Playmate

I meet it whenever I pick up a book, and I pick up books to meet it. In conversations of exploration, it's very pleasantly present. I wake with excitement weekend mornings with the prospect of engagement with it. In hectic weekdays, an encounter is a oasis. It feel it purring along side like a great invisible cat when I have no time to pay it heed. In a classroom, it makes a welcome third. Too long without encountering it and I feel unanchored and insubstantial.

It can be sated, fatigued, balky, petulant, whiny; sometimes it makes me feel small, feckless, stupid. No matter. Usually, like a great horse, it's wonderful to ride, to trek with, or, dismounted, just to look at.

I'd call it mine, except that it has a second 'boss' who continually provides fascinating places to travel to, and stocks each destination with what turns out to be unexpected and provocative, but also one who is unhesitant about exposing a subordinate's errors and omissions.

Over time, this that I delight in is mapping the world of destinations and revising that map. Connections are being traced, details magnified and inked in, refinements made, indistinct areas surveyed and staked, anomalies noted. I love to watch it busy, and urge it forward.

I'm most aware of it when it's eager for contact, when it brings what it's already mapped to bear on particular occasions, when it is shocked and surprised by what it meets, when it rummages and discovers in itself just the items I can use for my creations. I'm aware of it at work even as I write this.

I hardly know what to call it. My mind? but that leaves out its content. The information in my head? but that leaves out the processes of cultivation that have given me a ownership of, a fluency with and an ambition for the aggregate body of facts. A subjective construction? but that leaves out the regular input it gets from and its openness to revision by the common world. These days, I'm calling it my 'body of knowledge.'

I run, work out, and monitor the general tone of my physical body. What about my body of knowledge? It is active and ever expanding, but the task is daunting. There's so much to learn, so much to remember that I've forgotten, so much to master, so much to correct and discard, so much to find ways to put to use in creative or constructive projects. It's the same experience as that of  my students learning English.

This is a body that, however occluded, cracked, irregular or vacant the different parts of it may be, nevertheless seeks to mirror the universes, actual and possible. And yet it's as playful as a pup.

When I meet someone, it's their active body of knowledge I have my antennae up for. Often it takes conversation to jog it into revelation. I meet people with interesting bodies of knowledge when I read books, though compared to these folk I often feel like a tyro.

Mine, another's--ours add up to worlds of worlds, a bounty of being. I could live without an active body of knowledge, and in the course of time may have to, but why would I want to? Well, for one thing it tempts me to do what I shouldn't: collect more books than I know I can read. I'm complicit; I don't really want it to stop. It's so engaging, so much fun.