A circumference of knowing

“The horror of the 20th century is the enormity of event and smallness of the reverberations” Norman Mailer

It is eerie and strange with what disturbing certainty you can know things about people you don’t know, have never met, have never even heard of. Like those 1400 people lost when that ocean liner sank last month, all lying on the bottom of the ocean right now, who had no more intention of being there than you or I do. For example they each knew secret things about themselves that no one else knew. They had each once scratched an itch on their body and even if you narrow it down to the legs you still have the slightly reduced but nearly absolute certainty that you can’t live even a year without scratching or briefly rubbing at an itch or annoyance on your legs, you can even narrow it down to the left leg and still be left with the disturbing certainty of nearly knowing and then there is the nebulous but absolute knowledge that they had each farted when alone and further that at one of those moments they were also gratified that they were alone and then of course it is absolutely certain that each had once also withheld or suppressed a fart when in the presence of others and even though it cannot be know what each of them had thought or felt about balloons it can be known with certainty that they all, each, had knowledge of balloons, had known the moon and ocean and stars, the cat, horse, cow, and dog just as it can be known that at some point in their lives they had all had that mysterious sensation of a sudden sense of well being that sweeps over one like a sharp draft of wind from a window and leaves as swiftly.

They had almost certainly known love’s shadow boxing dance spiraling indiscernibly but definitely into lust and we know that each person on the bottom of that ocean floor had picked their nose, looked at themselves in a mirror, known a sharp ache of acute disappointment, the slapping stab of humiliations. Each had known angers eruption, each had surrendered gratefully to sleep. They had each known degrees of hunger and the satisfaction of eating, degrees of thirst and the satisfaction of drinking. Each had experienced fatigue, the rush of energy, the surprise of surprise, the shock of shock, and the exhilaration of exhilaration. They had all known reds and yellows and blues and greens and browns and oranges and purples and blacks and whites by sight and knew the alphabet, months and the season’s weathers by heart. We know with disturbing certainty that they all laughed, laughed lightly with it hardly entering into awareness and erupted suddenly with surprised deep laughter that momentary released them from the weight of life, though as for crying our certainty must be more cautious, as grief and loss are more circumspect and demanding in their criteria and conditions for access and display.

The most hidden of displays however, the layered mystery of simultaneity–that brought them all together in a tragic coinciding of time, place, and situation, mostly without notice by them because such coinciding entirely escapes our attention, like the people standing in the grocery store checkout line that have each come from their separate conceptions in time and place, through a perilous infancy and a dangerous succession of traffic intersections to be strangers, all standing together in their mature quest for groceries unaware of the actual mystery and their precarious participation in it that had been somehow unknowingly purchased by each of them just as was, we can be almost certain, that final strange congregating of the 1400 strangers finally lying together, on the bottom of the ocean floor like family.