Boat

Most of what I imag­ine to be impos­si­ble results from a lack of know­ing. How can a steel boat float? It can float because the water it dis­places is equal to its weight and it gets equal before the boat is sub­merged. So it is not only about the water or the steel in the boat, it is about the shape of the boat and the fact that most of what a boat is, is air. The air gives the boat time for the water to buoy it before it is sub­merged. This is why the tiny lit­tle rocks sinks. By the time the weight of the rock is buoyed by the equal weight of water, the rock is already under: game over. I learned this in col­lege and it took me a good while to under­stand it and I still got the prob­lems wrong, I am sure, on the physics test. I can under­stand physics in the realm of the lan­guage as long as that lan­guage has let­ters. Once it switches to the lan­guage of math (an incred­i­bly ele­gant lan­guage by the way, and in fact, I remem­ber a grad stu­dent telling me, one day when he was sad­dled with try­ing to tutor me there at UT in Austin – my eyes were glazed by the way – he told me this: math is the poetry of sci­ence. Because he said that in words, I got it on a fun­da­men­tal level, and it res­onated in a beau­ti­ful way and I respected him deeply after that. If he had proven his state­ment with an equa­tion I would have glazed over again immediately.)I glaze over.
If it is true that knowl­edge turns the impos­si­ble to the sim­ply known, as in, hmmm, I didn’t know that, (which implies that now I do know that and now what­ever it is I now know is kind of dull and com­mon­place sud­denly, like the way a new album is so much more when it is still in the shrink wrap and becomes some­how less once on the turntable. The lus­ter starts fad­ing the same way a dolphin’s col­ors {not Flip­per the other kind} fade within min­utes after being caught, unless it is one of the rare impec­ca­ble great albums, like Impe­r­ial Bed­room, for exam­ple) then maybe know­ing is all that I need? But it isn’t, I actu­ally need the not know­ing the same way that the boat needs the air to float. The not know­ing means I am ask­ing ques­tions, using my mind, feel­ing with my heart, stay­ing curi­ous. Curios­ity is more impor­tant than know­ing any­thing. Not know­ing keeps me buoyed. Knowl­edge alone is like a rock around my neck, sink­ing me with boredom.