken the earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few to consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes and barrens and wilds. It still dwarfs and terrifies and crushes.

It is something which the physicist Carlo Rivelli sees as the essence of lasting love.

Perhaps when uh after twenty or thirty years uh some of the excitement uh seems to be gone, we make the mistake of thinking that we know everything.

about that.

I think it's again a respect for ignorance. So I think we should be aware that we live all our life in this space between uh total ignorance, which is bad, and total certainty, which is not something we can get to, and we live in between and that's fine.

I would suggest perhaps that this is not just fine, it is where we should be. And this is an insight shared not just by artists but by the mathematician Paul Lockhart, who writes To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration, to be in a state of confusion. Not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don't understand what your creature is up to. To have a breakthrough idea, to be frustrated as an artist.

The sheer sense of not quite knowing what to say because we're overwhelmed by where we are and what we see.

Rowan Williams.

And it'll take us a while to let the words catch up, or the ideas catch up. I think that's the positive side, that's why This unknowing. as described by some contemplative writers in the Christian tradition and other traditions as a luminous darkness, a bright darkness.

So ignorance is everywhere. in beauty, insight and creativity. in the state of mind of the artist, in their creative impulse, their process, their subject matter, and their production, In their own understanding of all these things and our reaction as an audience to them. If ignorance is a limit of knowledge, Here it operates in many different forms, like a god appearing in different avatars, sometimes as mystery, sometimes as veil, sometimes as the unconscious, the esoteric, the unclassifiable.

is not so much a mystical wonder or a creative spur, but a brutal inevitability, and around which we need to design public policy.

The Long History of Ignorance is written and presented by me, Rory Stewart, and produced by Dan Tierney. It is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

Hi guys, I'm Rylan and this is How to Be in the Spotlight from BBC Sounds. It's the podcast where together we're gonna hear what it's like to be thrust into the public eye by those who've lived to tell the tale.

In this moment.

Podcast, I'm going to be joined by twelve fantastic guests who are going to share how they've learned to navigate the

Pucks.

pressures and pitfalls of fame. This is Rylan, how to be in the spotlight.

Iff hjälper mycket, även på jobbet. Vi vet att ingen bransch är den andra lik och hjälper dig med rätt försäkring för just ditt företag. Boka gratis rådgivning på if.se.

Snälla, snälla, sluta! Snälla, snälla!

Du är dum i huvudet! Fan asså!

Det blir i alla fall inte värre än så här. Ibland är ett nej, det finaste du kan ge. Systembolaget annorlunda av en anledning.