Monday, September 15, 2025

Not-knowing widens the world


Quote from Yuvan Aves in Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane 

"I am thankful for the unknowable field" wrote Yuvan. "It lets me see my paper wasps with wonder every day. It also lets me see my sister and uncle in some place together in the hereafter, unknowable from here. It grips me with fright sometimes when its field shows me the abysses, the thresholds of the knowable. Death among them -- As though life and death were a binary! Then the unknowable field queers that binary, showing so many unknowables as deep as death, in life itself."   (p. 151)

In the notes section of the book, I find that this comes from March 6, 2023 Instagram Post:  The post is about "awe" and "unknowability"

I don’t know - is a good place to start for anything, I think. Why, for instance, the paper wasps shifted nest from inside the vacuum cleaner cover in my balcony to the white-flowering Ixora plant among all the other plants, after the Mandous cyclone. Most of the previous nest in the first site has gone missing too. Did they chew up their old paper cells and regurgitate their new ones from them? I'm not sure. There are about 15 cells and 10 wasps in the old site with the shrunken nest, and about 200 cells and atleast 40 wasps on the two-tiered Ixora nest. I couldn’t count too well as the wasps get jittery when I peer at them. They vibrate their wings, stomp their feet and their lit-camphor yellow eyes glare penetratingly, fumingly into mine. Their sign is very clear even across species - “ back off, you’re too close”. Who stayed at the vacuum cleaner and who moved? How did they decide? I don’t know. But not-knowing widens the world and the wasps and lets me keep discovering ‘intra-connections’, as Karen Barad may put it.

When two men came to fix the pigeon mesh in my balcony I told them about the paper wasps and how we’ve been living with them and them with us for the past three years. The balcony is mostly their space, and the sweat bees’ and blue-banded bees’. I warned them not to disturb the Ixora. But they did by mistake, brushed against it and gave it a shake. A cloud of bright orange panic swarmed around the plant. Yet quite courteously only one wasp came flying out till the fingers of one of the men, stung him on his knuckle and went back. He took it lightly. And as the work went on the wasps flew into and out of the balcony - from Ixora to Neem to Tecoma, from home to open-plots to the apartment gardens and balconies and back. Like winged collagen, like connective tissue with a temper.

I’ve been feeling drawn to ‘unknowability’ this last month and the vastly varied human relationships with it. In the last four years I’ve witnessed the death of four close people. For three of them I crushed their hot burnt bones into ash and dissolved them into the sea. So it is not surprising that I wonder, with some urgency, what happens at death. I’ve been reading about near-death experiences - both the literature against and for it. I stayed with a bunch of studies which took the middle ground - recording the narratives of cardiac arrest patients in intensive care units, who, as it were, (brain) died and came back. All of them across countries, independently seem to say similar things. There are certain things they see and feel and understand somewhat commonly when they die - but there was no way to explain this medically or even verify its truth. This was beyond the threshold of certain-knowing. Those who do have these experiences, their life and perspective is totally changed - for reasons immeasurable, unknowable. Mortality is another word for the small sphere of the known. We become soil and seagrass. Or there is some hereafter. Or there is a superposition of both planes, and more - like the beautifully metaphysical Euler’s formula. It is unknowable from here.

I’ve generally grown wary of the following voices and have found it to be a healthy practice. Those which say 1) Everything is known (often a religious claim) 2) Everything can be known (sometimes a scientific claim, but not only) 3)The unknown/unknowable is not of any consequence (almost always the stance of an industrial/corporate entity causing ecological devastation). A good amount of my work revolves around creating hell for the third category of entities - infusing into their narratives and documents unknown animacies and the unknowable of every kind. Un-spinning their stories inside out and tearing them apart. This is every activist’s campaign partner.

 I am thankful for the unknowable field. Dacher Keltner, a scientist of Awe - studies this human relationship with the unknown/unknowable and tells us that this field gives our life meaning. We call it awe. It lets me see my paper wasps with wonder everyday. It lets me wake up excited for work as an educator. It also lets me see my sister and uncle in some place together in the hereafter, unknowable from here. Un-feelable? I am not sure. It grips me with fright sometimes when the field shows me abysses, the critical thresholds of the knowable. Death among them - as though life and death were a binary. Then the unknowable field comes and queers that belief, showing so many unknowables - as deep as death - in life itself.

On This Day (09/15):

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