Being and knowing
I'm spending my last reading hours here with Rachel Carson. I'd always wanted to read "Silent Spring."
As I discover one interesting thing after another from Carson -- the complexity of soil ecology, the perfect interlock between bird, fish and insect ecosystems, I find myself wanting to know more. When I read of the role of spindle fungi in soil, I become drunk with the desire to know a few more details and I resolve to find something good to read on soil. Same thing happens with fish toxicology. This is a very old pattern with me. I've always worried that my thirst to know, to catalog, to memorize was a desire to possess by understanding. Now, having had so many chances to stand in unmediated rapture of the greatness of the sea, the quiet wisdom of a saltmarsh, the brazen confidence of a tiny tidal pool, I wonder whether something else much more disturbing has been going on. Has my desire to relegate all of my experience to a carefully ordered bank of knowledge been an escape? Is this constant needling desire to 'know' an attempt to avert my gaze from the bright glare of life by scooping it up into a rack of books that I can line up on a shelf like a collection of tamed tigers? Is that what academics do? In collecting knowledge, are we spurning wisdom?
It is, perhaps, a wonderful thing to be able to generate a flow chart of the intricate interactions between bacteria, algae, fungi and insects on the floor of a forest. But to let that stand in the way of the feeling of your beating heart as you lie under a 400 year old hemlock tree, sifting a handful of cool, damp soil through your fingers, is a mistake I hope I've learned to avoid.
As I discover one interesting thing after another from Carson -- the complexity of soil ecology, the perfect interlock between bird, fish and insect ecosystems, I find myself wanting to know more. When I read of the role of spindle fungi in soil, I become drunk with the desire to know a few more details and I resolve to find something good to read on soil. Same thing happens with fish toxicology. This is a very old pattern with me. I've always worried that my thirst to know, to catalog, to memorize was a desire to possess by understanding. Now, having had so many chances to stand in unmediated rapture of the greatness of the sea, the quiet wisdom of a saltmarsh, the brazen confidence of a tiny tidal pool, I wonder whether something else much more disturbing has been going on. Has my desire to relegate all of my experience to a carefully ordered bank of knowledge been an escape? Is this constant needling desire to 'know' an attempt to avert my gaze from the bright glare of life by scooping it up into a rack of books that I can line up on a shelf like a collection of tamed tigers? Is that what academics do? In collecting knowledge, are we spurning wisdom?
It is, perhaps, a wonderful thing to be able to generate a flow chart of the intricate interactions between bacteria, algae, fungi and insects on the floor of a forest. But to let that stand in the way of the feeling of your beating heart as you lie under a 400 year old hemlock tree, sifting a handful of cool, damp soil through your fingers, is a mistake I hope I've learned to avoid.
posted by Colin at 8:30 AM
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