On Not Knowing

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Week 03

This week I’ve been reading On Not Knowing by Emily Ogden. I’m thinking about what it means to not know, especially in that liminal space of uncertainty and how one’s understanding of those moments can shape a life.

How much of what we call a life is seemingly brought together by threads we only see in retrospect, as if the act of living requires a willingness to dwell in uncertainty. Ogden writes about not knowing as something that comes after revelation. After falling in love or through childbirth or discovering a new favourite opera. Surprise matters to aesthetic experience, she says, and so “to form a taste is a joy, but to have a taste imperils the very pleasure that led you to form it in the first place”. There is the question of how one ought to continuously retain the capacity for surprise when the weight of the known threatens to settle in. I am aware of this feeling time and again. A song I unknowingly “run into” after many years sparks joy. In contrast, a recently discovered but overplayed song can quickly lose its appeal. It is still lacking that element of me having stepped away from it while the song, or me, have had time to become something new. In that liminal space of time, a knowingness withers and the possibility to be surprised is built up again. This knowing, as with music as it is with people, can harden into an obstacle; it closes us off from discovery and, more importantly, from connection. In the worst case, I think, it pulls us away from that which we think we love.

To love, Ogden suggests, is to linger within the uncertainty.

When I first went to the U.S. as a child with my family, I didn’t know it would be a place I’d return to years later for college. It was a loose plan that sprung up near the end of high school propelled by some friends who were also applying abroad. It happened relatively last minute. When I moved to Sweden, a country I researched only after I got into a masters program, I remembered that my first encounter with Sweden actually began many years before in a brief conversation with an Indian postdoc at Penn State. He had been living temporarily in our apartment for a few days and had spent six years in Sweden prior to moving to the U.S. I don’t remember much about him and yet, for some reason, our conversation about Sweden remained etched somewhere in memory. Later, the country came up repeatedly in a women’s studies class given by Dr. Greg Lankenau — one of the best professors I have ever had.

Similarly, prior to 2021, Lithuania didn’t really exist on my mental map. I learned about the country and its culture from M who became a confidant and my closest support here. Later, a Swedish course I took by chance was taught by an excellent teacher who also happened to be Lithuanian. More recently, while googling around for weekend travel to Warsaw, Poland, I recalled a memorable conversation with an old lady in an otherwise forgettable flight returning home for the summer as a young student from the US. In those days, I was carrying around a collection of poems by Czesław Miłosz, a Polish poet born in Warsaw. The old lady, sitting next to me and having met Miłosz in her own student years, started a conversation about my interest in poetry and her years as a grad student. She expressed her love for both Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, a poet she introduced me to by lovingly scribbling her name into my notebook. So cue my surprise when recently during my Google search on Warsaw I learned that Miłosz also had strong Lithuanian roots.

These moments feel random at times, and they often are, but these connections are also not always obvious. Many of them are fragments mostly, unlinked and incomplete, waiting to have some form of me return to them again. What makes the almost decades-old conversation with the old lady and the postdoc stick in memory? What makes Duchamp’s The Large Glass stick to memory that first time I come across it in my art history class and then spot it again and again around the world? What makes me remember an almost micro essay that I read a decade ago and feel compelled to immediately find again this week?

Robin Sloan’s “tap essay” titled Fish was not something I’d thought of in a decade. It stayed with me through the years and somehow found its way into my head again this week. The essay examines the nature of what it means to love something on the internet. That to love something — on the internet or elsewhere — is to constantly return to it. To revisit what we think we know, not in an effort to solidify, but to consider all over again. Not knowing, then, is just as much about returning — not out of nostalgia, but to see if something familiar can feel new again. In one of the essays titled “How to riff”, Ogden suggests that the riff — the etymology of which could have a link to refrain — is the part of the song that returns again and again, as though to tell listeners where they are in the song. A sort of instrument in itself that positions us again and again in the universe of the song. The song will travel, she writes, but it will keep coming back to the riff.

To love something, then, becomes also to return again and again to it.

🥘 Food
📚 Reading
💿 Listening

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