Fractals

True wisdom comes in knowing that you know nothing - Socrates

“Write what you know.”

This is the cardinal phrase driven into the head of any and every prospective writer anywhere. You read it in countless writing help books, hear it in seminars, classrooms. So what do you do when you feel like you really know nothing?

That may be my biggest shortcoming as a writer. I don’t feel like I know anything.

Friends and family reading that last sentence are probably scrunching their brows in confusion. I’m not a stupid person. I’m very well-read, have a fairly comprehensive vocabulary, and a wide range of familiarity in a great many subjects. I’ve got a logical mind, and can engage in critical thinking. I can converse intelligently with others, and am generally open-minded enough to accept and understand opposing opinions. But that doesn’t necessarily equate to knowing anything, in my book.

I don’t know where it comes from, or what it might mean, but I don’t feel as if I’m any kind of authority on any given topic. I occasionally find myself refraining from mentioning a contrary opinion out of a sense of fear that I might be wrong, and someone else in the conversation might be right. Maybe it’s just a general sense of insecurity such as I have in other areas of my self-view.

I’d like to think, though, that it stems from the notion that we can never really be completely versed in anything, because there is always something new to learn. I’d like to know everything- there is just so much about life, the universe, and everything to absorb- and so I jump around from topic to topic, learning a little bit here and there, taking in as much as I can until I find something else that intrigues me and I break away to find out about that. A Jack-Of-All-Trades, Master-Of-None, in parlance.

It’s both blessing and curse. In regards to my writing, more the latter than the former. When I sit down to write, I get far too caught up in what I don’t know about a given topic- say, a historic fiction piece- and worry that because I don’t know enough, my writing will come across as incomplete, or unconvincing, or just flat-out anachronistic. Thus, I stall.

When it comes to people…

I love learning about other people in much the same way as I love learning about history, or archaeology, or language. To meet someone new- to learn how they think, how they behave, what they’ve done and experienced- is one of the singular joys of life. To be able to see yourself in them, or to see things about them that you aspire to become; to see things in others that you are glad that you don’t have within you- well, I’ve always liked puzzles, and people can be fascinating riddles to explore.

Tonight I learned something about a friend that evoked mixed emotions within me. She’s a relatively new friend- someone I met about 6 months ago or so. I initially approached her because I was attracted to her, and wanted to see if there was any potential for romance between us. We went out a couple of times and had a lot of fun, learned a lot about one another. When I brought up my attraction to her, she wanted to just remain friends, and thus we’ve been since. That’s the gist of things, at any rate.

She’s told me that she had a wild streak in her past on more than one occasion, and I’ve heard the same from several friends of hers. Nothing much more specific than that, but enough to intrigue me for a variety of reasons- my thirst for knowledge and my continued attraction to her.

Thus, when I found out recently that we had a mutual acquaintance in common- one who knew her in her “wild days”- I thought I’d see if I could learn something about that period in her life. Before he cut himself off because he felt self-conscious discussing the matter with his girlfriend standing next to him, he told me that she used to have be something of an exhibitionist and was known to strip at parties.

I felt then as I do now writing this: titillated at the thought of my friend stripping; shocked because the girl I know seems so much more reserved and maybe even a little uptight than that; and dirty both for feeling intrigued and for prying into her life by asking someone else about her.

At what point does the acquisition of knowledge become unjustified? Can we only be allowed to learn about subjects- or people- via the accounts of the people themselves? Is it okay to ask friends, family, acquaintances, even strangers about someone?

I feel like a voyeur learning this- perhaps relatively innocuous- factoid about my friend. Would she tell me herself if I had asked? If so, does that make it okay that I learned it from someone else? And if not, did I violate her confidence by pressing our mutual acquaintance on the matter? Am I- in short- a bad friend?

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts…

Thus spoke the Bard, and I’ve often had call to consider just how apt his words were and are to this human existence of ours. We’re not the same people at all times to all people. Whether we realize it or not, we show different aspects of ourselves to others depending on their roles in our lives, the terms under which we came to know them, and dozens of other conditions.

I met my friend at a point in her life when she was- by her own account- not the wild child she once was. That’s the woman I’ve come to know and care about. I think it’s natural to wonder about this side of her life that she’s talked about to me one more than one occasion, but I find myself wondering now if I really want to know about it. It has a lascivious appeal to me- and I’m a bit disgusted with myself for feeling that way. I don’t like to think of myself as lecherous, but I can’t help but be- for lack of a more mature term- turned on and intrigued.

At the same time, I don’t want my opinion of my friend to change. I like the woman I’ve come to know. I enjoy her company, and while there are one or two habits of hers that I find less than appealing, I consider her great company. Even though I still bear a strong attraction to her, I am happy to have her as a friend, and I don’t want to think less of her by discovering something about her past that may or may not still be a part of her present.

Yet, without knowing the all, can we really ever know someone else? Again, we come back to the dilemma of knowing that has plagued me for as long as I can recall. How can you put the puzzle together without having all the pieces?

A couple of years back, I was having drinks after hours with two of my co-workers at the time. The subject of sex came up, and we shared some stories of our pasts- I say ‘we’, but I don’t think I really had anything to share, as I don’t really have any particularly interesting sex stories. One of my friends told a story about how she’d given a blowjob to this guy she had been seeing in front of his roommates, and then the next morning she’d made them all breakfast while topless. My other friend related how she d had met Joshua Jackson- “Hobie Buchanan” from Baywatch- and gone back to a hotel room to sleep with him, and then later learned he was only 16 at the time (she was 19).

Around the same time, I had another friend whom I was very close to, and I learned that he had cheated on his long-term girlfriend several times. I learned this from both he and one of the girls he’d hooked up with. Doubly awkward was that I both worked with and was fairly good friends with his girlfriend.

For the most part, my relationship with all of those people didn’t change significantly with the knowledge I’d gained about their pasts. My perceptions of them were definitely colored by what I’d found out, though. All of these aforementioned acts they’d shared with me didn’t completely jibe with the personas of the people as I’d come to know them over the months and years prior to discovery. It wasn’t necessarily so jarring that I couldn’t reconcile the new pieces of information, but it altered the picture somewhat. To this day, I’m not entirely certain I’ve ever quite assimilated my old perceptions of them with the new data.

But these were stories shared by the subjects themselves, and not gained through secondhand information. Though they were somewhat shocking to me, were they thus more valid factoids than what I learned from a third party about my friend this evening? Is it more proper for me to assimilate that information gained direct from the source than it is for me to wrestle with thirdhand information?

There are things about my own life that I don’t discuss with other people. Secrets, I suppose, though I’ve never had any kind of wild phase in my life, and have never done anything remotely dangerous or destructive, or frankly experimental. I’ve lived a pretty tame, possibly dull, life. Yet there are things I’m not quite ready to share with others. I wrote a story recently about a flirtatious sort of encounter I had at work and shared it with a close friend, and immediately felt a twinge of regret at having sent it to her. I was afraid that what I’d written might reveal a too salacious side of myself that I don’t think many people associate with me. I’m a guy. I think about sex. A lot. I don’t generally act like most testosterone mouth-breathers, and I don’t talk about sex much. I suppose I’m a prude that way, and I’m not entirely certain where it comes from (insecurities, is probably a good bet). Even though the story wasn’t exactly racy, I nevertheless was afraid my friend might look at me differently, just in the way I looked at the friends I’ve discussed thus far differently.

I sometimes find myself censoring my personal writing that way- suddenly realizing that someday, somebody else might read it, and wanting to control their perceptions of me. It’s far too tempting to do, and I have to consciously keep myself from doing it, which often ruins my flow. I guess I’m just scared that others might be as nosy or voyeuristic as I am, and don’t want them to see the “real” me, for fear that they might not like what they see. Which is silly, I realize, because every aspect of me that they do see- whichever aspect might be on display when we’re together at any given time- is no less “real” than anything that isn’t seen. It’s just not the complete picture.

It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps we, as personalities, are really all fractals. Like clouds, or snowflakes, with one overall structure that breaks down into many smaller parts, but each part is similar in features to the greater whole.

Maybe I’m just trying to solve puzzles that aren’t meant to be solved. Maybe I’m really just trying to figure out myself.