knowing/not knowing
Last night, my friend Marissa hosted a reading in celebration of the 100th issue of her lovely newsletter, constellations. I read alongside Marissa herself, Madeline Zappala, and CLAUDIA MORALES. It was a really beautiful night and a great room to read in, and I’m thankful to Marissa for including me and for the opportunity to write something unlike what I normally write, shared below.
I was walking the dog when I spotted it: a tray of rigid white plastic, like one out of a fridge or freezer compartment, sitting on top of a closed metal trash can, in front of the unoccupied building next door.
It had a band of black sludge around its inner walls, like the water had slowly receded and left bits of dirt and detritus clinging on, and around its base it had a ring of that coral-orange mineral deposit that looks like a rust stain and is a physical accumulation of the reason that New York City water tastes so good.
I wondered how it got there and, in the same instant that the question finished forming in my mind, I saw in the tray two small birds, round, almost squished, they must have been sparrows, splashing and diving. It felt like a miracle: that the tray had somehow gotten there, that it happened to fill with water during a drought, that I walked by right as these birds were bathing on an otherwise empty morning, no one else on the block as far as I could see. They seemed so solid and I suddenly so fragile, running over the day’s oncoming tasks in my mind, mood waning and undependable, somehow overcomplicated and dumb at the same time. They seemed to come from a world to which I did not belong and about which I knew nothing, an alternate dimension: mystery.
We have been trying to deal with the problem of mystery for as long as humans have existed. We’ve tried everything: mythology, religion, science, art. When they’re good, these things rescue something, some piece of knowledge, from large expanses of unknowability. They bring the universe closer to us, and thereby they bring us closer to ourselves. But then—here’s the problem, more of the same problem—when that tale, that prayer, that study, that painting, articulates a kernel of truth, it also elucidates the extent of the mystery, makes knowing and not knowing appear as they really are: inextricable from one another.
Here’s Ovid, in his Metamorphoses: “Before there was earth or sea or the sky that covers everything, Nature appeared the same throughout the whole world: what we call chaos: a raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined discordant atoms of things, confused in the one place.”
Mystery.
But then: “This conflict was ended by a god and a greater order of nature, since he split off the earth from the sky, and the sea from the land, and divided the transparent heavens from the dense air.”
“He had barely separated out everything within fixed limits when the constellations that had been hidden for a long time in dark fog began to blaze out throughout the whole sky.”
Ovid’s tales of how the constellations got to be in the sky are familiar stories of conflict and acrimony, of human failings. In them, mystery is abbreviated (Juno is jealous of Callisto for sleeping with her husband Jupiter) and then expanded (Juno turns Callisto into a bear) and then abbreviated again (Arcas, son of Callisto, unknowingly kills his mother in bear form) and then expanded again (Jupiter turns them both into constellations: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor).
I remember as a child learning how to pick out Orion’s belt and the Little Dipper; I also remember learning to how to look for Venus and Mars by tracing lines out from the Moon. These were exercises in knowing—my relative place in the physical world, my smallness in comparison to its vastness, the mundanity of that smallness—and not knowing—my true place in the physical world, the extents of its vastness, my own unknowability. And they would have been impossible to carry out without something tangible to hold on to, something to give shape to disorder.
The mistake we make all the time is thinking that there is something more true than constellations or things like them, to confuse what is an act of distillation for an act of deception.
I did that, that day with the sparrows. Ran into the super of the building next door and asked him about the tray, told him about the birds; he said he’d put the water out for them. I had guessed that was the case, and thought the confirmation of my hunch would elucidate something—but it felt extraneous then, an addendum to something already finished. My fickle personhood snapping into clarity around those birds didn’t need worldly explanation; it was enough for me to have known them there, plucked only momentarily out of their world and placed into mine.
I approached them, when I saw them, to take a photo, and they both promptly flew away; I stepped back and they swooped once again to their bath. From farther back, I managed to get a video of the pair in the tray. In it, the birds move improbably quickly; you’d think the clip was sped up if it weren’t for the fact of a third bird, first standing still on top of a fence and then flying in an unsteady arc down to the lip of the trash can lid. Their movement is the tether between my world and theirs, which dissolves as soon as I try to ascribe reason to their presence, force their actions into logic, interpret their instincts as happiness. When I walked away they were still there, in the bath, preening and drinking. If I saw them again I would never know it.