‘Do I Want It? Life, That Is.’
‘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…
