You Think You Know the World

[Image: Supper at Emmaus (1601-02), by Michelangelo da Caravaggio]

From whiskey river:

October

1
There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re

not there? and there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

2
I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the
green pine tree:

little dazzler
little song,
little mouthful.

3
The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes—
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.
Near the fallen tree
something — a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down — tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.

4
It pulls me
into its trap of attention.

And when I turn again, the bear is gone.

5
Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?

6
Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

7
Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me — and I thought:

so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

When

When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know
any of us, what happens then.
So I try not to miss anything.
I think, in my whole life, I have never missed
the full moon
Or the slipper of its coming back.
Or, a kiss,
Well, yes, especially a kiss.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Not from whiskey river (on the definition of the word information):

In the very first English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall in 1604, we see that defining words is not so easy. I quote a few of my favorite Cawdrey definitions (in their entirety):

crocodile, [kind of] beast.
vapor, moisture, ayre, hote breath, or reaking.
theologie, divinitie, the science of living blessedly for ever.

The word information isn’t in Cawdrey’s dictionary. Our authority, the Oxford English Dictionary, now requires 9,400 words for its entry — a multitude of definitions — as I discussed here.

Words are not meant to be pinned to the mat like butterflies. Also in [my book] The Information I explore the ancient dream of a perfect language, a dream of Gottfried Leibniz, of the Esperantists, of logicians like George Boole and Bertrand Russell. One imagines God’s own dictionary, described by the novelist Dexter Palmer this way: “one-to-one correspondences between the words and their definitions, so that when God sends directives to his angels, they are completely free from ambiguity.”

That dictionary does not exist. Our language is a thing of infinite possibility. We learn to live with ambiguity and with choice.

(James Gleick, from “Information Is How We Know” [source])

…and:

The Synthetic A Priori

What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all
this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely
unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of
perceiving them… With this alone have we any
concern.

— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

At a church rummage sale, I study the perfection of shadows
in a painting by Caravaggio, although what I hold
is only a small print of Christ — its frame broken — dining
at Emmaus with three of the Apostles. And because the table
is dramatically, if not unbelievably, lit, the bowls & pitcher
& loaves send their dark crescents onto the immaculate
white cloth. When the Savior raises his hand to offer a blessing,
its shade deepens further his crimson smock. Tenebrosus:
that rich, convincing darkness. As though the master understood
that the obscured world only seems to us somehow
even more familiar, as though our sense of our own unknowing
had at last been made visible — even if what we do not know
cannot itself be seen. The future’s drape, the carnival fortunetellers
of my childhood might have called it, but also the now’s,
displayed as it is — so many unmatched cups & saucers, old coats
& wicker baskets — all around us. At a party last week,
someone said verisimilitude. We were huddled on a tiny porch.
It was the first cool night & the wine had no conclusion.

The talk turned quickly to shepherds & the pastoral & then,
to opera, before someone recalled a horror film he’d watched
late one night with his brother. In black & white vignettes,
an evil tree stump possessed by the spirit of an executed prince
hunts the scheming tribal elders who have destroyed him.
A former pro wrestler in a costume of wire & rubber bark
& wearing a permanent scowl lumbers after vengeance
in the confusion & fear of 1957 on a half-dozen root-legs,
driving his victims into quicksand or toppling himself over
upon him. Though here the point is the teller’s small brother
& the boy’s allegiance, even in a state of suspended disbelief,
to what we call sense. How, he wanted to know, suddenly
unusually earnest, did the tree manage to get itself up again?

Yesterday I spoke to a friend who is despairing: back home,
waiting tables, he’s dating a woman whose marriage has only
just come to an end. When he wakes, he discovers he does not
recognize himself. One afternoon, walking home from school,
I hit my best friend in the face with a book. It may well be
that she hit me. Thin pages flew out into the street. More punches
were thrown & I came away bruised. In that book, a novel
by Emily Brontë, the land is violent & unjust & we are violent
& unjust upon it. Even worse, our greatest passions
change nothing at all. Before one of us hit the other,
there must have been a cause, but I can’t recall it, which makes it
seem nonlinear now, &, thus, apocryphal, both impossible
& impossibly real. I failed, though I tried, to offer comfort.

It’s not that our lives don’t resemble our lives. I’ve been alone
so often lately I sometimes catch myself watching myself —
breathing in the fresh spears of rosemary or admiring the shallots,
peeling their translucent wrappers away, centering one on the board,
making the first careful cut, lifting the purple halves.

Before stories, we were too busy for stories, too busy
hunting & suffering to invent the tales of our own
resurrections. Caught out in the kitchen’s brightness last night,
the handle of the skillet cast its simple, perfected form
across the stove — pierced, like the eye of the needle, so that
it can be hung from a hook, as pans, presumably, have always been.

Outside the wind picked up. Thunder. The dog trotted off,
hid her head beneath the chair. But today: a charity sale
at Trinity Chapel & sun on the tar of the buckled walks.
In the cracks, beads of water spin into light. Tell yourself
it’s simple: this is where it’s been heading all along. Tell yourself
something you have no faith in has already begun to occur.

(Kathleen Graber [source])

Finally, Leonard Cohen and Madeleine Peyroux conspire to bring you half a perfect world: the other half’s up to you.

[Below, click Play button to begin Half the Perfect World. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:21 long.]