been trained as a philosopher, she had a Ph.D. in European philosophy from one of the great philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. Yet she’d taken graduate courses in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, international law. She’d participated in bioethics colloquia. She’d published a frequently anthologized essay titled “How Do You Know What You ‘Know’: Skepticism as Moral Imperative.” As the president of a distinguished research university in which theories of every sort were devised, debated, maintained, and defended—an abundance like a spring field blooming and buzzing with a profusion of life—M.R. wasn’t obliged to believe but she was obliged to take seriously, to respect.
My dream is to be—of service! I want to do good.
She was quite serious. She was wholly without irony.
The Convent Street bridge, in Carthage. Of course, that was the bridge she was trying to recall.
And other bridges, other waterways, streams—M.R. couldn’t quite recall.
In a kind of trance she was staring, smiling. As a child, she’d learned quickly. Of all human reflexes, the most valuable.
The river was a fast shallow stream on which boulders emerged like bleached bone. Fallen tree limbs lay in the water sunken and rotted and on these mud turtles basked in the October sun, motionless as creatures carved of stone. M.R. knew from her rural childhood that if you approached these turtles, even at a distance they would arouse themselves, waken and slip into the water; seemingly asleep, in reptilian stillness, they were yet highly alert, vigilant.
A memory came to her of boys who’d caught a mud turtle, shouting and flinging the poor creature down onto the rocks, dropping rocks on it, cracking its shell….
Why would you do such a thing? Why kill …?
It was a question no one asked. You would not ask. You would be ridiculed, if you asked.
She had failed to defend the poor turtle against the boys. She’d been too young—very young. The boys had been older. Always there were too many of them—the enemy.
These small failures, long ago. No one knew now. No one who knew her now. If she’d tried to tell them they would stare at her, uncomprehending. Are you serious? You can’t be serious.
Certainly she was serious: a serious woman. The first female president of the University.
Not that femaleness was an issue, it was not.
Without hesitation M.R. would claim, and in interviews would elaborate, that not once in her professional career, nor in her years as a student, had she been discriminated against, as a woman.
It was the truth, as M.R. knew it. She was not one to lodge complaints or to speak in disdain, hurt, or reproach.
What was that—something moving upstream? A child wading? But the air was too cold for wading and the figure too white: a snowy egret.
Beautiful long-legged bird searching for fish in the swift shallow water. M.R. watched it for several seconds—such stillness! Such patience.
At last, as if uneasy with M.R.’s presence, the egret seemed to shake itself, lifted its wide wings, and flew away.
Nearby but invisible were birds—jays, crows. Raucous cries of crows.
Quickly M.R. turned away. The harsh-clawing sound of a crow’s cry was disturbing to her.
“Oh!”—in her eagerness to leave this place she’d turned her ankle, or nearly.
She should not have stopped to walk here, Carlos was right to disapprove. Now her heels sank in the soft mucky earth. So clumsy!
As a young athlete M.R. had been quick on her feet for a girl of her height and (“Amazonian”) body-type but soon after her teens she’d begun to lose this reflexive speed, the hand-eye coordination an athlete takes for granted until it begins to abandon her.
“Ma’am? Let me help you.”
Ma’am. What a rebuke to her foolishness!
Carlos had approached to stand just a few feet away. M.R. didn’t want to think that her driver had been watching her, protectively, all along.
“I’m all right, Carlos, thank you. I think….”
But M.R. was limping, in pain. It was a quick stabbing pain she hoped would fade within a few minutes but she hadn’t much choice except to lean on Carlos’s arm as they made their way back to the car, along the faint path through the underbrush.
Her heart was beating rapidly, strangely. The birds’ cries—the crows’ cries—were both jeering and beautiful: strange wild cries of yearning, summons.
But what was this?—something stuck to the bottom of one of her shoes. The newly purchased Italian black-leather shoes she’d felt obliged to buy, several times more expensive than any other shoes M.R. had ever purchased.
And on her trouser cuffs—briars, burrs.
And what was in her hair?—she hoped it wasn’t bird droppings from the underside of that damned bridge.
“Excuse me, ma’am …”
“Thanks, Carlos! I’m fine.”
“Ma’am, wait …”
Gallant Carlos stooped to detach whatever it was stuck to M.R.’s shoe. M.R. had been trying to kick it free without exactly seeing it, and without allowing Carlos to see it; yet of course, Carlos had seen. How ridiculous this was! She was chagrined, embarrassed. The last thing she wanted was her uniformed Hispanic driver stooping at her feet but of course Carlos insisted upon doing just this, deftly he detached whatever had been stuck to the sole of her shoe and flicked it into the underbrush and when M.R. asked what it was he said quietly not meeting her eye:
“Nothing, ma’am. It’s gone.”
It was October 2002. In the U.S. capital, war was being readied.
If objects pass into the space “neglected” after brain damage, they disappear. If the right brain is injured, the deficit will manifest itself in the left visual field.
The paradox is: how do we know what we can’t know when it does not appear to us.
How do we know what we have failed to see because we have failed to see it, thus cannot know that we have failed to see it.
Unless—the shadow of what-is-not-seen can be seen by us.
A wide-winged shadow swiftly passing across the surface of Earth.
In the late night—her brain too excited for sleep—she’d been working on a philosophy paper—a problem in epistemology. How do we know what we cannot know: what are the perimeters of “knowing”…
As a university president she’d vowed she would keep up with her field—after this first, inaugural year as president she would resume teaching a graduate seminar in philosophy/ethics each semester. All problems of philosophy seemed to her essentially problems of epistemology. But of course these were
