What landscapes await us at the edge of knowing?
Exploring our relationship to The Unknown™
I have been thinking a lot about what it means to embrace the unknowable; to live in questions; to cavort with the mysterious. Or, as my ineffable friend
is known to say: to “fuck with the abyss.” At the crux of all this wondering, I’ve been asking myself how one might go about cultivating a more fulsome relationship with the unknown.
Of course, we like “knowing” things. It gives us a sense of control in a system* that tries constantly to take more and more power away from us. This same system benefits from our need for tidy knowingness, for categories, for labels. It breeds this need in us by violently enforcing its own binaries and hierarchies: rich-poor, healthy-unhealthy, male-female, right-wrong, straight-gay, abled-disabled, them-us, even you-me... the list goes on.
This article from 2022 (the preview is free to access here), explores the psychological ways binary thinking “splits” our thinking, and contribute to many of the horrors we’re seeing today. I really like their language of: “the splitting of the world apart.”
“The psychodynamics of splitting and projection not only split selves, others, groups, and organizations, but also assign to the sides of the split good or bad elements. The good self or group may be confronted with an evil other or group that merits attack-and even eradication-as underscored by ethnic cleansing and genocide throughout history.”
- Binaries: Psychodynamic Insights in a World View Split Apart by Seth Allcorn, 2022, The Journal of Psychohistory
Without these simplified, split, separated understandings and our adherence to them, the system really would would fall apart. The system’s binaries and hierarchies keep us in line, disconnected, and unable to expand and relate in ways that would ultimately free us.
A lot of this may not feel new to you, reader - A lot of you already have windows beyond this largely “Western”, white system and have ancestral knowing that tells you otherwise. And many of us are already able to critique these tidy categories and acknowledge that they are social constructs. But what tends to come as we try to move away from them?
New labels emerge! New terminology! We readily adopt new categories as a means of moving past the categories imposed upon us. Often though, these are built on the backs of the very categories that we’re trying to expunge. We continue to find safety in our sense of “knowing”, rather than embrace the possibility of just… not!
Not knowing! Not defining! Instead, embracing the infinite nuance of it all!
I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that labels do have the potential to open up our worlds, rather than limit them. Labels and categories can give us answers to questions we’ve had, misalignments we’ve felt. They can save us, in a sense. They can help us find our people and build community around shared identities, values, or alignments. They can help us understand and feel empowered in a different kind of knowing - the embodied kind, found in our bones, in our guts. The kind of un-pinnable, soul-level knowing that helps us stay strong in our moral stances and stand against what we do know is wrong or unjust.
Where labels and categories can create separation and distinction, they can also create pockets of connection.
As you may be able to tell - even as I write this, I keep coming up against the yes-ands, the knowing-not-knowing-about-unknowningness. In the spirit of embracing the infinite nuance of it all, I want to be very clear that I’m not writing today to say that labels, categories, or more broadly “knowing”, are good or bad. No, that would be too “binary-thinking” of me! I am rather urging the curious exploration, intentional questioning, and tender examination of how we understand them as we cultivate our relationship with the unknown. And, how embracing the unknown might be one way we can fight against oppressive systems.
I wrote the following fragments in an In Surreal Life After Party once, the prompt being to write a poem entirely composed of questions:
Where does the echo of my questioning collide with the abyss?
What depths must I dive to, for my questions to orbit back to me?
At what seam do my questions rejoin knowing?
At what lip do they plummet me into inaction? Complacency?
What landscape awaits me at the edge of knowing?
Poetry (and other arts) are such amazing conduits for exploring our relationship to the unknown. It comes up so often among poets that the unknown is where the good stuff is. The magic happens when the poem unfolds as we go, with no prior knowledge of where it will take us. It was in fact a poet, Keats, who coined the term “Negative Capability” - the idea that embracing the unknown is a skill, an aptitude, a strength.
Collage helps me practice Negative Capability at the visual level. I rarely have a preconceived idea going into it. In fact, it is perhaps impossible to go in with a pre-baked vision and make it happen in any exact way. Instead I let go and allow the materials and the unexpected to surprise me as it all comes together. This is one of the reasons I have returned to collage as my main medium for over a decade now. I never get bored of it, and it helps me build a close and curious relationship with the unknown.
I have so much more to say about how we relate to the unknown, in particular how it comes up in my work with people living with dementia.
However, the length of this essay is getting unruly and I’m going to save my other thoughts for a part 2. Stay tuned!
* I am using “system” here to act as a blanket-term for our current, lovely mélange of Capitalism, Colonialism, Neoliberalism, Imperialism, etc. etc.
Some news to share, + an upcoming workshop!
Last month the 2025 Spring/Summer issue of Epiphany Magazine came out - and I had my first poem publication in it!!!!!!!!! I promise these excessive exclamation points are not so excessive given how exciting this is for me. I’m really proud of this poem, and proud for it to live alongside some work by my favourite poets/friends, too! Rachelle Sierra,
, , Jennifer Shikes Haines, and of course - the editing magic of Ashna Ali, dearest friend and writer of .This poem is written after another poem written by Rachelle, making it all the more special to me. I’d love to know what you think of it.
I also want to let you all know about my upcoming online collage workshop. This Saturday July 26th, join me for Let’s get WEIRD!
It’s PWYC, and gently guided. We’re going to practice letting go, getting playful, and delighting in the way collage enables us to get weird! Maybeeeeee we can even practice not-knowing, vibing with the mystery, and gettin’ down with SURPRISE here??
Sign up for the workshop here!
Thank you, always, for giving me your time & brainspace today.
xx katia