The Touch of the Unknown

I don’t know that a year can go by without me vowing, again, to read all the poems in The Giant Book of Poetry (edited by William H. Roetzheim) that I bought in 2011, when I decided to embark upon a 365-day photography project inspired by poetry. Over and over again, I’ve read the first few poems—and a smattering of others. The book opens with this one (and the photo up there is the one I took to accompany it on June 27, 2011):

Ishtar

The unconsecrated foe entered my courts,
placed his unwashed hands upon me,
and caused me to tremble.
Putting forth his hand
He smote me with fear.

He tore away my robe
and clothed his wife therein;
he stripped off my jewels
and placed them upon his daughter.

Like a quivering dove upon a beam
I sat.
Like a fleeing bird from my cranny
swiftly I passed

from my temple.
Like a bird
they caused me to fly.

—Unknown (possibly 4,000 BC), Translated from the Babylonian Cunieform by Lewis Spence

I will always start with Ishtar and will always love it. There is something so universal about the feelings expressed, and now that I have a little more knowledge under my belt, I can maybe understand the poem’s speaker a little better. He is filled with fear, and while it comes to him dressed in the armor of the unconsecrated foe—a man from another tribe, a different world—we find that it is the most primal and terrorizing entity in the world: the unknown. What goes through his mind as he flies like a bird? His daughter will be ravaged, his court desecrated, his wife taken, and what will happen to him? How will he navigate the changed world in which he finds himself? Will they catch him and kill him? Will he run until he can no longer stand and then desperately seek for shelter? Will anyone help him? Where will he go? Will he ever be able to hold up his head again?

I imagine that he wants to shut his eyes, take a few breaths, and find—when he opens his lids again—that nothing has changed. He’ll see his wife in her jewels, whispering to a maid; his daughter will look up at him with her beautiful eyes and smile; his steward will be at his elbow with the next course of the meal.

There is nothing man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Men always tend to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenseless flesh of the victim. 

—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

The unknown might find us at any time. It’s always there, just out of sight. It could be as innocuous and commonplace as a missed flight, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t feel the clutch of panic at your throat, if only for a fraction of a second, and there are no guarantees that life will continue as before. We never know if the next moment of life will be the last, so maybe we should strive to be present for the one looking us in the eye right here and now.