We have a soul at times *

I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.
---Wislawa Szymborska

In a debate that has all too often been contaminated with dogmatism and where political or "spiritual" leaders and wannabe gurus of all stripes parade before us and lecture us about "Truth" (whatever "Truth" is for whomever it is who happens to be "uttering" it at the time), it's a rare voice that has the courage to confess the limits of what we really know, and remind us instead that progress flows from uncertainty and doubt.

In her 1996 Nobel Prize lecture, Polish poet Szymborska commented that for people who know, "what they know is enough for them once and for all. They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish the force of their arguments."

As for those who don't know..."their work becomes one continuous adventure ... A swarm of new questions emerge from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'"

* A Few Words On The Soul by Wislawa Szymborska We have a soul at times. No one's got it non-stop, for keeps. Day after day, year after year may pass without it. Sometimes it will settle for awhile only in childhood's fears and raptures. Sometimes only in astonishment that we are old. It rarely lends a hand in uphill tasks, like moving furniture, or lifting luggage, or going miles in shoes that pinch. It usually steps out whenever meat needs chopping or forms have to be filled. For every thousand conversations it participates in one, if even that, since it prefers silence. Just when our body goes from ache to pain, it slips off-duty. It's picky: it doesn't like seeing us in crowds, our hustling for a dubious advantage and creaky machinations make it sick. Joy and sorrow aren't two different feelings for it. It attends us only when the two are joined. We can count on it when we're sure of nothing and curious about everything. Among the material objects it favors clocks with pendulums and mirrors, which keep on working even when no one is looking. It won't say where it comes from or when it's taking off again, though it's clearly expecting such questions. We need it but apparently it needs us for some reason too.

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Strong relativism and openness are well known to be important dimensions in the temporal sphere at the basis of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry. The way in which she links the past with the present, the present with what is to come and the event/experience of a moment with the weightless dimension of eternity is what gives her poetry its greatest strength. ---Malgorzata Anna Packalén: A Domestication of Death: The Poetic Universe of Wislawa Szymborska

(Reprinted from a previous post, with Tlingel's permission)

© Illustration: from a "A Bit of Madness," by Mosdi and Civiello