More 'Just Thinking' Pieces
In Search of a Knowable Absence
Fear
In Search of a Knowable Absence
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John Knowles in A Separate Peace said:
Now here…was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn’t even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identity its presence. 1
I have been thinking about that. I am drawn to Knowles’ premise. I want it to be true. But I am not sure it is. I doubt that we identify something only when we know its absence. Do we identify life as life, for example, only when we know death? Obviously not.
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But do we identify love as love only after we know indifference? If so, how do we first know indifference? Wouldn’t it require our having first known love?
(Just for the record, homo sapiens is, as far as we know, the only animal that gets itself tied up in theoretical arguments like this. We are the only creatures, apparently, who know that we know something. So I am glad that in this moment I am the only creature in our garden that is wondering about this. I might do well, though, to shed my homo sapiens drive to know that I know, and just sing or dash for nuts.)
So no, I do not think it is literally true that we cannot identify a feeling for what it is unless we have already known its converse. But I still savour the poetic thrust of Knowles’ observation, the poignance of it.
And I am entirely drawn to his assertion of a “knowable absence.” How can we, I wonder, achieve the knowing of an absence?
If fear is our constant state, for example, how do we know the absence of it? Only when it stops? Only when our hearts no longer pummel our days, our minutes?
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What is that like, I wonder, the cessation of fear? I don’t know. Because I, like Knowles, know fear that “surrounds and fills my days and nights.” Not fear that immobilises, not often anyway. Not fear that precludes confidence, enjoyment, fascination, conviction, loving, savouring, imagining. But a steady drone of something.
Something mystifying.
Or not. Maybe not mystifying at all. Maybe continuous, cryonic fear emerges from, feeds on, an untrue assumption lived as true, an assumption easily identified.
I am afraid all of the time. The assumption?
I am dying.
Stamped in the foetal brain during premature contractions for four months. Imprints of the swim of diethylstilbestrol (DES) in her in bed for those four months, her unmoving preservation of life, these lives. “You can have other babies,” they told her. “I want these babies,” she said.
For me:
It is ending. We are dying. We cannot trust. We can. We can’t. We must.
Probably not, you say (because most people do). A foetus doesn’t absorb the mother’s fear and then learn to manufacture its own expressible version of it as life’s immutable blueprint.
Maybe. Maybe. But maybe it does. Maybe I did.
What I know is that I do not ever know the absence of fear. Not ever. And I search every day/hour, for a way to fool it, then to end it, and for the first time, know its absence. Its absence. Think of that. The absence of fear.
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Must that require a presence of something else?
Maybe you are not afraid all of the time. Maybe you can tell me about the presence that replaces fear. Maybe if I have words for that, I can create it. A new presence, by definition, would eliminate an old, wouldn’t it? You can’t have, vying in a given second, opposite valid presences.
So maybe, if I knew the presence of something else, I would know the absence of fear. And maybe, logically, the new presence would be a true liberating assumption:
Although I am in the process of dying because we all are; and although I will die fully sometime because we all will, I am not dying today. Nor tomorrow.
With positive brevity:
I will live today and tomorrow.
And:
If I knew that I will live today and tomorrow, how would I feel in this moment?
I will absorb that, that titanic question and its somersaulting wondrous replies, again and again, and see if I can materialise a knowable absence of fear, a presence of non-fear.
I want to live that presence, and not die until I have.
That is all I ask.
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1 Knowles, John, A Separate Peace, Macmillan, NYC, 1960, p.10
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