From “To Know and to Know Not,” a lecture delivered in May at the annual Premio Gregor von Rezzori ceremony in Florence, Italy.
If you are from somewhere else, living somewhere else . . . no, if you are an African or an Arab living in Europe . . . no, if you are a Libyan and therefore both African and Arab, and moved as a boy to England in the Eighties . . . after all that has happened, after Balfour and World War II, after the invasion and occupation of Palestine, and long after Kipling, after all the countless gestures of reduction and prejudice, long after your land and resources have been stolen, and being born into that dispossession, the hot bitterness of it running in the veins of those around you and, more bewilderingly, in your veins, then witnessing how your own are spoken of, seeing how cheap your body has become, how it can be done away with so easily, with little drama or outrage, drowned in the sea in front of everyone’s eyes, or bombed from the air in front of everyone’s eyes, and then witnessing some of your European colleagues, otherwise liberal and fair-minded intellectuals, some of whom you love and who live in your heart, perform new forms of the same old and inelegant acrobatics you have witnessed all your life, so as not to name the crimes for what they are, but name some of them, so as to have named something, when all of this happens, you are reminded of the center, that these good people operate from within a conceived center, a perceptual center from which the world is viewed, and that you are outside that boundary.
I did not learn to read till a year or two after starting school. I had not seen a letter, or known what a word was, till I was six, when, because I could not make out the blackboard, it was discovered that I had severely poor eyesight. Up till then I believed my vision was the same as everyone else’s. A television was a radio with flashing lights, and the family gathered around it the way people gather around a fire. The world was without lampposts. Trees appeared and loomed large, their bark textured and vivid only once you approached and were within touching distance of one. It seemed as though people and things belonged to one giant mass, a shy mist from which objects emerged only when called upon, appearing when apprehended and then evaporating the moment one walked away.
Leaving the optometrist with my new glasses on and everyone around me pleased, I partook in the delight, was proud of the new furniture on my face, the accessory that had its own box. All this was easy and straightforward enough. The thing I could not explain, however, was that this exacting world did not correspond to what I had believed the world to be. Clear vision struck me as a corruption. I had to contend with the violent, hard edge of things, where the geography of each object and person was distinct, their borders fixed, delineated into specific terrains, that each thing and each one of us really did start and finish so precisely. Before, when I placed my hand on the table, it merged into it. Now the table and my hand were easily distinguishable. I became at once fascinated and quietly outraged by the sight of my fingers resting independently on my father’s arm, or the fact that the branches of one orange tree, when intertwined with those of the one beside it, remained divisible.
Not being able to see, while believing that I possessed perfect vision and that my perception of the world was therefore true, helped form some of my early ideas of the world. My impressions had become my ideas. I am not, for example, given to thinking in distinctions. I am bad at remembering that I am not you and you are not me. I secretly believe in the unity of spirits and matter. As soon as the differences between one thing and another are established, a germ of rebellion is born in me.
Perhaps this is why I persist in believing, regardless of its evident unprovability, that every painting retains a trace of all the gazes it has been subjected to, that every great work of art hanging on the wall of a museum, a church, or a private home is actively working on us and our culture, but also absorbing a secret record of all those who have stood in front of it and honestly looked. Many painters know this and acknowledge it in their work. Almost all of Francisco Goya’s pictures, for example, share the presumption that the act of looking leaves a detectable imprint, that even as he marks the canvas, he is aware that it will later be marked by the eyes of others. You can see this in his self-portrait from 1815, which hangs in the Prado. He is looking directly at us, with eyes that are, oddly, studying his own face but through our eyes, as though he is at once inside and outside himself.
One feature of possessing a center is being ambivalent about it. Most people take their centers for granted. And this is not only because to have a center is to be well settled into one’s subjectivity, resigned to one’s blind spots, but also because many of us are unenthusiastic about thinking of ourselves as fastened to a silent doctrine. This is in part what Albert Camus meant by the absurd. He was—no doubt owing to his history, of being from both France and Algeria—anxiously aware of the absence of a clear center. He worried about the distances, the gaps between things. For instance, the inconsolable discontinuity between finding meaning in our individual lives—in our work and family and community—and yet living in a seemingly meaningless universe; how one could care so much and so specifically about one’s children, for example, while not knowing what the meaning of life is, or how we came to be here. This contradiction fascinated Camus, yet he, like St. Augustine, the man he called “the other North African,” quietly resigned himself to the belief that the heart is the only possible place to find one’s center, or not to find it but to build or conjure it. For St. Augustine, that was done by drawing in God—“and behold, Thou art there in their heart, in the heart of those that confess to Thee”; for Camus, it was through an enlivened and convivial suspension of belief—“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
Once I began wearing spectacles, objects were in blunt focus and of equal importance. This, in the early days, infected me with a quiet panic. Now, paradoxically, because all things could be seen, one had to find connections between them so as to unite these distinct and brilliant pieces.
Camus was of the mind that pursuing knowledge is an attempt at unity. That knowledge is, in part at least, where disparate fragments are brought together in a state of harmony, knowledge as an organized and stable state. Abdelfattah Kilito, yet another North African, has, curiously, the exact opposite idea. According to him, to know is to shatter, to pull apart; a state of knowledge is an exposure of a diverse cosmology that claims to unite a whole. One of the themes that Kilito may be thinking about here, which is a discrete but abiding motif across his work, is the tension between freedom and obligation; the liberal facilities of the mind against the weight of history; our opinions and beliefs versus our liberty and imagination; the artist as inventor and inheritor. Perhaps knowing is not about authority, and not an act of containment.
One of the most frequent responses, in Britain at least, when people are asked what they make of Israel’s current bombardment of Gaza is to say that they don’t know enough about it. This is curious for several reasons, not least of all because Britain was a key architect behind the foundation of Israel. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been prominent in the news for the past seventy-five years. Many books have been written about it. Countless debates have been had. Many films and radio programs produced, too. But it also makes one wonder what it is that people believe they have possessed by not knowing enough about something. What facility or freedom does not knowing enough provide? And what would enough knowledge resemble? How much knowing is enough? How much does one need to know so as to know what to think? And what fear might not knowing enough signify? What would knowing enough about Israel and Palestine do? And what does not knowing enough about it allow?
One spring day in Paris many years ago, my wife, Diana, a most penetrating photographer, capable of seeing like no one else, decided, as an experiment, to walk across the city blindfolded. Arm in arm, I guided her through the streets and parks and across bridges. Everything she heard and smelled and felt on her skin became acute. And I remember the strange and uncanny sense I had of her inner life, her consciousness in the dark beside me, and the weight of responsibility I assumed so naturally for the welfare of her body, moving amid people and traffic and trees, always knowing enough and always not knowing enough.
