Misknowing
On absences waiting to be activated
The other night I was walking down Victoria Avenue and saw a tree that was wider than it was tall. I wondered how it had grown like that and why I’d never noticed this weird thing in daylight. I decided that the way the roots grew in the riverbank had something to do with it. Under the next streetlight, I saw that the wide tree was nearly all a cloud passing in front of it. The revelation was as banal as the mirage, but in a few steps a whole nexus of non-knowledge formed and disbanded.
For years I thought that sleeper agents were oblivious to their missions. That they were as deeply asleep to their status as the citizens they lived among, until that one fateful moment of ‘activation’ triggered by a word or phrase engineered into their spy subconscious. It must have originated from a social subtext because I lived with a friend who shared this niche misknown. Em and I worried that one of us might be triggered non-consensually and disappear into an MI6 operation; we would try words and phrases and then sigh in relief. There was always a vague sense that something was amiss in this absurd ritual, a ritual that disbanded the day we realised our mistake. In moments of realisation like this, I wonder how many ‘wide trees’ I am harbouring. How many holes in my knowledge have been ornamented by confirmation bias and are now part of my accepted truth, like the trace of a double hole punch, photocopied onto fresh A4?
Clarice Lispector once spoke about a similar reification. In her case it was unknowns rather than misknowns (two terms which can only exist in the past tense where they come to be): “I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me… The things I do not know constitute my truth.” She speaks of absences so striking they become presences. When an absence is neutralised into a presence it can hide among the millions of truths we have ‘understood.’ In the latter half of the 19th century, sentimental poetry helped construct America in this way. Those ‘virgin territories’ where states had not yet unified were absorbed into the nation under the poetic trope of the American family: an empty chair by the fireside.
The things we miss-know are equally present, themselves clueless little ‘sleeper-agents’ lying dormant. Then one word reveals that they have been absences all along. In year three my class went on a school trip to the Prime Meridian. My classmate and I straddled that metal ribbon that signifies time on the tarmac of Greenwich Park with our matching patent Clarks. She gestured over my shoulder and said “So then, how are we both looking at North?”, and a moment later, more tentatively, “Because North is just the way you’re facing right?” In year nine my class went on a school trip to the Prime Meridian and I stood in the same stance with a different girl, now both wearing black air forces. I said, “I’ve seen enough of the Prime Meridian, I want to stand like this but over the equator.” She looked at me, with the same expression – the dawning of a misknown – and asked “How would we stand like this over a river of lava?”
The complexities of the Prime Meridian reveal two characteristics of misknowns as I understand them. Firstly, as imposters, they do not mature along with our wider knowledge. The river of lava may have come from an illustration in a forgotten childhood book, or an imagistic headline playing on the radio at nursery. From that origination, its presence was too engrained to be overturned later by her adolescent brain. Secondly, absurd misknowns carry shame, although not enough to give them away. Something is not quite right. (How could Cold War surveillance have operated on such chance word usage?)
But what of misknowns that are massaged in by their alignment with common sense? Errors included in the sum of one’s parts because they increase its sense, or at least its harmony. This category contains ‘eggcorns’, words or phrases that are misheard and reinterpreted by so many people in the same way that an alternative is codified. Examples include ‘cold slaw’ for ‘coleslaw’, ‘old timers disease’ for Alzheimer’s, and ‘all intensive purposes.’ Eggcorns become commonplace because they are equally or more plausible than the original. The same is true of The Mandela Effect but those communal experiences seem too smug to compare. It is the personal idiosyncrasy of a misknown that can make it preferable to truth. If unknowns/misknowns are absences reified and then recognised, a Mandela effect is granted presence yet again after this cycle by collective insistence.
The most durable misknown of my life thus far was elegant enough to stick for fourteen years. The term ‘L’espirit d’escalier’ describes a witty remark that comes to mind too late and was coined by Diderot when, flummoxed by a moment of dinner party conversation, the ideal retort presented itself hours later as he made his exit. In this case, the mansion was of the ‘hotel particulier’ style where hosts entertain in first-floor reception rooms; to be on the staircase is to be through with farewells and past the point of acceptable return.
This is a nuanced idea to communicate in a primary school assembly. I now understand that the headmaster (breathlessly running up and down the gymnasium’s stairway) was trying to communicate lessons worth teaching a seven-year-old: be honest, be clear, no one likes a smart-arse. His demonstration likely informed my misknown, which placed the staircase itself at the centre of an allegory for failed communication (perhaps, as Lispector’s reference to ‘virgin territory’ would also suggest, spatialisation lends credence to knowledge holes). Until last year, the staircase spirit described a far sadder communication failure for me: the moment when two people realise, with the lurching panic of a misstep that they had misunderstood each other. Rather than standing ‘eye to eye’ they have been stranded on different stairs, or different planes of meaning, all along, and too much time has passed to rectify the discrepancy. I still think my version has more to it and is in some way more accurate to Diderot’s term than the experience that brought it into being.
Misknowns are wrongly filled absences. Often planted in childhood, they can be lent a naïve wisdom and, like an eggcorn word, feel more correct than their corresponding truth. In Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad ‘We Are Seven’ (1798) we see all of these facets play out in a subjective misknown. A speaker comes across a little girl who tells him she is one of seven siblings. Two live in the town, two have gone to sea, and “two of us in the church-yard lie”(21). The speaker insists “Then ye are only five” (36), “those two are dead” (65) but is met unwaveringly with the stanza ending “we are seven!” (69). She is wrong and right, but more so right.
