Knowing the vague

Knowing the vague

I've thought for quite a long time that there might be such a thing as knowing the vague, which is possibly a contradiction, although contradictions don't necessarily bother me as much as they used to. If you know something then presumably it isn't vague any more, except I don't think that's actually true. You can know the sea without knowing exactly where every bit of water is.

I was talking about the void, either yesterday or a couple of days ago, and thinking that absolute nothingness ought to be the same nothingness for everybody. It can't really have personality. My nothingness can't be slightly different from yours because then it contains something with which to distinguish them.

Perhaps it's fog

So you could put the void somewhere, perhaps at the black pole of a sphere, and nirvana at the white one.

This works quite well for a minute.

Between them there would be grey, except because it's a sphere there's an awful lot more between two poles than there would be on a line. You can go sideways. You can go all the way round while remaining roughly the same distance from both. So perhaps the grey isn't grey really. Perhaps it's fog.

If you lived in it you wouldn't necessarily know which direction was towards the light.

There might not even be a visible gradient.