Although I see the stars, I no longer pretend to know them

I’ve been thinking about the ways that art and writing return us to our internal home. As the poet and editor Christian Wiman writes: “Who knows what atomic energies are unleashed by a solitary man or woman quietly encountering some arrangement of language that gives their being—shunted aside by chores and fears and who knows what—back to them?” Yes, who knows. When we create, our work reveals reasons and rewards we could not know any other way.

Poets and storytellers and mystics remind us of the unknowable, of our longing toward that which is larger than ourselves. They speak and create in precision and approximation, where wiggle room and story and metaphor tell the unsayable truths. “Although I see the stars, I no longer pretend to know them,” writes the monk Thomas Merton. More than fifty years later, the poet Joy Harjo has a reply: “Beneath a sky thrown open / to the need of stars / to know themselves against the dark.” 

Given the space to move, our creative acts become a waltz of flexibility and courage, of generosity and perseverance, of discipline and lightheartedness, of making a turn and being frightened, of making a turn and feeling yourself in synch with the universe. It’s serious work and it’s holy play. It matters desperately and it matters not at all. And sometimes it matters simply because where there was nothing now there is something. 

And making a life is no different. I once heard two women in a cafeteria talking, strangers fumbling over topics and silence like hikers searching for a riverbed to follow. And just when the food was finished and it looked like it was only dead ends, they found it. It was something about St. Louis and a question and the other exclaiming “Yes, I know the Smarts!” with such enthusiasm it was clear this was only a stand-in for “Yes, I know you and you know me!” or whatever that is called when strangers become kindred become rivers become one. Which is to say mutuality, which is to say these lives we’ve been given and the stories we tell about them are far more baffling and connected than we imagine.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 53