A Work of Love: On Emily Ogden's "On Not Knowing"
Emily Ogden | On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays | University of Chicago Press | 2022 | 136 Pages
Defenses of liberal arts education seem a dime a dozen these days. The title of one recent example, Roosevelt Montás’ Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, is indicative of their usual format: memoir adorns and supports an impassioned and argumentative defense of the value of the humanities. Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays is not of this genre. Rather it is a short collection of brief lyrical essays with names such as “how to swim,” “how to give birth,” “how to turn a corner,” and “how to stay.” The book’s tone and structure are decidedly non-argumentative. And yet, Ogden, an English professor at UVA, could have accurately titled On Not Knowing “How to Defend the Liberal Arts”—it is, in its unassuming way, a truly superb case for (a life in) the humanities.
Ogden’s primary target in On Not Knowing is a kind of knowledge-assuming stance which she dubs “knowingness.” Knowingness is acting from a (literal or internalized) manual, script, or theory; it is to inhabit a position that takes itself to be authoritative, which has already to some extent pre-digested the situation it confronts. Situations demand differing degrees of knowingness, with knowledge itself being more or less essential depending on circumstance. For instance, your doctor, lawyer, and electrician better possess the knowledge relevant to their respective roles; if you need to change your car’s oil, follow the instructions in the manual. But in more open-ended situations, such as in dealing with other persons, creatures, or art, knowledge is less important, and knowingness can be problematic or even inappropriate. It can foreclose the possibility of spontaneity, surprise, and change; it can constitute ethical blindness. Most of life is not—or should not be treated as—merely a perpetually unfinished (self-)checklist. Human beings are not (yet) simply agglomerations of skills and preferences. The essays of On Not Knowing aim to illuminate the dangers of “knowingness” and elucidate aspects of what Ogden calls “unknowingness”: the capacity “to hold the position of not knowing yet,” the ability “to live with the dimness that I will mostly inhabit.”
The relation between what I have called Ogden’s “argument” and each individual essay is always angular. But the hazards of knowingness—and particularly those of self-knowingness—are perhaps most directly addressed in “how to listen” and “how to have a breakthrough.”
“How to listen” is lightly focused on surprise. It opens with an anecdote from the psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle about a fellow analyst who becomes distracted by a beautiful pigeon outside his window. By the time he reels his attention in, his patient has undergone a striking change: she seems to have suddenly (after many months) moved on from her ex. A friend of Ogden’s speculates that the patient also saw the pigeon, and the surprise of its beauty provoked her revelation—perhaps “the pigeon changed her, directly.” Ogden writes:
Surprise matters to aesthetic experience, as it does to a cure. To form a taste is a joy, but to have a taste imperils the very pleasure that led you to form it in the first place. There I am, liking the sort of thing I like. I have a personality, but do I have a passion?
Knowledge interferes with experience (as anyone familiar with the Judgement of Paris—the twentieth-century one—knows). Do I like what I like because I like it, or because I believe (“know”) I like it? This is a skepticism that Ogden acutely feels— “I am skeptical of what I love, and of whether I love it or have been pretending, all this time, to be the kind of person who would”—so much so that her skepticism is only ever absent during moments of overwhelming aesthetic surprise, when she is conscious of a thing she loves but not conscious that it is such a thing. This, however, is what we might call a “professor problem.” More of us are probably too secure in, rather than skeptical of, our tastes—particularly the negative ones (those things about which we say (if we’re being generous) “it’s not my thing”). We become attached to the personalities our tastes constitute because they legibly differentiate us from others (in the marketplace which is our world) and because they lessen the attentive burden that the world makes upon us (we can rule out huge swaths of potential experience as out of bounds, “not for us”). But in doing so, we may often be blind to the ways in which we routinize the things we like, numbing them; and we may close ourselves off from new joys. These problems of attachment and security are central to “how to have a breakthrough” (the following essay), which deals with romantic love and sexual desire (but is also focused around the cave on the Greek island of Patmos in which the Book of Revelation was dictated to John the Divine).
One of the troubles with love (aesthetic or romantic) is that it always falls off its initial peak. Ogden tells us that at twenty she expected to soon be in love, and “planned before then to have had sex with enough people that I would have mastered desire…temptation would no longer tempt me.” In this way she hoped to prevent the “deadening” of her future love: she would have found her partner, and all potential others would be (happily) out of bounds. But no map of desire or aesthetic taste can be more than provisional; no boundary is permanent. To rejigger a line from Heraclitus (through Annie Dillard), desire is “ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.” When she eventually does find a life-partner (coincidentally named John), Ogden realizes not only the futility but the folly of her earlier schemes. If the intensity of their love does “deaden,” this is a pre-condition for its rebirth, and for a life that contains other pleasures and necessities. “The urgency has to depart. I do not want, all the time, to do this all the time. I have other work.” Ogden demonstrates here a synthesis between openness and security, unknowingness and commitment. It is a way of living that she can live with, a pattern that sustains her for the present—in a way, all one can ask for.
And yet the frame of On Not Knowing is not merely the personal, it is the personal in the political, the collective, which is (today) to say the personal in the apocalyptic. This is clearly set out in the first essay, “how to catch a minnow,” though it then recedes into the background:
Conceptual efforts stumble in the face of the world’s vast calamitous tides. Nonetheless, it is human beings who, in the aggregate, have set those tides on foot. No act, no failure to act, no use or squandering of resources that does not mark me as the author of another’s destruction…As difficult as it is for me to think one thought among a proliferation of thoughts, I would appear to be, at the same time, effortlessly prolific in my complicity. My school has destroyed a planet.
Some readers might be disappointed by how little explicit mention of climate (or other) politics there is in On Not Knowing, beyond liberal hand-wringing and confessions of privilege. The ethical burden of an extremely privileged life in the third decade of the twenty-first century seems to be raised only to be avoided: “In the shadow of catastrophe, was I rinsing out dirty socks? Was I commenting on Melville?...I only know how to evade the question.” Yet there is a crucial difference between momentarily sidestepping this burden—internalized for Ogden as a fundamental concern—and dismissing it. Could Ogden have been more ethically self-scrutinizing in On Not Knowing? Does she give the appearance of occasionally letting herself off the hook a bit too easily? Certainly. Could she have been more explicit, more didactic, about contemporary ethical and political imperatives? Yes—but then she would not have written this book. And unknowingness is not unrelated to the political struggle for climate justice—the two may be intimately connected.
We can see one such connection through “how to turn the corner,” in which Ogden meditates on the twentieth-century jazz singer Blossom Dearie, whose “voice is ingenuous to such a degree that you could wonder whether it isn’t, in fact, the least ingenuous thing you have ever heard.” Dearie’s voice, combined with lyrics such as “But even though I meet / at each and every corner / with nothing but disaster, / I set my chin a litter higher / Hope a little longer / Build a little stronger / Castle in the air / And thinking you’ll be there / I walk a little faster,” creates music which is, for Ogden, exemplary of an “innocence that is also an irony.” Dearie maintains (or performs) a capacity for hope despite having encountered “nothing but disaster.” This is a hope characterized by unknowingness; a hope which refuses to know how long its odds are, which hopes against them—something we may require today, as political and environmental conditions make such hope both more necessary and more naïve than ever. The opposite pole to this unknowing hope would be a knowing cynicism (which might call itself a “realism”), exemplified in “how to come back to life” by a psychoanalytic patient who believes with equanimity that she knows when she will die, and in this way has “mastered death.” The knowingness of unknowable knowledge (the date of one’s death, the futility of combatting climate charge, that which is politically “impossible,” etc.) is a temptation because hope (the dual possibility of failure and success) is difficult and demanding. But this kind of “knowledge” is perverse and deadening: as Adam Phillips has it, “it assumes that otherness…is redundant, that it has nothing to offer us, that it brings nothing—or just rage and disappointment—to the occasion.” It occasions a death of the Other, which is a death of the living self.
On Not Knowing, by contrast, is nothing if not enlivening. There is palpable joy on every one of these pages: the joys of life, literature, and thought. The subtitle—How to Love and Other Essays—might seem presumptuous (or ironic) at the bookstore, but after reading, its aptness becomes apparent. Love, or intimacy, is the subject of Ogden’s work, just as much when she is writing about Melville and Hardwick as when she is writing about sex, marriage, or motherhood. The philosopher Richard Rorty wrote towards the end of his life that he wished he had known more poems by heart because he would have “lived more fully” with those poems, “just as I would have if I had made more close friends.” Threaded throughout On Not Knowing, intertwined with scenes and reflections from Ogden’s experiences as a young woman (on a farm in France and as a travel guide writer / serial seducer in Greece), with her partner John, in nature, and as the mother of twin boys are many literary and philosophical friends: Emerson, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Hardwick, Calvino, the philosopher Stanley Cavell, the contemporary poets Mary Ruefle and Brian Blanchfield, the psychoanalysts D.W. Winnicott, Adam Phillips, and Anne Dufourmantelle, among others. Some of these writers Ogden seems to merely use, dipping into their respective oeuvres for an apt word or phrase (Blanchfield’s “near terms,” Calvino’s “lightness,” Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse”), but she uses them, as (me via Ogden via Winnicott) “the infant a mother nurses freely needs to exploit her.” On other occasions, her love for her interlocutors (like an older but still young child’s) is apparent and moving—“the matter of poems belongs to us, it cannot be cut away without a scar.” At times she even seems to merge with them (to go back even further): the boundaries between Ogden and her inspirations (friends, progenitors) blur.
Somewhere between a mother (a gender-neutral term for Winnicott) and a friend, a companion in life and thought: Ogden is and will be this for me.
Readers will put On Not Knowing down (for the moment) with a reinvigorated desire to live. Readers will understand (or at least have glimpsed) that to live fully is to always be open to being surprised, and they will see how succumbing to the temptation of knowingness is to foreclose risk and therefore kill that which makes life worth living. Or maybe they won’t. Perhaps they will disagree with these conclusions; maybe their principle “takeaways” will be fragments of Ogden’s wonderfully lyrical prose. I hope other readers will surprise me. But I also hope that they will see (as Ogden so clearly does) that life and literature are coextensive—and that the joyous and impossibly demanding task of each is love.