This is one of my favourite set of pictures and each one tells a story. But I am posting them again because today that little girl is twenty - hoots! And she is here in Brighton having managed to get out of Oklahoma before the tornado took out the neighbourhood next to her's - and indeed the cinema she was in last Friday (with a boy) is no more. Goodness, what a dangerous world we live in. And its not just the tornado is it, much more the Lacanian ISR triad of the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real. This reminds me in a way of Rumsfeld's,
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we know we don't know.
However, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us, he forgot the crucial addition to this, which are the 'unknown knowns'; the things we do not know we know. This is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the 'knowledge which does not know itself,' as Lacan would say. And isn't that what the artist eventually produces; the book smarter than the writer, the poem smarter than the poet, the painting which reveals more than the artist knows they know, so that as writers all we can ever do is look back at what our art eventually tells us? Of course, it could be telling us, actually, you are no good at this writing malarkey if only you listened you would save yourself so much time, grief and anguish. You could go on to do something else, perhaps even something worthwhile. And maybe I should... and every now and then I can look over my shoulder and say to my old writer self, 'I remember you.' Only one music for that, I am hearing it as a duet between myself and that writer, about my 'knowledge which does not know itself,' singing, 'do you still have dreams, did they all come true... :
