On Uncertainty
Is it healthy to know something? Is it a sign of health, to be certain of knowledge?
Sometimes as a migraine begins—a stage of the illness called prodrome—I fall into a hard state of uncertainty. Like other aspects of migraine, this state erases awareness of itself; it arrives as a sudden totality. It’s not that I feel uncertain about something; I, my whole self, am uncertain.
Over 20+ years I’ve had a couple thousand migraines, but I often don’t know right away that I’m having one, don’t recognize what’s happening even as the episode follows the same pattern as always. For migraine sufferers, this failure of recognition is common—though I thought I might personally just be very stupid until I read Oliver Sacks’ helpful book on the disorder. A loved one may need to ask you: do you have a migraine? The brain stops witnessing itself, entranced by its own alienating involuting habits.
A few years ago I gave a reading from a novel and participated in a long Q&A at a bookstore in this prodromal, uncertain state (though I didn’t know it, not in the way that would help). I was already feeling insecure about this event, for emotional not neurological reasons, since my interlocutor was someone who truly impressed me and whose expertise, I thought, overshadowed my own, so why was I here—though graciously she didn’t seem to see things that way, which only made her more impressive. From the start of the night I was too intimidated. (And it didn’t help the situation that my father’s memorial service was planned for the following day.)
As I spoke that evening, I found I was in a familiar trap, one I sometimes build for myself while teaching: I begin anticipating every counterargument or opposing viewpoint, every legitimate perspective someone could have that might foreclose what I was saying, or need me to have said it differently, to have connected with them otherwise, opened for them a different path. So, instead of saying any one thing clearly, I start to hedge, saying something and countering it, or presenting multiple possibilities around every opinion or conclusion, declining to offer my own opinion or clear knowledge (though I really have them) and instead presenting a confusing little garden of possible opinions people could have and why. I had written one specific novel, but I oddly discussed it more as an abstract set of possibilities. You seemed like someone who was deeply ambivalent, a friend said to me after (or deeply interested in ambivalence?)—to be fair I asked him into saying this, since I knew things hadn’t gone totally well. Sometimes after teaching I say to myself or to friends: I wish I’d been more… crisp. Student evaluations give me the lowest marks in categories like “answers questions clearly.” I know what they mean. I tend to treat questions as an invitation not simply to answer but to consider the question itself, to explore the ground out of which the question arose. I tend to create more uncertainty, when someone was looking for knowledge.
To myself I speak of uncertainty not ambivalence—though the back-and-forth-ing and multiplicity described by that word are there too. But at my migrainous worst I’m in a state that precedes even the clear options of a back-and-forth: it feels impossible that I could or should ever know, or say for sure, that I could ever say the right thing, and not inevitably say what would later prove to be the wrong thing, for oneself or for others. It feels less and less possible to communicate, to know how to say something and know what one would want to say. A deep lonely debilitating wave of feeling asserts that anything you say couldn’t be wanted or understood, that your knowledge might be as flawed as you are, that everyone knows something about you that you can’t know, which is that you don’t know yourself and your thinking can’t be relied on.
This uncertainty may take familiar, everyday forms—rewriting an email for far too long; getting stuck in the kitchen, unable to decide what to have for lunch—but then descends into a full neurological episode, flooding the brain’s whole city of working knowledge.
Throughout my writing life, illness has been an obstacle, a lack of ability, at best a subject. Illness means you can’t write. You can’t write that day, for example, while you’re ill, and worse, if there’s enough illness you can’t write any day, not for a while, since you’re so behind in work and more work and email and laundry and groceries and seeing or replying to anyone. I’m very suspicious of my sick brain, such that if I sit down to write and then later learn I was getting a migraine, I wonder if I should throw that day’s efforts out, discount whatever I’d thought, in that corrupted state, might be good.
But this week I was remembering how much I value, in works of literature, states of active, ethically charged uncertainty. And that perhaps this value extended from what I’d otherwise thought of as a negative or worthless, involuntary realm of experience. Earlier this summer I thought I might try—I said to myself I should—to write with, or back to, my sick brain, to value its unwanted knowledge, including its uncertainty about knowledge. What does that mean? I don’t know yet. I’ve been trying to write a novel in ways that honor this kind of repetitive shamed circling, of knowing only for-now or not feeling like one could know, of not feeling like one has anything smart or possible to say, but here you are anyway, alive and vibrating. Skepticism toward certainty can be very useful: an ethos of suspicion of certainty, a desperate love of the field of the question. Let the sick brain in. Let its circling non-arriving thinking into the realm of healthy knowing.
A friend recently described a new critical project she’d encountered, which would propose an aesthetic category of contemporary literature, a new label. I was sympathetic to the project but for seemingly no reason I instantly rejected the idea of this label. I just distrust, or honestly hate, many forms of names, labels, and categories—which so often seem so exclusionary or presumptuous, like they might leave out the most important thing, or just serve as a decoy for the desire for recognition. I’ve thought this distrust must be either cause or effect of studying a lot of Buddhist language theory when young (being young is so cool and optimistic, I can’t believe I read all that). Here names and labels are contingent, temporary, a stage that has always been passing, blurring at the borders, already ghosts.
But perhaps this distrust is born, too, of practice living unwillingly in the prodromal realm of uncertainty.
To pursue the ghost, through the field out of which the question arises, may become a path to the future?
I want to point to a few works of literature that I think render an active and vital state of uncertainty—a bravely humbly incomplete non-arriving ethics. Each writer excavates an intimately known uncertainty: what should I do? How would I know what to do? How may anyone know someone, when we have already failed one another and may be lost beyond even our own knowledge? One example: Eric Fair’s Consequence, a memoir of his work as a contract interrogator who participated in torture—who tortured people—in Iraq. Fair builds his book around a passage by Maimonodes: “For example, a person is not forgiven until he pays back his fellow man what he owes him and appeases him. He must placate him and approach him again and again until he is forgiven.” This phrase approach him again and again haunts the book and its readers. In this phrase is an ethics of non-arrival, never-knowing, not-certainty: although the sentence ends with the promised forgiveness, the emphasis on approach argues that you must spend your time not knowing when forgiveness may occur, how, why, will it ever be earned, what forms will it need, in what form will it leave you. You must live in that state, continuing to approach and approach. Fair never arrives into the place of forgiveness, not in this book; he can only arrive into ongoingness and the testimony of shame that may help prevent future harm, keep others like him from doing what he did. He cannot reach those he’s harmed, so his approach is endless, its forms needing continual renewal.
And also, very differently: Jeannie Vanasco’s Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, her brilliant, careful, raw document of a dialogue she initiated with a former friend who sexually assaulted her when she was a teen. Vanasco raises doubts continually about her own process—why she undertook this dialogue; how she approached it and behaved; how he did. She doesn’t seem to have had a guide or model; she moves according to her own instincts, the shape of her life and thought, and the wisdom created in conversations with caring friends. Her language is everyday, casual, not elevated—she is showing us that this violence and harm and care and work and thinking are the stuff of everyday life. She is extraordinarily courageous in first, her human decision to undertake this project, and second, her writerly decision to simply document her questions and doubts, her distrust of herself, her search for clarity. In the book there are opportunities for a writer to draw sweeping conclusions or declare triumphs that many readers would value. Instead Vanasco stays close to the moment, its ongoingness, the torrent of feeling and thinking and talking that is life. I would say she is looking to arrive into her own sense of process. That process is, I think, a living shared possible justice, one other people could use. Her uncertainty is part of her power and the possibility she is trying to build.
(Perhaps not coincidentally, both these books provide insight, I think, into modes of restorative and transformative justice—but neither uses any such label or framework. Like those who love literature most, these writers begin with the most difficult, most private experiences and don’t seem to want to claim names that would justify their practices.)
I don’t think anyone could enjoy the uncertainty of illness—the sick uncertainty—because it’s hard to like something so inescapable. A rollercoaster is only fun if you wanted to ride a rollercoaster. But maybe I can include this state more fully in my life, under the sign of myself and my thought, welcome its haunting. No one chooses the sick brain but the sick brain chooses you. I’m not sure what to do with its hostile gifts but I’m trying to follow their living questions.
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I won’t flood this space with too much book stuff but Hole Studies, a collection of essays (on art, activism, labor, adjuncting, friendship, Sinéad O’Connor, the Swet Shop Boys, the war on terror, #MeToo) is forthcoming from Fonograf Editions, can be learned about & preordered here! I’ll share some fall event plans in a bit, in hopes of seeing some of you…