The Inner Swine Guide to Ignorance Episode 6

(This originally appeared in Brutarian Quarterly #52; for a while I wrote a column there about ignorance in general and my ignorance in specific. It was a lot of fun and I figure I’ll post them here now and again.)

Episode Six: Retroactive Ignorance

I Title this: Handsome Bastard

They say that time travel is impossible. “They” being the faceless, cruel scientists who actually rule this planet with their “knowledge” and “expertise”. If I had knowledge and expertise I’d probably be unstoppable, but this damned ignorance keeps getting in the way, dooming me to a life of beer-swillage and remote-fondling. And, of course, pondering ignorance and its power, which is apparently infinite. When they figure out dark matter and string theory, I’m sure what they’ll find at the core of the universe is, you got it, ignorance. In fact, a sufficient level of generalized ignorance even makes time travel possible, and not in the traveling-forward-in-time-at-regular-speed way.

Usually ignorance is pretty much in the moment and, like the elusive rainbow, disappears the moment you realize it was there at all. But sometimes ignorance—such is its power—can cast a long shadow backwards in time as the sudden inrush of knowledge that fills the vacuum exposed by your realization of ignorance sheds light on past events and makes you realize you’ve actually been a jackass for much longer than you had previously imagined.

The effect is startling. Trust me.

Naturally, such revelations are almost always humiliating in nature, for vengeful ignorance crushes its enemies and punishes those who attempt to dispel it. The worst part is, with retroactive ignorance the humiliation reverberates backwards in time, illuminating the last few months or years or decades of your life in the harsh yellow light of Fail.

An easy illustrative example of this is the simple mispronunciation of words.Say you spend your entire adult life pronouncing “segue” as seeg. “And then we seeg into the next scene.” You do so completely free of shame or self-consciousness because you don’t actually realize you’re pronouncing it wrong—you’re ignorant. And no one corrects you because they know how embarrassing it is to be corrected about something trivial like that. Then, one day, you’re reading a ridiculous column in a cool underground-type magazine and some points out that it should actually be pronounced segway, and you quickly experience the following string of events:

1. An urge to snort and point out how ridiculous this is to someone standing near you
2. The sour, rotten tendrils of doubt poke through your bravura
3. You look up the word and realize you have been saying it wrong for approximately your whole life
4. You are embarrassed
5. You start recalling how often you like to use the word in your daily conversations because you think it makes you sound erudite
6. Flashes of all the moments in time you’ve used the word go through your mind as your humiliation speeds backwards in time until it reaches you as a zygote and implants itself inside your soul
7. You realize your whole life has been a terrible sham and failure and begin to contemplate suicide
8. Someone says let’s go have a drink and you cheer up, but resolve to never use the word again
9. After three or nine drinks you suddenly realize you just used the word “segue” sixteen times in conversation and mispronounced it, as usual, all sixteen times
10. And no one corrected you in any way
11. So you decide they are all your enemies, secretly laughing at you behind your back, and excuse yourself to go throw up in the bathroom, attempt to climb out the window in order to make a dramatic and secretive exit, get wedged in the small bathroom window, pass out, and wake up the next morning in a hotel room in Mexico, sitting in a tub full of ice with a cell phone duct-taped to your hand

This happens. Trust me. Such is the power of ignorance.

In fact, I doubt it could ever be proven that the sudden realization of long-standing ignorance doesn’t actually alter past events as opposed to merely altering your perception/recollection of them. Say you suddenly remember a moment when you used “segue” incorrectly and now you remember that everyone burst into laughter and at the time you assumed it was because of something hilarious you just said even though what you said wasn’t all that hilarious, but now you see they were laughing at your sad lack of proper pronunciation. Or were they? Maybe they were laughing at something you said—until you realized your ignorance, and changed the past.

String theory is a hell of a thing. You can’t prove I’m wrong.

Of course, having established that Ignorance can travel backwards along your timeline and alter events in the past, isn’t it conceivable that it can also change the future? After all, once you learn how to properly pronounce “segue” you’re unlikely to mispronounce it in the future (unless you are brain damaged in some way). As a matter of fact, you’ll probably go out of your way to ensure you don’t mispronounce it ever again, as from that point forward you will be sadly aware of the humiliation involved. You will take steps. You will write the word phonetically on your hand in permanent marker. You will practice in front of the mirror, privately. You will invent little mnemonic games to help you remember.

In other words, you will consciously change your behavior, thus altering the future.

You’re starting to see why we should immediately build a huge golden statue of the God Ignorance and start slaughtering cattle at its base, yes? Ignorance could crush you, boyo. It holds the Deep Magic in its taloned hands.