‘Do I Want It? Life, That Is.’

‘On Not Knowing‘ by Emily Ogden

On Not Knowing by Emily Ogden

I think a lot about not knowing. Will I someday know — finally get it, really get it — that I don’t know? What is the point of thinking if there is nothing to be known at all? Well, it happens — the thinking, anyway.

These essays by Emily Ogden are — and of course, now, the word escapes me, I simply do not know it — gosh, what is the word for something that is small, short, brief, doesn’t take up much space or time, yet gazes off as if into another plane of being, partaking of that otherworldly depth, leaving its own borders undefined? What is that white blotch on the book’s cover: a painstakingly creased, palm-sized square of origami held in front of the eye, or a mile-high cloud beyond the control of any technology?

Can unknowing help us? Knowledge helps us live, we know. But unknowing? What does it do?

“If there is a kind of unknowing that could serve now,” Ogden writes, “it is not the defensiveness of willful ignorance but the defenselessness of not knowing yet.” Not stubbornness, but openness, vulnerability, honesty. We cultivate “a capacity to hold the position of not knowing yet — possibly of not knowing ever.”

Then what is there to hope for? Should we hope at all? We cannot answer. We can do our work in the field, making bales of hay, but the work of the soul “never will be cut and dried.” The poet (Thomas Hardy, in this case) listens to the song of a thrush. Maybe there is hope, maybe not, yet he listens. Ogden says:

“When we are being blown about, when we are afloat over fathomless depths, when we are not yet dead, in short, things are not cut and dried. And in this state of expectation, it seems to confer a strange but durable benefit to have alien interlocutors like a thrush or a poem. It helps to behold our conversation partner and to oscillate between he knows nothing and he knows everything; or, he doesn’t matter at all and he matters surpassingly. Maybe what is helpful about it is that in this oscillation, we climb over, and thus for a moment grasp, our position in the middle, which is that hope is neither abundant nor nonexistent; we neither know nothing nor everything; we fight at bantamweight.”