When I was a child, the only pets my parents permitted were goldfish. I spent hours staring at my first comet, watching the gills, wondering what the fish could and couldn’t see, what it’s like to be trapped inside a transparent bowl, to spend life in a contrived world. The “real” world is unknown and unknowable to this fish, I remember thinking.
I graduated from studying goldfish to quarks, gravity, and stars. What my time in theoretical physics taught me is not only that Nature is full of mysteries, but that each answer to a question uncovers additional questions. That atoms are made of smaller particles with fuzzy quantum behavior raises Einstein’s famous question about God playing dice with the universe. Finding the light source in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave would only raise questions like Who lit and keeps the flame? Are there other flames? Expanding a goldfish’s known world from fishbowl to living room only raises questions about the creatures in the living room and what’s outside the house.
The realization that we’re inside an endlessly nested matryoshka doll of unknowns was, of course, a huge disappointment to me. Not only is the real world what the novelist Robert Boswell calls “half-known”; the things I want to know most are unknowable. Poetry that connects and heightens my awareness of mystery is my retreat of choice —the goldfish in the bowl beating her gills—for the days I must spend feigning expertise and confidence to earn a living.
When I think of poems that straddle the border between the known and the mysterious, I think of seashore poems like Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” in which the narrator walks from “fish tubs” lined with “herring scales” and wheelbarrows with “iridescent flies” down to where water flows “above the stones, / icily free above the stones,” and
should you dip your hand in,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
What’s more mysterious than hand, water, fire?
John Ashbery not only takes us down to the shore, he often takes us out to sea. His verse rarely relies on unfamiliar syntax. Just the opposite: he grounds us in rhetorically familiar units but in lapping waves of language, which produce in me a feeling of swimming in mystery. In “Le Livre est sur la Table,” a soliloquy where “a woman / …knows / All that she does not know,” the narrator jumps from the woman to a book to men, walls, birdhouses, to questions:
…did all secrets vanish when
The woman left? Is the bird mentioned
In the waves’ minutes, or did the land advance?
Now might be a good time to differentiate what I mean by mystery from other forms of uncertainty. When I say “mystery,” I mean all that we don’t understand of character, life, Nature, and art—the universal and enduring unknowns of the human condition—as opposed to one-off or temporary uncertainties like criminal guilt or next month’s weather, items that are of parochial interest or resolved by next month’s Google search. Mind and love are mysterious. Whodunits may raise questions and cause surprise but aren’t mysterious. Neither are wars, stock prices, and elections: we’ll learn their outcomes soon enough.
Growing up as an infant immigrant was a doubly mysterious experience. First were the usual curious-child questions about life; second were the immigrant-child questions about language, foods, holidays, appearances, beliefs, and the news—the discrepancy between what the outside world, as represented on TV, worried about (civil rights, politics, technology) and what we worried about in Chinatown (gangs, money, opportunity).
While a senior in high school, I ran into a grade-school classmate. Just released from juvie, Danny greeted me with a headlock, held a pistol to my temple, and cocked the trigger. I feel violent mystery whenever I ponder the parallel world in which I refused to say “uncle.” We came from similar blue-collar immigrant backgrounds and shared the same small San Francisco Chinatown classroom for eight years, but he’s as mysterious to me as I must be to him.
Writing this, I was tempted to Google Danny and find out what became of him. But I decided to keep his fate a mystery; learning it would not demystify the boy I knew and why he became the teen I encountered. To paraphrase the seashore poems: while knowledge and mystery are drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world and forever flowing and flown, all isn’t lost. Or as Wallace Stevens put it, “In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”
Kenton K. Yee is a physicist and Silicon Valley consultant. Poems of his will be appearing or have appeared in TAB Journal, Terrain.org, and BoomerLitMag.
