Ignorance Gives Way to Insight
“Smoke on the Water: one of the greatest rock and roll riffs,
has been compared to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
(Of course, that’s a matter of taste, but one cannot argue
the omnipresence of the musical line.)”
—Rolling Stone
“Smoke on the Water” was part of the sound track of my adolescence. But I’d never really tracked or comprehended the entire lyric, or the situation it described. It was enough to hear the riff and “rock out” to the beat of my generation. That signature riff was as familiar as my bedroom furniture.
I was aware as an adolescent, yet ignorant.
I had the outlines of life, but not the detail or significance.
The details (as it happens) began to emerge with adulthood.
But it was only as the pressures of production and acquisition began to wane that ignorance gave way to awareness and awareness matured into insight.
I had heard the riff, but not the lyrics. I then heard the signature line, but not the lyrics. Finally, the whole lyric, but not the significance of the event.
We live over-full lives, constructed out of fragments acquired in passing. We are confident in our fullness, in our collection of fragments, certain of the broad span of our wisdom.
Back to the song…
It’s the story of Deep Purple’s challenge to record an album off-site on a tightly limited schedule with rented equipment, temporary accommodations and people all hurtling in different directions — then the building burned down! Go ahead! Make a Record in the midst of total destruction and disaster! Then, as you repair to an alternate location, the noise complaints shut you down yet again! That’s the whole story, which I didn’t fully comprehended for 45 years!
So what’s the point?
Are our lives knowingly constructed out of completely clear, totally understood, uniformly molded building blocks of knowledge? Is the process wisely ordered and controlled, proceeding on schedule, toward a steady accumulation of wisdom? Well, that’s the illusion… But in reality, maturation is not always so well integrated. Guitar riffs, fragments of the Latin Liturgy, partial lyrics, pieces of overheard conversations, misunderstood lines from plays, movies or books share accommodation in our minds with familial lessons, academic training and work.
Our lives are, in reality, haphazardly constructed out of incompleteness; with some of the material intended, selected, but also with whatever’s at hand. Yet each of us today seem over-certain of our wisdom, confident that our fragment is the whole — that we alone get the big picture.
It’s amazing that we function at all in the absence of a more complete, integrated understanding. “Data” is now immediately available and omnipresent. But context, significance, and relative importance come only with time, focus and the maturity required to concentrate long enough to acquire a more complete picture. Be careful in overestimating the span of your wisdom, because, though ignorance does give way to insight; it does so slowly.
Applications
1. For You
What do you know for sure? Are you certain? And from where did this certainty emerge? As it turns out, your parents, the news, the internet and your friends may be just as ill-informed as you! Insight evolves with every added particle of information. Keep acquiring, and watch your wisdom grow!
2. For the Family
Children (and adults) seem to form political opinions with great fervor out of the air, sometimes in opposition to their parents, sometimes as carbon copies. Keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge with ever larger and loftier input. Use the vacation as an educational voyage to museums, capitals, cultural repositories. Education need never stop. Everyone knows everything, until they acquire more context. Certainty in these times is dangerous! That’s where parenting can help!
3. For the Office
It’s easy to find yourself in an intellectual desert — the Office, where the boundaries of information are what we do, how we do it and why we’re the best! But if you step outside the lines and look at the competition, new insights reveal themselves. Then look outside your category, then outside your industry and finally outside of business into the broader culture. Ooh, maybe it’s worthwhile exploring another country or language. And the insights multiply!
We’re all wise. And we’re all incomplete.
Ignorance does give way to insight, but slowly.
Dessert:
“Smoke on the Water”
Deep Purple
Songwriters: Blackmore, Gillan, Glover, Lord, Paice
We all came out to Montreax,
On the Lake Geneva shoreline.
To make records with a mobile,
We didn’t have much time.
But Frank Zappa and the Mothers,
Were at the best place around,
But some stupid with a flare gun,
Burned the place to the ground.
Smoke on the water and fire in the sky.
Smoke on the water…
They burned down the gambling house,
It died with an awful sound.
(Uh) Funky Claude was running in and out,
Pulling kids out the ground.
When it all was over,
We had to find another place.
But Swiss time was running out,
It seemed that we would lose the race.
Smoke on the water and fire in the sky.
Smoke on the water…
We ended up at the Grand Hotel.
It was empty cold and bare.
But with the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside,
Making our music there.
With a few red lights, a few old beds,
We made a place to sweat.
No matter what we get out of this,
I know I know we’ll never forget.
Smoke on the water and fire in the sky.
Smoke on the water…
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