Unknowableness

Small Apples by Laura Tovar Dietrick (2009)

My computer has underlined this title in red. Unknowableness. There it goes again. I’ll add it to my dictionary. William T. Vollmann gave me that word on page 51 of his new book, “Imperial”. In this passage he shares an insight about how the life of manual labor is unknowable unless one has labored. He uses the example of stacking hay bales.

This reminds me of a short story by D.H Lawrence called “Love Among the Haystacks”. Lawrence writes in a way that awakens the senses, to describe the experience of a hay harvest in August in England. The plot is simple. Two brothers meet girls while harvesting and stacking hay. But it’s the simplicity, the clarity of the experience, an otherwise unknowableness of manual labor, that Lawrence paints with words.

Vollmann seems to be stretching his readers to listen more intently to his writing. It worked for me. His humility makes me trust him more. I know he’s not going to try to fool me or be clever to the point that I have to read his writing over again to understand. I may read it again to taste it again because it tasted so good, but I’m experiencing his writing as a sort of river trip, a road trip, a walk with a narrative. More like a walk because he’s a patient story teller.

He says that the hay baling work is unknowable. That may be true in many ways, but I certainly know more than I did yesterday. Adding to this is something about apples.

It’s apple picking time in NY State and every apple will be picked by someone, by hand. Supposedly, estimates say that this year, 8,000 people, all non-New Yorkers will pick these apples. Many of them crossed from Mexico to America at the Imperial County CA, US borderline. So, we can write about apples and like Laura, paint them, eat them, bake with them, and drink the cider. We can know those things.

I haven’t picked an apple from a tree for a long time but I’d like to find an orchard this weekend and do that, just to know.