When Dante wrote of “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he was shining a sidewise gleam on the secret knowledge of the universe, the knowledge by which everything coheres. All love is an outstretched hand of curiosity reaching for knowledge — a tender acknowledgement of a reality that is not yourself and a lively interest in its interiority. Bertrand Russell captured this in his essential distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge,” for it is only by means of love that we get to know anything deeply — a landscape, a person, the world — and it is love that beckons forth our own secret knowledge of what makes life worth living.
That is what poet Aracelis Girmay and her artist sister Ariana Fields explore in What Do You Know? (public library), inspired by the closing lines of Sharon Olds’s tender poem “Looking at Them Asleep.” (“When love comes to me and says / What do you know? I say This girl, this boy.”)
Page by page, love comes to the farmer and the seafarer, to the fruit bats and the honeybees, to the forest and the stars, asking each what they know, and their answers come simple and profound like a child’s question.
When love comes to the well and asks,
What do you know,
it says,
I know thirst, I know abundance.
I know depth, I know darkness.
When love comes to the ash and asks,
What do you know,
the ash says, I know the secrets between the volcano and the sky.It says, I know wandering,
and I know the language of fire.
When love comes to courage and asks,
What do you know,
courage says,
I know speaking, even though I am afraid,
and I know the daily work of keeping on.
The constellations know “the story of distance and the language of light,” the rocks know “that change is possible, even if it takes a million years,” the land knows “the laughter of children who run below the birds” and “the joy of going on and on and on.”
What emerges is a glowing sense that love is not something we do but something we are, something the world is, something vaster than space and older than time.
Couple What Do You Know? with Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way, also by Girmay, then revisit Mary’s Room — a brilliant thought experiment about the limits of knowledge.