Unknown
carries two, beautiful, resonant almost underground vowel sounds echoing through its very centre, as if the word itself brings more meaning than our bodies or our minds are able to hold or understand. Said fully and properly the word unknown sets the whole thoracic region resonating in turn, in the same way the unknown itself resonates through every minute structure of our never fully-understood sense of the world. Unknown is a word that always echoes, spoken or unspoken, through the hidden structures of our barely articulated lives.
Every known in our life, almost by definition, communicates with, lives with and grows with, not only the invitational mystery of its own accompanying and as yet, unknown future, but with the way our present understanding of what we know will be rearranged by what we will come to know. What we know and describe now, will be seen and known and described in a radically different way by our future self, and most especially by that future self, granted the perspective of our deathbed and preparing itself for the greatest unknown of all.
Most human beings find themselves, at times, longing for a settled existence and yet any settled existence without the unknown to draw it on and enliven it eventually becomes a prison from which we become more than desperate to escape. We often think of a committed relationship as a way of eliminating too much of the unknown in our lives, a way of settling down, and yet our intimate relationships are prime examples of the way the known and the unknown live together, and in the very same way we try to live together, in a kitchen, in a bedroom or in a car traveling together, speaking of the things we know and do not know while facing toward the unknown future to which we are traveling.
Every beginning to get to know, in every relationship, is also a never-ending getting to know, a tidal exchange between what we can comprehend and understand and what breathes a surprising and alternative life into our mutual understanding.
Strangely, what draws us initially into thinking we can anchor our life in one known committed life, is the seduction inherent in all the ways the other represents so much of the unknown. What is most seductive in that intimate other to which we are first attracted is the rich cargo of the unknown that by slowly getting to know them, bumps, floats and eddies into our life carried not only by their unspoken past but their slowly understood hopes and dreams for the future. What is then beguiling in a solemn commitment to that same person is sharing all our present delightful knowns with all the unknowns we share together. What enlivens every relationship and continues to enliven it is the invitation to the edge between what can now be said and what is waiting to be said, out of the shared unknown.
No matter the settled nature of any individual life, the unknown accompanies us through every turn of our attempt to know a person, a work or an epoch of our life more thoroughly. The person we might have named and boxed and predicted a future for, the person we think we know so well in a marriage, or a settled relationship, that colleague whom we have assessed with too small a name, all the while as we continue to name them, becoming something of a stranger to us, becoming a stranger even to themselves, someone they themselves have to get to know again; someone therefore, we in turn have to meet and get to know again. All knowns live in a marriage or a friendship with their own seemingly faithful, accompanying and emerging, unknowns. The presence of the unknown is always the arbiter of health in any relationship, the willingness to join the conversation between the hidden essence of a person and the as yet unspoken future to which they are drawn.
Even the most cherished memories of things that happened in our life or of people who occupied our past so poignantly begin to change as our own maturing sense of self starts to enter ground it has never explored before, and from that ground, see things we never saw before. In the light of that seeing, what we heard and witnessed, and what we now remember begins to change into something surprising. The person we condemned as our enemy in divorce, we realise now was just a fellow struggler, like ourselves, trying to emerge with some shred of dignity intact: the annoying competitor in our field, now seen as the one who enlivened our own dedication and pushed us into creative territory we might never have entered without them.
What we see and know as settled fact in our life right now is already growing and changing into something else. We get to know and get to love not only the things we cherish, but all the ways we have learned to protect ourselves from vulnerabilities that loving in an even deeper way entails. We love the things we love, but we also learn too quickly to love the things that prevent us undergoing the heartache of living and loving in a deeper, more open, more generous way.
For all that we say again and again, that we are afraid of the unknown, we are actually not afraid of the unknown, what we might be more afraid of, is letting go of what we know so well, and have learned, with so much difficulty, to love so well, until now.
-from Consolations II
This essay was startlingly prophetic about the year that as yet lay ahead of me after its writing was completed. It is quite astounding how much we intuitively know about our unknown future even we cannot, or are afraid of, supplying the details! DW
This essay was startlingly prophetic about the year that as yet lay ahead of me after its writing was completed. It is quite astounding how much we intuitively know about our unknown future even we cannot, or are afraid of, supplying the details! DW
This: "What we see and know as settled fact in our life right now is already growing and changing into something else"