Chapter 16
Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.
—ANNIE DILLARD1
ETYMOLOGISTS ARE unclear about the origins of the English word understanding. It has been suggested that the under- part of the word comes from the Latin inter-, meaning standing among or in the middle of things, that is, close enough to see them clearly. But I prefer to take under- literally. When we truly under-stand something, we don’t just perceive it; we feel a deeper knowing about its true nature. To do this, we need to get under first appearances and habitual thoughts and reactions. As Annie Dillard says, we need to “follow it down.” We need to get a felt sense of the thing.
This deeper, bodily felt kind of understanding is essential to forming and sustaining genuine relationships with other people, as we have been exploring. It is also important in education, professional development, art, literature, philosophy, and religion. Too often we go directly from acquiring information to regurgitating or acting on it. We miss the vital “under” dimension of things. We don’t allow them to digest properly and, as a result, we don’t absorb things fully and aren’t nurtured by them. We don’t have them viscerally.
Most of us learned as children not to go swimming right after a meal: even if we aren’t consciously aware of it, the body needs its own time for the transformative process of digestion. Understanding works the same way. After we have gathered the data, the input, and perhaps spent some time chewing it over, we need to leave things alone. We need to leave ourselves alone so that the invisible digestive processes of understanding can occur. Sometimes the wait is brief—Aha, I get it! But often we need to restrain the impulse to rush into speech or action and allow a gap, a clearing, in which something fresh can appear. Think of those Magic Eye pictures.
Works of art, because they draw so much on the felt sense of their makers, are particularly effective for cultivating our ability to understand things in a visceral rather than an intellectual way. Music is perhaps the most direct means for doing this; like the felt sense itself, it can embody immediate felt meaning independent of a story line. Painting and sculpture are also mostly wordfree but can be realistic—portraying recognizable people, places, and things—or abstract. Abstract art, in particular, can be understood as the artist’s way of conveying felt sense stripped of conventional meanings and associations. Vasily Kandinsky, one of the originators of abstraction in art, began by literally replacing recognizable features in a painting, such as a face, with abstract bits of shape and color.
Writing, and especially poetry, presents a special challenge since it is composed of words, which by definition convey conceptual meanings. Often it is by using words in unconventional ways that a poet points to the underlying felt sense. Emily Dickinson is a brilliant exemplar of this method. Another approach is to eliminate story line and logical argument in favor of just a series of vivid images. T. S. Eliot, in the introduction to his translation of St.-John Perse’s long poem “Anabasis,” counsels the reader to “allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.”2
Here is a short but exquisite poem that builds up a series of seemingly unrelated images, each conveyed with extraordinary economy, that virtually require one to respond from the felt sense.
Exercise 16.1 Reading with the Felt Sense
Read the poem several times, silently and aloud, slower and faster, letting the images fall into your memory, as T. S. Eliot advises. Savor it, be intimate with it, “follow it down” into the mystery of its own special resonance. (Later do the same with a poem of your choosing, or a work of art or piece of music.)
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
BY JANEK ENYON
I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .
I am food on the prisoner’s plate. . . .
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .
I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .
I am the heart contracted by joy. . . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .
I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .
I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .
I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .3
For the sake of brevity and because I love poetry, the exercise given here involves reading a poem. But the theme of this chapter is understanding in general. Learning any new thing, be it history or chemistry or Spanish, a new technology or job responsibility, how to ski or play the cello, involves a similar unconscious digestive body process. Trungpa Rinpoche called this interval “the yogurt phase.”
When I was a freshman at Harvard, I had the great fortune to take what we called Hum 6 (Humanities 6), a famous general education course taught by the renowned English professor and critic Reuben Brower. Professor Brower advocated what he called “reading in slow motion”—a careful and very personal close reading of literary texts. His first questions were: “What is it like to read this poem? With what feeling are we left at its close?” Only from our personal response to those questions would he allow students to engage in “critical thinking” and interpretation of the works we were studying. There’s an essential point here. Understanding through the felt sense is not in opposition to conceptual thinking. Rather, it is the very foundation for original, meaningful thought.