Science  Write  Now

Walking in the dog park

I have another conversation

with a man I call a western rationalist

but who prefers to be known as a scientist

When he starts saying All things are knowable

I’m not sure why our discussion

devolves into an argument

He says, Everything is observable

And quantifiable into data

while I say, The way I see it

we’re more like ants, we can’t ever

know everything, or that is, anything

We can’t even imagine

colours that other creatures envisage

To which he says, Yes, we can’t see them

but we can comprehend how and why

Then he starts to use words

like chromosome and phenotype

and I see myself drift toward

an unbridgeable invisibility

And later he says,

You’re quite smart

a qualifier I recognise

as diminishing

And I think about the ophthalmologist

who kept saying good girl

whenever I looked up or down

until I had no choice but to confront him

And even though he acknowledged

it was wrong, It’s just my background

afterwards he began talking about aging and death

as if there was nothing between a good girl and dying

I was trying to say to the western rationalist

I like things to be mysterious or the way an idea

can make its way unpredictably

into the world, like poetry

But it was as if we were shooting

through the sky like those stars

I saw in yesterday’s meteor shower

which seemed to come out of nowhere

But were actually the tail of Halley’s comet

as if knowing this, makes it any more comprehensible

and why was it that when I watched those stars

I thought about my father and also about my mother?

In another observable moment of reality

where language might run in parallel

as I switch from a girl to dying

among other variables uncounted

First published in A Treatment (Upswell Publishing, 2023)