This Matter of Not-Knowing

[Image: “The Sea Has No Need of Us,” by August Brill on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license.) The photograph’s description there consists entirely of a quotation from Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov: “Its beauty is not for us. It’s a beauty that has nothing to do with us… The sea doesn’t know we exist, and besides, would it perhaps really like to know this?” (I haven’t located a specific source for this quotation — may be a loose translation.)]

From whiskey river:

There is a certain kind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change;
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

(Daniel Goleman [source]*)

…and:

“At this moment” is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present: usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

Not from whiskey river:

There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received the following reply: “When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.” This story gives, in all probability, an entirely false impression of Browning’s attitude towards his work. He was a keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning’s attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in Sordello, he could have given an account of the man and an account of his father and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew.

(G.K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

The Doctor: [moving stone tablets]  Put this one… there. This one… there. Uh, keep that one upside down. What have you got?

Lucius: Enlighten me.

The Doctor: What, the soothsayer doesn’t know?

Lucius: A seed may float on the breeze in any direction.

The Doctor: Yea, I knew you were gonna say that. But– it’s an energy converter!

Lucius: An energy converter of what?

The Doctor: I don’t know! Isn’t that brilliant? I love not knowing! Keeps me on me toes. It must be awful being a prophet, waking up every morning, “Is it raining? Yes, it is. I said so.” Takes all the fun out of life.

(The Doctor [source])

…and:

Bird Left Behind

As for her, the circumstances must be ordinary
And so the return. Door unlocked. The path mowed
Right to the oiled gate; the pasture

Cleared of stone and alder. All untouched
Enough to enter. The man or woman
Off down the valley or working above

Treeline. No other sound but a few strays
Hurrying through the dusk as if the end
Will begin, certain and with nothing

More to say. She does not know she does not know.
Having come back to find her kind
And none being left she took herself up

Into a tree unclear what to do next save only
Sing the song she wanted sung back to her.

(Sophie Cabot Black [source])

__________________

* This quotation is generally and apparently mistakenly ascribed to R.D. Laing. According to the source linked to above, Daniel Goleman actually wrote it in 1985, “in the form of Laing’s ‘knots'” (emphasis added). Laing had published an earlier book of ruminations, called Knots (some samples here, and elsewhere around the Web), in what looked something like free verse.