Rivers of Knowing

And the company of wolves

A month or so ago,

David Knowles

, a writer I love to read, asked me to write something about knowing, after I had written this in a short Note about an earlier piece,

Somewhere between the fort-town of Facts and the river of Knowing is a meadow where I gather leaves of wild faith.

I was making notes, mulling it over, as you do, when a friend died. Washed downstream into a gully of grief, several of us swam together and kept each other afloat. Now, on the banks of that peaty force, I sit to regather my thoughts and find them changed. I cannot write about epistemology¹, not only because I have not read the requisite books, but also because I do not keep a kenning that could be culled and flayed thus.

So, I will describe some of the different ways I ever know anything, (if I ever do), as I have never tried to list them in words. Perhaps it will chime with how you know what you know.

Then, I will write of a recent long moment spent outside time with my pack.

Attention is immersion

Attend long enough and with luck, knowing may drench you to the bone.

What do we seek?

An ongoing baptism of the real.

This is wild faith knowing.

In vino veritas

After impromptu Flanders and Swann, but before cheese, and after at least a glass of wine at Iain’s, I said to Dougald,

‘I am sorry, I don’t always know how I know things’.

‘That’s ok,’ he said, and laughed.

Then, stupidly (but honestly at the time), I said I was the happiest person I knew. What idiot calls down fate like that?

This is foolish-yet-true knowing.

Risks

I remember

Nicholas.Wilkinson

writing that ‘just knowing’ can be dangerous. I agree, it can be a door slammed in the face of much-needed discussion, change or compromise. Both religious and atheist friends and family use the fact that they personally ‘just know’ something to be true to suggest they also know how other people should or should not live.

If I speak below of my own ‘just knowing’, be assured, it doesn’t even always tell me how I should live.

Usually, it tells me what I must attend to, what I must relinquish, and what I must repair.

I say ‘must’, aware that is an unpopular word these days, freighted with obligation and lacking the sugar coating of apparent choice. The T’ai Chi Classics say ‘Eat bitter’, and ‘Small loss, small gain. Big loss, big gain.’ Quite so. My ‘must’ has been proved by hindsight to be completely reliable. So I take this knowing’s lack of graces on the chin.

This is bitter knowing.

The gold testing stone

The body is the gold testing stone, the place where I assay any new knowledge, whether from books, experience, conversation, dreams or intuition, what I have learned from others, what I trust as facts. For instance, last year I was emphatically sure I had met my match, my heart wished it so, my head thought it a very nice idea. But my kidneys immediately felt as though they had been kicked very skilfully by a T’ai Chi master² and my head felt like it would explode, leading me to spend two afternoons in a series of noisy MRI and CAT scanners. Scans proved I had both a heart and a brain, but neither could at that moment be entirely trusted with my best interests. Only my nerves told the truth about what ‘I’ knew. Looking back, I clearly knew what I know now, but no thoughts in words nor feelings of the heart would allow a chink of introspective light to enter and illuminate things.

This had happened years before, just long enough ago for me to forget the inconvenient accuracy of physical pain. It is the final call to my will when well out of alignment, head turned, heart un-tempered. No one else is necessarily to blame. It is (sadly) neither a narcissist nor time-waster detector. It only tells me what’s wrong with my posture in relation to another: clinging, leaning, grabbing, blocking…

Wrong relationship, not just to other people, but also to outcomes, is often obscured beneath wishful thinking. I will not forget the ache of this particular knowing again. Perhaps it is a distillation of lessons learned in the martial arena, decanted into the civil sphere.

This is nerve knowing.

No choice

For me, if there is still a choice, there is no choice to be made.

I wait. There is no point making more lists of pros and cons, that’s for before I even know I will need to choose. When there is no qualm, no sense of this or that, just a clear path ahead, however difficult, then the time for decision-making is over. Each time I exercise my will to make ‘make a choice’, (except for trivial things, of menu, clothes or some such ordinary daily thing), it is the wrong choice, even if it is technically correct. The way in which the choice happens is where the virtue resides, or is absent. There is no residue of bad feeling or equivocation after this method. I learned it intuitively over five years or so of T’ai Chi pushing hands, and only named it because it was something I wanted to pass on more easily to my students.

Any decision I could make about how to yield to my teacher’s pushes were never as good as just immersing myself fully in the moment and practising uprightness, softness and sticking. My stupid cleverness tried to have good ideas, solve the problem, do tricksy things. Luckily, at least 100 times a session, these not very good ideas, machinations of the left hemisphere, I expect, were shown to fall short. So now, in most but not all situations, I stay connected until I can feel what is right to do. It doesn’t mean I will always succeed, or prevail, but it does mean I have no new regrets.

This is paradoxical knowing.

What calls?

What directs the spotlight of our attention to that darting kingfisher, the loved one entering the room behind us, the stag beetle which we would have crushed upon the path? When we reside, even briefly, in open expanded awareness, the whole world presences to us, and we to everything in it. Suddenly there is plenty of time to place our foot two inches to the left, to spot the trout leaping, to feel the beloved close by and to turn, already smiling.

This is open knowing.

Oracle

It became something of a joke in bands I was in that the lyrics of each previous album would foretell my life ahead. It was no trick. After all, my dreams, scribbled notebooks and lyrics were all springing directly from the source of all my deepest wishes, the unconscious. By the time I wrote the lyrics for songs on some of Susumu Yokota’s last albums, I was aware not to look too closely while improvising, and just to allow the syllable sounds and rhythm to suggest words, rather than impose a poetic structure, or specific meaning. I let his music lead and attempted to get my will out of the way. Needless to say, these were the most uncannily oracular of all my lyrics.

This is a gently prophetic knowing.

(But it must only be looked at in retrospect, else I am swiftly separated from the present moment and become an onlooker in my own life. So I keep faith with not-knowing, as well as un-knowing, instead. These afford me greater proximity to the Great Mystery and to love, which turns its face from pronouncements, and slips away like a shy guest. But it should be listed for completeness’ sake.)

‘You can prove anything with facts’

I know that it is wrong to starve a nation, to bomb hospitals, to target civilians during war, or even so-called war. I know that the leaders of my country are corrupt, and have been since at least 1979. I know that had John Smith not died, and Tony Blair not become Prime Minister, that he would not have gone to war with Iraq alongside the US, and the whole world might now be utterly, perhaps wonderfully, different. I know that whether Shakespeare was one person, ‘William Shakespeare’, another person entirely, or indeed, several people with a handy stooge and pseudonym, that his plays move me more than any others written over the next 400 years.

Only the first line of that last paragraph is knowing. It is gut knowing.

It regards ethics, which is (hopefully) still learned in the home and during young life. The rest of the paragraph is belief, and then opinion. Neither of these are knowing, even though they use the words ‘I know’.

Tricky, I know.

Tara, the first swan I got to know in person.

Between-ness

Sometimes it is just settled. Between two people an understanding spontaneously arises, or between a human and their beloved creature, a horse, a cat, a dog, perhaps. Between the shepherd and her flock, the falconer and his bird. Between my friend and his neighbourhood swans, ducks, sheldrakes and - incredibly - moorhens, even. There is the knowing that is usually called ‘trust’ in English, a word which does not do justice to the shared knowledge residing underneath the part we can label. We say we ‘put our trust in someone’, but this is the language of bankers and empire, debts and promissory notes. I do not love it.

We do not put anything anywhere. This knowing is not positional or transactional but gravitational. The turbid water between two apparently separate souls settles, the water clears. Earth drops down, clear water rises. All that is needed is time, the pull of the earth, and that no one picks everything up and shakes it violently. This knowing would be far more common - is indeed the basis of community - if we would just stop shaking ourselves and everybody else up and peering into them to judge their thoughts.

We rest our hand on the other and both nod and then scratch our chins in unison. A certain glance. The cat’s silent meow, or the cocked head of the dog. There is a commitment, a laying alongside-ness of our energies, we have intuitively reached a shared understanding.

This is the birth of the Third Heart knowing.

Now, as I sit here, tired from a day of packing for months away from home, I feel all the other knowings asking me to tell you about themselves. So, I will return to them soon, I think, in a slightly different context, perhaps. But now I must record this for you before it would be too late and disturb my neighbours.

I have a curious good feeling in my belly, so I will take this as a good sign, and stop here. It is easy to over-eat, especially with words and sentences.

---

This week’s good thing is a Wolf Pack made of people.

Two west country wolves, a Dorset wolf, two northern wolves, two Scottish wolves, and three Scandinavian wolves, (one of whom is still a nipper) met up in the woods at equinox with a desert wolf, two Tooting wolves and a whole host of other animals and friends. We howled. We ate and drank and mourned our lost wolf, who had been by far the best singer of the pack.

Tuesday evening until Thursday morning was a time outside time, for me, ceremonial time. We nestled into one another, leant on and listened to each other. I held someone up and then was held up, in turn. We laughed a hell of a lot and I mindfully broke my Lenten fast from alcohol for one night to raise toasts and better empty out my heart of grief.

Thank you, wolf pack. I can and must now run all spring without a sniff of any of us in the real. But every time I see la luna llena I’ll remember Dougie reading this. ³

Is my soul asleep?    by Antonio Machado

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

Translated by Robert Bly

If you cannot afford a paid subscription but would like to comment, just send me an email by replying to this newsletter, or message me via Substack, and I will comp you six months for free.

1. The study of knowledge and the theory of knowledge, how we know things and what can be known.

2. Which has happened to me and felled me instantly. It is a uniquely interesting kind of pain that one never forgets.

3. All photos this week are from 2010 in Arcadia, which is a name for a famously beautiful reach of The Thames near Richmond.