The World and Its Double

[PrinceMyshkin]

The World and Its Double

“We know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.”
Donald Rumsfeld
There are the things we think
we know and the things
we are sure that we know
though we may not know
how or why we know them.

There is the world in which
a president presides over
a ‘real’ nation and sends real armies out
to do battle against real others

and there is the double of that world
in which the soldiers only seem
to kill and be killed, the poor
do not actually starve but do

a sort of dumb-show of looking
for a scrap to eat and their children’s
faces are not gaunt but only seem so.

They do not actually die
of malnutrition or despair
but in our minds, if we permit it,
they really seem to do so.

[blp]

Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns. Those were the three categories in Rumsfeld's pithy, but tongue-twisting epistemology. But as the philosopher and Lacanian psychonanalyst Slavoj Zizek pointed out, he missed a fourth possibility: unknown knowns – the things we don't know we know; effectively, the unconscious. Politicians are always missing this one out, obviously (even when they're constituents of administrations that value acting on one's gut), but it's normalish territory for poets.

This double you speak of – would that be the place a Bush administration official invoked when he sneered at the denizens of the reality-based community?

[Scheherazade]

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