We Knowers
Some thoughts on knowledge and truth, and a dive into a difficult poem by Emily Dickinson.
Lately I’ve been overwhelmed with how little I know. In the space of a few hours, I recently learned the following:
Three musicians I admire, Sara Jaorsz, Sara Watkins, and Aoife O’Donovan, have been recording and performing together as a fabulous group, “I’m With Her,” for years.
In the Adirondack Mountains there are still some half a million acres of old growth forest.
The “scarletina bolete” mushroom, considered gourmet, is nearly identical to “Satan’s bolete” (poisonous), distinguished only by the subtle markings on the stems—“dots versus a web or net pattern.”
I can only use all four solar panels a neighbor at my cabin gave me if I wire them in “series/parallel,” (thanks YouTube).
It seems no matter how long I live, the amount of stuff I don’t know spools out infinitely ahead of me, and I wonder if perhaps I should have, like Sartre’s “self-taught man” in Nausea, attempted in my life to read every volume of every book starting with the letter A….
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche famously proclaims, “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?” and I’m faced with a more potent level of considering what I “don’t know.” In that book, Nietzsche worked to show how even something as seemingly fixed and permanent as morality may well have arisen from Feudalism—serfs=bad, owners/elite=good….
Aside from regularly feeling that I simply don’t know enough of the things a man my age should know—how to use power tools, how best to fell a tree, how to fix a car…., I’m also neck deep at times in a flood of philosophical pondering I have engaged in since reading Robert Frost’s poems in high school—a tendency that intensified with my first ever philosophy course in college where I first read Nietzsche.
Turning to philosophy, I think of Martin Heidegger’s two types of truth/knowledge—“truth-as-agreement” and “truth-as-uncovering.” The first is the easiest to grasp. It speaks to the things I listed at the beginning of this post, grounded in the idea that certain facts “agree” with others. The Adirondack Mountains/half a million acres of old growth forests. My new-found knowledge of how to not get poisoned by a Satan’s bolete hinges on the agreement of the type of stem pattern with the type of fungi—dots pattern=good, webbed/netting pattern=bad.
Truth-as-uncovering, however, is altogether different, even though we use the same words, “truth,” “knowledge” to express it. Rather than things agreeing, this category of knowledge springs from uncovering the hidden, unknown, not easily seen.
As I begin writing about it, I feel the ground give way beneath me. It’s easiest to say what it is not. It is not the same as fact-based knowledge, no matter how complex or nuanced those facts are. Truth-as-uncovering calls for a different mode of illumination/understanding. It is a way of thinking, seeing, being. It is philosophic, poetic, literary…to some degree unsayable. It goes beyond/beneath agreement-based truth.
And what do I “know” in this sense? What lies “uncovered” in my mind’s eye, assuming that this way of knowing is an active, constant process, not a final, terminating expression?
That’s difficult to say. I know it’s deeply worthwhile to read good fiction, poetry, essays, to watch compelling films, plays, to read thought-provoking essays. All of these when done well push hard toward uncovering truth, expressing essential, if not fully graspable things.
With that, I’ll turn to a poem by Emily Dickinson that seems to me to wrestle with many of these same things, perhaps including the thing that sparked much of Nietzsche’s work, contemplation of “the void,”—
(340)
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -
Dickinson, playfully at first, then ever-more ominously, invites us to envision a funeral occurring inside her very brain—not just the idea of a funeral, but an actual one in miniature, whose sounds she can hear, feel. She doesn’t say she “imagined” a funeral in her brain; she “felt” it, and felt things surely speak to “truth-as-uncovering,” things not as easily said or proved, but sensed and understood in an immediate, non-rational manner.
That first stanza right away throws us into such an odd place/situation, making our own brains work hard to find a way to consider the words. Again and again in Dickinson’s work, we are forced to enter into an altogether different way of seeing, understanding, thinking. Why is it that these miniature “mourners footsteps to and fro” make it seem as if “Sense was breaking through”? What is meant by “Sense” here (a word she even feels the need to capitalize)? Is she referring to “sense” as in reason, rationality? Sense as in one of the senses—sight, touch, taste, hearing? Both all at once? For either, how does all that “treading, treading” give rise to its “breaking through”? Is sense/reason breaking through, even as her senses are no longer functioning normally? Might this “breaking through”—as in a break through—suggest an altogether different (more complete) mode of understanding, sensing, maybe even as “truth-as-uncovering”?
In the next stanza we find something similar. Here the mini-mourners in her brain sit down, but now it is the “Service” (another capitalized S word, inviting us to juxtapose it to “Sense”) that is “beating, beating” (echoing the “treading, treading” of the mourners) till she “thought [her] mind was going numb.” Whatever “Sense” broke through in stanza 1 shifts to the “Service” itself—the words of a pastor, say, music, testimonials…all the normative things spoken at a funeral service when addressing death—perhaps breaking through her senses further still, so that the entirety of her senses, her mind, the thing that translates and allows her to “know” anything is itself going “numb.”
In stanzas 3 and 4 the treading, beating becomes the sound of a lifted coffin that “creak[s] across my Soul” (a third capitalized S word) and along with the returning mourners’ “Boots of Lead” the sounds become a “toll,” so they are now “Space itself” (yet another capitalized S word) that continues on until “all the Heavens” become a bell. Then that remarkable, elusive line, “And Being but an ear.” All of the early sounds gather into one great tolling across her Soul, becoming Space itself, reducing being to “an ear”—no sight, touch, taste, smell…just an overriding, singular, immense tolling, so vast that the entirety of being can only do one thing—listen.
Is this the sound of her own impermanence, the sound of Nietzsche’s void, the nothingness we all will fade back into? And this singular essence of Being as “but an ear” is set alongside her self, “and I—and Silence—some strange Race/Wrecked solitary here—.” The cascading of her imagination as she envisions a funeral as something real and occurring somehow inside her own brain, that initial sound of treading feet echoing out into a universal tolling…ultimately bring her to casting herself as “solitary,” profoundly alone, with only “Silence” as a companion, “Wrecked,” alienated. These truths, this “Silence,” somehow become “some strange Race”—an altogether unfamiliar state of being, not just a different person, but an entirely different race. The experience of the poem lies profoundly outside of the normative gestures of the funeral goers; their service is no match for the immensity of what she’s experiencing. She is overwhelmed by these contemplations, though also exhilarated.
The last stanza is so critical, though more elusive still. That a “plank in Reason broke,”—the end result of the first image of “Sense breaking through”?—could suggest that Heidegger’s “truth-as-agreement” (reason) is giving way to something else in moments like this, moments of deep, penetrative contemplation and imagination, Dickinson working to “feel” a funeral inside her own brain, placing death there as an actual, visceral consideration—a corpse, her own corpse? And these planks are the flooring of an entire construct/structure with many layers—perhaps even suggesting all the normative truths we grapple with, all the never-ending limitations of our truth-as-agreement knowledge. There is a “world at every plunge,” her imagination sending her careening through layers of floors/worlds. Just as Nietzsche calls for an upending of how we think about good and bad, Dickinson could well be expressing a parallel epiphany—though in a purely poetic/artistic, ever-more elusive way. When she “finished Knowing—then—” she could be speaking to the more normative way of knowing coming to an end for her, a poet working to uncover truths that require us to break through the restrictions of normal human paradigms and other constructs/constraints (especially those of normative language) to achieve more overarching, illuminative knowledge. That final “then” almost feels like the beginning of another phrase, the poem ending but not concluding.
Whenever I set forth into one of Dickinson’s more complex and challenging poems, like this one, I feel as if I’ve entered an utterly novel way thinking, communicating, understanding. She even shifts our poetic expectations (and certainly the expectations of readers in the 19th century). “Then” at the end of the poem should rhyme with “down.” “Through” in the first stanza should rhyme with “fro.” These near-rhyming words within an otherwise normal rhyme scheme are off just enough to trigger other more complex dissonances at play in the poem. She capitalizes words in a seemingly random manner and famously uses dashes where no other mark of punctuation seems sufficient enough. In this poem, she even ends with a dash. In order to work to uncover truth, to know more fully, she works to invent a whole new mechanism with which to address it.
The poem has much in common with Nietzsche’s famous “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.” She stares into the abyss here, listens, reacts, working to uncover the kinds of “truth” Heidegger speaks of when he writes that one should “comport yourself authentically toward death.” She is not content with the tolling of the “Service,” the drumbeat of mourners’ feet. All the normalcy of the event strikes an odd, emanating chord for her that utterly, unexpectedly upends her sense of everything, allowing her to envision her solitude and the profound silence that comes along with her understanding….
As I contend with how little I know, I find comfort in knowing that I at least occasionally recognize the import—the pull and thrill—of working to know other kinds of truth. In the end it may well not matter all that much that we learn lots of skills and come to the end of our lives possessing extensive knowledge of things unless we also work to reach toward the types of truth we’ll never fully grasp and finish knowing - then -
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