"Knowledge is power"

Thus echoed in my head my father's dictum - you study in order to know, and you want to know because knowledge is power.

Knowledge and ignorance - two contraries, not that brotherly, meeting and clashing, fighting like two opposed fetuses in one cognitive womb, for ever causing a much wanted and feared lack of balance in me.

Knowledge. I know. But what if one were to make an argument in favor of ignorance? What if Gregor Samsa were to wake up one day and, instead of a "monstrous vermin," a perfectly normal human being with the unbearable capacity to Know everything? How would that be?

Gregor would wake up and be crushed by the noise of all the voices of people, all the meanings of things said and written, he would see, with plenist discomfort, what others call the subtext and which to him would be a clearly perceivable sense of the words; he would see the intertwining narratives of truth and lies, he would read the revealed and the hidden as one, he would be overwhelmed by the visual perception of a world which is entirely One, seeing how each particle of earth is made up of generations of dead people, he would see the lives of those dead people, he would see clearly how each and every part of who we are is a result of generations of thoughts, actions, objects made and destroyed.

That Gregor would not die because of the incompatibility between humanity and vermin, but would die because, as John Donne wrote, the spectacle of a fully-meaningful reality would be of "too much weight" for him. He would die a cognitive death, or burn instantly in a moment of epiphanic tremor. Sight, hearing, all the senses would be unbearable intertwined, and the eros of our wonder-struck contemplation of the world would end in an orgasmic moment, a punctiform concentration of difference into identity, of desire into satisfaction. That Gregor, the person I'd really like to be, would disappear together with Truth, an ignored bang in the senseless concatenation of cosmic events.

Yes, knowledge is power. But I prefer to dance obliviously and playfully between worlds, between knowledge and ignorance, between freedom and possession, between myself and the Other.