What we don't know

When I was a kid, we used to watch The Twilight Zone. It was a half-hour program of stories about the supernatural, and they all made you think. I still remember one about a compact mirror that would allow the viewer a glimpse into her future. In my memory, the story ends with a woman sitting at a kitchen table holding the compact. She opens it, looks into the mirror, and is so horrified by what she sees that she loses her mind -- or she dies -- I don't remember which. Or it could have been a man. The interesting thing to me is this: What I remember of the episode is my curiosity about what it would be like to see into the future. I wondered why it wouldn't be a good thing.

They don't make TV shows like that anymore, stories that put ordinary human beings into extraordinary situations with no pat ending, no explanation. Back then we calle those stories science fiction; today I see them as little Zen koans: What is the sound of one hand clapping?

And what is wrong with not knowing? Because you know what? We don't know nearly as much as we think we do. In an earlier post, I quoted the opening stanza from a poem by Wislawa Szymborska. The poem is about being alive, what it means, how it looks, and the poem ends with these two lines (see the end of this post for the entire poem):

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

Life is the only way to keep on not knowing / something important. You know that feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue and you just can't quite bring it to your mind so you can say it? Do you ever feel that way about something you have no words for? Years ago when I was living in San Jose, I was driving down 280 on a beautiful sunny day, not thinking about much of anything, paying attention to the flow of traffic, when I suddenly had a sense of a thin curtain between me and something else, and it was swaying in the breeze, almost showing me . . . what? I don't know. I wanted to know, but I didn't and still don't.

Maybe death is knowing. And if it is, then maybe life is just practice in being aware, in learning to see, in understanding the value of not knowing. I don't want to know what the future holds. And anyway, I don't even believe in the future and I'm gradually coming to dismiss the whole idea of a past. There is this moment and there is memory. That's all. That's enough. And some days even that is too much.

A Note by Wislawa Szymborska:

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

 

Comments

[Bellezza]

Every New Year's Eve there's a channel here (in Chicago) which plays Twilight Zone reruns for 24 hours. I love them, and I agree with you: they don't make television shows like they used to.

[Trevor McPhee]

Long ago, in another life where I had the pleasure of your company here in cubeville, you gave me a photocopy of that poem. It wasn't printed, but an honest to goodness photocopy, lines on the page at a bit of an angle, the rough edge of the book preserved in shadow. Recently I was going through a box of "important stuff to keep" that I'd taken from my desk when I moved last fall (this being the box within which, somewhere, there was a folder that had tax info in it, a box that had therefore been labeled as dangerous, a box to avoid going through until I had to…).
It had been sealed for months, lurking on a shelf among other boxes, but the other week, looking for tax information, I dug in, and about halfway down I pulled out a folded piece of paper with this poem that begins with the word 'Life" and ends with the words "something important" on it.
Thanks again for the gifts of this poem... for sharing it, and for coming back to its affirmation of the possibility of deep meaning within the quotidian realities of life. I sat there reading, my tax frenzied mind settling down into the warm core of the poem, savoring the memory of conversations held with the lights off.
I brought the page to work and pinned it up on the cube wall just over my monitor, so that when I gaze up to think it frequently comes into focus, a reminder that in the fullness of life it is these little gems of experience that stay with us. If there is an afterlife and we are allowed to share fragments of experience somehow, it is these moments -- here is what it was like to discover, here is what it was like to be discovered -- that I imagine exchanging, in wonder at the wealth of experience that could take millennia to fully appreciate.
And here in your post, the poem shows up again, its reminder still valid, still very much needed, its bit of truth more pertinent than ever.

[Andrew Hartley]

Thank you.

Thank you.

THANK you.

Thank YOU.

Thank you thank you.

The idea that life is practice to be aware of not knowing is beautiful - and I needed that idea today.

My grandmother (Mimi) passed away this past weekend, and the funeral was Wednesday... and I was pretty much fine all the way up until the end of the service, as everyone was leaving, Jill and I went up to the casket and I gave Mimi back the handkerchief I had cried into as a baby. She kept it for me until her husband died (a few years ago)... she had kept it for me for over 20 years.

That was hard. But your poem reminds me of the poem that Mimi always said reminded her of her family (brothers and sisters). It's posted on my blog at http://www.aviationofbusiness.com/AoBBlog/2007/04/12/passing-away/