I don’t know

One of those days with nothing to say and no inclination to say it.  One of those days when I stare over and above the computer screen and out of the window.  One of those days when my head is full of the thoughts that Kier Starmer found too boring.  One of those days when I eat sweetcorn straight from the tin…

I’m (un)comfortably into my sixties now.  I have had many of these days, but somehow I never see them coming.  They just kind of ooze over me in the night.  Today I’ve spent the day tickling around the edges of a recently written play, shuffling around the characters in a just finished book, picking random threads from my life, raking over any number of things that I have never satisfactorily concluded…

I thought that the book and the play were done, but they never are, are they?  It’s impossible to read through anything you’ve ever written without either regretting something that you have said or finding something new that ought to have been said: dropping in new markers and tracing new outcomes.

Sad that you can’t do that with life.  Once said, nothing can ever be unsaid.  Neither apology nor explanation will ever make it go away.  Equally, in real life, it is not possible to go back and paste in the words you know you should have said.  Nothing ever really reaches a satisfactory conclusion.  Every teetering step you take merely knocks over another domino.  By the time you have cobbled together your excuses, the repercussions of your actions have zoomed off over the horizon, and like the roadrunner being chased by an Acme rocket, they will back around before you know it, when they will bite you on the bum.

Sometimes having nothing to say can be the very best thing.  Sometimes…  I am seldom afraid to say “I don’t know” when I really don’t know, but people are prone to interpret that as “I can’t be bothered” or “I don’t care”.  Honestly, if I say that I don’t know, it is genuinely because I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  If I don’t care – really don’t care – I might just say so, but more likely I will say either nothing or, depending on my mood/state of inebriation, something outrageous and irrelevant.  Anything other than “I don’t know…”

If I am asked something simple (what is the square root of nine?) I am allowed to say “I don’t know”, but if the question becomes a mite more tricky (where did we come from/where are we going?) I am suddenly denied the opportunity to aver.  I cannot even point out that nobody knows.  It is unacceptable that I do not have a theory upon the unknowable.  If it is known, I can not know it, but if it is unknown, I am just being coy.  Or ‘smart’.  I am not smart.  I know what I know, and I know that what I don’t know is an awful lot more than that.

There are things that I cannot even begin to think my way through – life, the universe, everything – without finding myself struck dumb.  My brain becomes so preoccupied with the imponderable that basic communication becomes a luxury for which time cannot be spared.  I am a computer with that little whirring wheel, a TV with a never-ending buffer…

So why, I hear you say, are you like that today?  What has sent your brain into this peculiar state of stasis?  Well, I’d love to tell you, but the truth is I just don’t know…