Moats

I was contemptuous of "facts" for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.
-- Joyce Carol Oates, in The Girl with the Blackened Eye

People tend to appreciate great songs, so the typical songwriter interview digs into bard 'secrets' with questions like,

Do you write lyric or melody first?
Do you write every day?
What (or who) inspires you?
Do you keep a little book handy to jot down ideas?

I can imagine Bob Dylan, should he be enticed to suffer the little children, evading every one.

The educated mind assumes you can penetrate mystery by amassing facts about it, but I'm skeptical. I think you get to sense the unknowable by plunging in to fiction, your fiction, whatever one occurs to you in passing.

There was an art piece at iNGENUiTY yesterday that called itself Kaleidoscopic Cleveland. A darkened space folded a smattering of trudgy humans (factoid: 93 degrees at 48% humidity downtown) into a smallish room where heaps of glittery materials formed a circle on the floor. Images of words and color leapt against the walls too quick for minds to capture. I re-emerged, apparently unmoved as new earth walkers filed past me when, suddenly, a sliver of mystery pierced my spine. There I was, a shifting fleck in a kaleidoscope of anonymous droids, dust mote in a late afternoon kitchen, ordinary spectacle of soundless light. Did the artist intend for me to feel this way?

Why would I even need to know?