To be known

To be known

Samuel Bird

My worn cowboy boots dropped and scuffed their way across the fine marble floor of a museum. My old lumberjack knees were beginning to fail me and I saw a small room with a bench. I had been using the last of the few dollars to my name in an effort to travel around the eastern coast of the United States alone looking at art. I sat down on that bench and pulled the museum map out of my leather jacket and began to scribble notes from the last series of paintings. “This period of art seems to be more of a lamentation of the loss of beauty, than the celebration of it.” I had found that art done well was able to get into the terribly ineffable end of philosophy as metaphilosophy, but I had also found that the spirit of giving up on this human process of meaning-making was a lost art. This post-modern view, I saw not as an enemy, but as what I would respond to in my ideas. I put the paper back in my leather jacket and breathed in for a moment. I opened my eyes to see a painting on the side of the rotunda I was facing. It was of a young boy on a ship led by an angelic being guiding the boat from a cave into a beautiful world. The painting had this celebration of the natural world, as well as something of the human experience. It had a rich, warm, hopeful tone. From the side of my eye, I got a notion to turn and did so to find that same boy in another painting, only now more grown up. The angel was now leaving him to steer on his own as the land seemed to sprout and blossom into the fruition of life. I turned to the next painting to see the boy now as a man. With clasped hands, his tattered ship was now braving violent rapids and stones. My mind expected more to this story as it turned to see the boy now an old man. The angel had returned to the man in his broken boat and pointed aloft to a break in the clouds where a warm light waited for him longingly. A tear, a warm tear fell down my wind-burnt cheeks. Then another. Not a word was said, but a sense of something was expressed here. Another tear as I went back to each story and saw this man as myself. Every small brushstroke seemed to queue in on a secret of life not captured by behaviorists or anthropologists. I went back and forth between each painting as the tears began to stream. Something had been captured that I seemed to have been missing, but more than just expressing it, it had beauty. I stood there in tender reflection and reverence at this moment. Of course, there was a God, I thought. How could there be a moment this divine if it had not been initiated in the first act of creation all to lead to now? I stood there, basking in a light only my soul seemed to see. I pulled the paper from my jacket many times and scribbled away a note here and there. I kept trying to truly perceive and deeply experience this moment and the art that created it, but it seemed no length of time would satisfy me. A reminder in my mind of the tedious travel to my ramshackle dwelling for the night reminded me that I would soon need to part ways with the last of this art that was hopeful and human. I prepared myself to walk out, but first, the plague and the name of this art: The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole. 

I have often sat beholding something and truly want to perceive it. I want to take it in its entirety and transplant it in my mind. From what we know about taking information from the outside world to the inner one, this is not possible. Even if I could know it as it was, I would miss out on seeing it as I am. Beauty can be suggested in the world, but only instantiated in the mind. Still, I sit there gazing, hearing, and soaking in the moment. I want to revel in that process of me perceiving this thing. I will play a song over and over to get to the poignant emotion, watch a sunset until it is long gone, or have a conversation until there is nothing else to say. Out of all the things that are there to be sensed and amaze me, human consciousness seems to stand in a privileged place in my mind. I will talk with someone and ask questions trying to drag their very soul out so that I may see it. In that same expedition to see art, and many before and since, I have talked to the homeless, the wealthy, the farmer, the academic, the father, and the daughter, and from each encounter was met with a richness of being I was dumbfounded I was honored to know them. For each of their twenty, fifty, or eighty years, they were simply existing and I had no idea about it. Now I get to hear the story of how they see themselves, see the cadence and patterns of speech they choose, and any other intricacy that affords me looking into their soul. There may be an eventual exemption, but when I look that close at the core of a human being, I can’t help but feel an affinity toward it. That is not to say that I haven’t met some hardened criminals, angry extremists, or ignorant wealthy people. There may be some people who choose a life I can’t say is good, but not one yet has picked a life that wasn’t beautiful. This is not to say that all lives have the same level of beauty. What some overcome, what they sacrificed, what they lost and found, can make for much better stories and characters. There is one story in particular that I can never forget. 

I was driving out of a neighborhood in the southern United States and saw a man in a tattered plaid shirt swaying from side to side. I pulled over and went up to the man who was speaking gibberish and flailing around. I sat there in silence watching his face, nodding, and showing expressions with each change of tone in his ramblings. I grabbed some food, an extra jacket I had, and some water. I asked him a question, but he would shake and shrivel up. He began to eat as he noticed that he was being perceived. His eyes met my gaze as he realized he was being seen back. I smiled and nodded at him. I kept reaffirming his existence until he became slower, more relaxed and finally sat down on the ground. We looked up at the stars for a moment while I started on a little rant about how pretty they were. I then looked at him and smiled. “May I ask, what is your name?” His face became somber as he seemed to come to himself. Some memories seemed to flash across his mind as he lowered his head. “Joseph.” He said with a tone he hadn’t used up until this point. 

What this man was experiencing was a deep sense of invisibility that came from the shunning looks away from him when he asked for spare change. It was an invisibility that I knew from my time as homeless. One slowly begins to lose sense of oneself. No more could he make sense of himself in another's eye as they all turned away blindly. Knowing the power of this, I have often asked people if they felt seen. Rather than in some frivolous contemporary sense, I meant to say if they thought they existed in my mind or the minds of others. In one of my books, a character is about to die, but she tells her friend she is not scared because she will become what she loves most: A thought. I am honored by the way that I can live on through others, and I love how I get to let others live on through me. This deep sense of perception is even the basis for some concrete reasoning from Berkeley and contemporary biocentrism. Perhaps to be is to be perceived. While I am not committing to this metaphysical claim, I do think it expands on this idea. As I have said before, our minds take random data from the world, process it, make sense of it, and then make it meaningful. I am very wary of culture and like an individual approach for specific reasons, however, I think that the people around us play a vital role in this process. They can help us assign meaning and make sense of the facts. Think of all the times something difficult happened to you, and you went aside with the people involved later and just thought out loud about it later. What seemed like complaining was actually a shared narrative in the making. 

But to know and be known is its own ironic mystery. There are, of course, real steps we can make toward it. I am always thinking of ways to help people open up and allow what they perceive as the truest depth of themselves to be seen. One question I love to ask is: If I could look in your mind right now, what would it be like? I have received so many wonderful answers from this and my own answers have prompted me to write three separate books. There is one person in particular I wanted to know better, but they had some guard up from old habits. I asked them what they would think if I could look into their soul. I asked them what I would see. I asked them if they thought I would see it as good, bad, or something else and if they thought I would be right. These questions lead to a level of introspection that slices through all the ideas of how we should perceive ourselves, whether in guarding arrogance or weakening self-abasement. It has also allowed me to truly know someone, or at least know as well as we can in our epistemic plight. I then sit there, like before this painting, and simply behold. This deep knowing and the affinity that follows with it, I define as a large and vital portion of what love is. 

This will allow us to go about deeply knowing people, but we will soon see that we ourselves are left to be a mystery to others. I think that in the absence of one having something, there is great heroism in giving it to others. However, I think one is not left without power and resources. I have had many moments, feelings, thoughts, memories, and facts that I seemed to plead with reality to let be known. I wanted so deeply for someone to know my stories and the heart that was made through them. No doubt a large part of my writing is me attempting this. However, to a large degree, or at least any, I stand unknown to others. This leads to a deep sense of conceptual isolation. I feel as if no one has braved the conversations and time to attempt to come into my mind. This has limited my ability to be seen and thereby affirm and validate facts, meanings, and experiences. I want so deeply for someone to tell me that the things I overcame were hard. I want people to see that the love I gave was real. I want to be known so that when I die, in their minds I can stay off death. Since my fortune has not allowed this, I have found something else I can do. I can know myself. All those memories, I can work to see them deeply. I can work to understand my story and let it be known. I can affirm my direction in life. This internal and autonomous experiencing and acknowledging of oneself is difficult, but it leads to a direction and drive that is original. There comes a point where we can act out our pain in becoming miserable or making others suffer so that the world can have to see it, or we can learn to see it. This strength to see oneself is held by the greatest of leaders and thinkers. We don’t wait for how we are perceived, but figure out who we are. 

Today, I stood before another image as I tried to soak it in and truly see it, but it wasn’t the canvas of a painting, but the glass of a mirror. I looked at someone who could easily be a stranger if I didn’t work to know him. I ran my mind across his story and allowed him to be known. I recounted all the souls that live on in my mind and I hoped to one day live on in other’s minds. However, there is a sacred consolation that I can know myself. 

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12