‘Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking and touching and loving…’ Mary Oliver
My impulse is to say I know nothing, but that’s not true. I know things. We all know things. Some we know with almost absolute certainty no matter what philosophers might say about the nature of reality and its inherent uncertainty.
Other things hint at us. We might fathom something is going on or something is there, but we cannot be certain.
When I was small, I knew almost nothing unless I learned it by rote, piggy backing on the shoulders of others. I could retrace their words out loud and this way sound as though I had some knowledge. But understanding was something else again.
Understanding came late to me. It did not reach my shores until as late as my early thirties when pennies of understanding began to drop. Not everything, mind.
There were some basic things I understood.
A crying baby needed comfort, and how to offer this comfort, but I did not understand why lightning strikes precede the boom of thunder. Something to do with the speed of light. I have no idea why there’s a difference. Between light and sound, and my geography is appalling.
The other day I pored over maps with my visiting five-year-old grandson who is interested in all things, animal and land. He asked which country began with the letter L. I imagined because his name begins with an L. I could only think of Lithuania. But no idea where it was located on the map we laid out on the table. In the form of 25 large jig saw pieces, all connected to reflect the world globe.
It only showed the continents in bold, and excluded the names of all other places. I couldn’t even locate the Netherlands, my parents’ birthplace, relative to the broad outline of Europe.
The only country I can map out with any degree of accuracy is Australia and even then I have trouble situating places like Cairns and Darwin, the Northern Territory. And please do not talk to me of places north, south, east and west. I have almost no concept of such directions in the abstract.
I know the zones when I stand in my house. Can get some sense of where to point my finger when it comes to the sea in the south; where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. But even then, even as I know the north is the opposite of south, it still feels wrong to point in this direction. Even as some of my children live in the north. And I wonder from whence such ignorance derives. In other words, why I should be so stupid when it comes to important matters of place.
Why did I not pay more attention when we studied geography at school all the way up to my fourth form, year ten today? I remember rote learning the imports and exports of countries by heart, their population size, and the like. But it was knowledge I could not retain even now as I try to evoke images. Mostly it was things like coal and steel. The great necessities of the twentieth century, the stuff that today might be killing us.
When you’re a child and young person living in a type of ignorance about the world around you there’s a sense of standing on shaky ground.
The same with my body. I did not understand how it functioned. The fertility cycle in females baffled me. All those hormones at work to produce things like a fertile ovum. The luteinising hormone through the fallopian tubes. Gigantic words that I could not attach to any images even as I write here.
That’s the trouble with hormones. I have no image of them. Are they like sprinkles of hundreds and thousands that enter our blood streams? Are they like spurts of liquid from a water pistol? Or do they shed into our blood stream like those new-fangled sheets of laundry powder you can buy in the supermarket that dissolve in water to clean your clothes.
I bought a pack of laundry sheets recently because they argue they’re better for the environment and don’t make so much mess, at least for top loading washing machines. They seem to work.
They remind me of the hosts we swallowed at Holy Communion, only they’re much bigger. Square, white and fragile, they crush easily in my fingers.
Are hormones like this? Are they invisible to the human eye? I expect so if they’re small enough to enter our blood streams to make a difference to our bodies.
When I was eight and recognised how useless I am in the body God had given me. In those days I blamed it on God. I decided to practice the art of running. There was a laneway at the back of our front garden that ran the length of a block all the way through to Alexandra Avenue, the road that ran parallel to our home in Wentworth Avenue. It was knotty with grass tufts and rutted dirt on either side where cars could drive. It sheared off at one point into the driveway of one of the houses on the left and had other tributaries on to the line of houses that ran in front on Canterbury Road. To my short eight-year-old legs it was at least a mile long. To run the length and back was a mastery.
I coaxed my younger sister to act as timekeeper and every evening after school before dinner, before my belly was heavy with food, I got her to stand sentinel as I ran my laps. My time never improved and my determination and hers lasted only a week or so before I decided my fate was sealed. I would never be a runner, able gazelle-like to cover vast tracts of land, land I could not even identify. No matter how hard I tried.
Ignorance is a funny thing. It can inspire you towards a deep curiosity and will to know more, or it can leave you feeling trapped in a confusing world that refuses to yield its secrets.
For a long time, I elected to stay in that world, relying on rote learning to get me through. But once I reached university and discovered rote learning was not enough, I was forced to take a stand.
Drop out or begin to understand. I chose the latter – or it chose me – but only after tumbling many times on the way to knowing just a tiny amount, enough to get me by.