I JUST STARTED a mustache hair - sorry. I look at it, it is one of the dark ones yet, it makes me sad: I don't have many left and I regret and miss each one that leaves. But man is an optimistic animal — are they optimistic animals? —And I still get to wonder if another dark one or a arrogant, disdainful cane will grow in its place; I do not know. Ignorance - that little ignorance, that ignorance that I should ignore - impresses me: I don't even know if the hair that grows when I tear off one is the same - if it is the same root that sprouts or is a new one that takes the place of the previous one and if, even so, it retains its main characters.
I carry my mustache with me almost everywhere for more than four decades. They identify me by him, with him; To my surprise and my shame, I am in many ways, my mustache. And I don't even know how their hairs grow. I guess I could find out, but I don't know. And I do know that I have lived all these years without knowing it.
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Just in case- The mother of the elections
It is a very minor example - and is therefore a great example. We live without knowing how we live or why: we live without looking at each other. Without knowing, without going any further, what are the billions of processes that happen all the time so that I can write the words all the time, so that you can read them, so that we can both forget them.
Sometimes I think that ignorance is necessary: that if we could see what happens inside our bodies it would be very difficult for us to look at anything else. “That this show would be so fascinating, so scary, so demanding for its only interested spectator that that spectator — hypnotized, hostage to what the show produces — could not distract his attention for a second. That the fascination would be complete: that there would be nothing more or better in the world. That in this, as in so many other things, ignorance is an indispensable condition. That having skin saves us, ”wrote an almost contemporary author. So we live - "we let ourselves live," said the teacher - without knowing how.
We never need to know: we are machines that work beyond the supposed will of their supposed drivers. But when we started to create machines beyond our bodies, we had to understand them. And so we did it, we did it. For most of the story the utensils and tools that men and women used were simple enough for everyone to understand. A hammer, a screw, a lever, a gear, a candle, a loom were even clear. Man was, then, a master of creation: an opaque body, full of mysteries, controlling understandable bodies.
Obviously not anymore. In the last two centuries our machines were humanized: becoming, in the image and likeness of our bodies, incomprehensible, dark. And now I don't know more about the biological process that gets my ring finger to press a key with the I that over that electronic means that, after the pressure, a letter I appears on this screen.
It seems silly and is, however, one of those great civilizational changes: we have been building a world where nothing has an explanation - or, at least, where the vast majority lives without knowing it. We do not understand processes, we know functions. And that works for everything. We are machines that we do not understand that handling machines we understand less. That's why, I guess, so many things scare us so much.
Or, therefore, we resign ourselves to not understanding, in general, the world: to let others "understand" and handle it for us. Therefore, I suppose, we let ourselves be governed by those who govern us, tell stories by those who tell us, pray for those who pray to us. We decided not to know, and so we are so good. If the mustache, after all, grows the same.