Knowing To Oblivion

What is it you seek when you seek to know?
What do you wish to find in knowing?
What is it you expect will come from understanding?

Watching the pale courtly figure of a courtesan gliding through a winter snowfall puts me in mind of a Noh drama. This in turn puts me in mind of Ezra Pound translating Noh dramas. Which makes me to wonder what it was that an Idaho American sought to find in the words of an ancient Japanese art form?

Surely he was seeking an answer. Just as we all seek an answer. To a question we barely know.

We know it’s there. Not on TV. Not in our textbooks. Not in the ordinariness of our daily world.

But it is there. Perhaps among the stars. Or lying unseen in the deepest dark of the waters.

Whatever it is, it is inscribed in the difficult signs of mysteries. Encoded, if you will, in the difficult language of the unknown. Just waiting for one to discover its meaning.

This, I believe, is the driving passion of knowledge. Once one comes to understand, to truly know, all things melt away.

And in that single moment there is that climactic ecstasy when we ourselves melt into nothingness.

In seeking knowledge we seek to return to our primal state, before there was Being.

In knowledge we seek oblivion.