When Dante wrote of “the Love that strikes the Solar and the opposite stars,” he was shining a sidewise gleam on the key data of the universe, the data by which all the things coheres. All love is an outstretched hand of curiosity reaching for data — a young acknowledgement of a actuality that’s not your self and a vigorous curiosity in its interiority. Bertrand Russell captured this in his important distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge,” for it is just via love that we get to know something deeply — a panorama, an individual, the world — and it’s love that beckons forth our personal secret data of what makes life price residing.
That’s what poet Aracelis Girmay and her artist sister Ariana Fields discover in What Do You Know? (public library), impressed by the closing traces of Sharon Olds’s tender poem “ Them Asleep.” (“When love involves me and says / What have you learnt? I say This lady, this boy.”)
Web page by web page, love involves the farmer and the seafarer, to the fruit bats and the honeybees, to the forest and the celebrities, asking every what they know, and their solutions come easy and profound like a toddler’s query.
When love involves the nicely and asks,
What have you learnt,
it says,
I do know thirst, I do know abundance.
I do know depth, I do know darkness.
When love involves the ash and asks,
What have you learnt,
the ash says, I do know the secrets and techniques between the volcano and the sky.It says, I do know wandering,
and I do know the language of fireside.
When love involves braveness and asks,
What have you learnt,
braveness says,
I do know talking, despite the fact that I’m afraid,
and I do know the day by day work of holding on.
The constellations know “the story of distance and the language of sunshine,” the rocks know “that change is feasible, even when it takes one million years,” the land is aware of “the laughter of kids who run under the birds” and “the enjoyment of occurring and on and on.”
What emerges is a glowing sense that love will not be one thing we do however one thing we’re, one thing the world is, one thing vaster than area and older than time.
Couple What Do You Know? with Kamau & ZuZu Discover a Manner, additionally by Girmay, then revisit Mary’s Room — a superb thought experiment in regards to the limits of information.
