BioLog

I’m trying to practice writing relatively quickly – as it is, I feel like I take too much time to write anything because I want it to be just right, and this discourages me from writing because I don’t have the time to do it.  I have so many essay ideas, and I feel a real need to start writing them.  So I’m trying an exercise I made up for myself, where I take 1 hour to write down whatever I’m thinking about – not in a stream-of-consciousness form, and not quite in journal entry form, but in a form approaching an essay. These are skeleton essays, sketch essays, speed essays – unfinished, but with the kernel of an idea there. This one feels very truncated because I was only starting to get into the meat of it when time ran out, which makes me wonder whether I want to do outlines (the entire essay in very sketchy form, not a lot of detail or content) or half-baked essays (small portions of the essay with detail and content).  In any case, here goes:

“Tangled knowledge: coming up against the limits of what I can understand” by Kriti

Ultimately, my obsession is with knowledge itself. I am daily stunned by what I don’t know. I am constantly curious about things, asking “What is this? How can this be?” I look into the world and see a gorgeous tangle, a breathtaking tangle, a thicket I would never wish to leave, a bramble whose branches lead inward and outward, earthward and skyward. The bramble, the thicket, the tangle, the web is beyond the capacity of my small mind to hold. The feeling, the daily feeling that catches me where I stand, is the feeling of watching fireworks: there’s a smoky trail in the sky, a whistle and a hum somewhere far away, and the trail is amorphous and difficult to decipher, and there is confusion as I watch to see where it’s going, and an irritation under my skin as I realize it’s too dark outside and even my most earnest attempts to see through squinted eyes are foiled, and then! A chaotic burst, and an orderly pattern in the air. The thing, the idea I had, the connections I was trying to make, the hard-to-trace relationship of everything to everything – it all jumbles inward and then explodes outward into a wondrous, breathtaking, vast and open space.

I squint to follow the trails between things as best I can, and then to hold the web as a whole in my meager mind, and when it proves too much, too large, too intricate, it all dissolves into a warming in my heart and a reverence in my breath. It seems like a rather futile endeavor, all of this tangled journeying, but the rewards are rich. Wonder, I think, is its own reward.

Many different problems share this thickety, brambly form. How from a single cell a being forms with a whole body and a blinking, racing knowledge of the world is one such problem. Another one is how a society comes to be an obstinate thing, with power and domination entrenched in its structure, with the powerful merely changing faces on occasion over centuries. Another is how we who are said to inhabit the same world can have such apparently contradictory knowledges about that ostensibly common world. In all cases, the pursuit of the questions lead to fireworks, to a tangled mess that cannot quite hold, at least in my small mind.

Take for example the problem of contradictory knowledges in a common world – a problem that is close to my heart as I move through my life puzzled daily by the distance between what I know to be true and what those whom I encounter know to be true. The very constant, everyday experience of awe, shock, and sometimes dismay at observing what people-who-are-not-me believe and do often gives me pause. I operate on the premise (where does this premise come from?) that I share something with every person, and that if I understood their lives, I would understand their positions today – their fears, their hatreds, their joys, their sadness’ – no matter how radically different these positions might be from my own. I carry a fairly constant desire within myself to connect with and understand others, though my relatively meager capacity to do so is often pushed to its breaking point despite the fact that I often summon all the resources I can to the task.

One of the most obvious and troubling manifestations of this phenomenon in my life are the racist comments, behaviors, and ideologies I observe on a daily basis. Racism is clear as day to me, identifiable from a mile away, manifest always in a rich set of textures and colors, variations on a common theme. I do not search for it – I would rather not see it at all. But there it is always, waiting for me when I wake up, predictable as sunrise, ubiquitous as air. So when every other day, I encounter someone—either in person or through media—who says that racism does not exist, and that those who believe in its existence are simply misguided or oversensitive or vengeful or anachronistic (or, as a modern twist on the theme, “reverse racists” themselves), I become confused, as if someone told me that my left hand is just a hallucination that I experience alone, that no one else can see it, that it doesn’t actually feel, or grab, or caress, or throb.

“But it’s my left hand,” I say. “I can pull my fingers into a fist and watch them curl, and feel a soft pressure in my palm. I can curl my fingers around a small thing and move it from one place on the earth to another. The fist forms. The thing moves. I do these things with my left hand, and I feel its existence so closely. What do you mean my left hand doesn’t exist?” At which point, my detractor says, “But I can’t feel your fingers curl into a fist, I can’t feel the soft pressure in my palm, I can’t feel the weight and movement of the small object. So your left hand can’t exist.” When I point out that the small object that was once in one place on the earth is now in another place, and that some force must have moved it there, and I offer the hypothesis that it was my left hand that supplied this force, the detractor explains that the object must have moved due to the movement of wind, or something else eternal, free of responsibility, natural. It seems we are at an impasse.