R D LAING - KNOTS

Only two days back at work and already there are several urgent deadlines. Hence, I'm spending a lot of time looking out of the window at the birdfeeder and generally pissing around. But R D Laing is rewarding my efforts at displacement activities. 'Knots' is about behaviour, which I'm incurably curious about. Here are two knots. They are convoluted and dense; the paperback is about 100 pages. I'll have to get round to buying it sometime.

There is something I don't know
that I am supposed to know.
I don't know what it is I don't know
and yet am supposed to know,
and I feel I look stupid
if I seem both not to know it
and not know what it is I don't know.
Therefore I pretend I know it.
This is nerve-racking
since I don't know what I must pretend to know.
Therefore I pretend to know everything.

I feel you know what I am supposed to know
but you can't tell me what it is
because you don't know that I don't know what it is.

You may know what I don't know, but not
that I don't know it,
and I can't tell you. So you will have to tell me everything.

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I know you believe you understand what you think I said,
but I'm not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.

and so on.