To know is to receive what is given.
We think, perhaps, we extract.
We think, perhaps, we discover.
We want so much to control, to earn, to conquer,
but stories like these are empty ones,
like shells with no meat.
The scientist is the one who waits in the dark,
the one who survives the dark,
the one who senses movement and calls it measured,
the one who melts into what she comes to know.
To know is to receive what is given.
To love is like this too.
This book is largely being read as a love story, and it certainly is. But it is also a story about science, a story about knowing. As I read it, I kept thinking This is a new Metamorphosis. As I began to focus on what I think it has to say about knowing and method, I thought to myself Knowing is a form of metamorphosis; it is a willingness to be altered by what you see, a willingness to be altered by what is given to you.
I was told recently that I’m unqualified to teach my Methods class that I’ve taught now for over a decade. As I dig through all my rage about that, what I’ve arrived at is a buried pocket of relief and gratitude that I can now move myself beyond the boundaries of that class and its positivist notions that always catch in my throat and choke me a little during lecture. Unqualified in Western academia is one of the coziest bits of clothing I wear, an identity I protect without apology or doubt. It’s that part of me that saw what I see in this book, a story about knowing as embodiment, a story about intimacy as method.
Laura Ellingson writes that the “fixed self is an Enlightenment fiction.” I love how Armfield’s story seems to play with that idea as Leah alters more and more, transforming from objective scientist into the stuff of our curiosity. But Leah never becomes an object of study. Why? Because this is Miri’s love story, and love doesn’t grasp or try to explain. Nor does grief. These things release; they give.
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