FACING THE UNKNOWN

Igor Goldkind

·

Follow

4 min read

·

Jan 18, 2021

--

Listen

Share

The truth is available to each and every one of us at each and every moment throughout the entirety of our existence.

We can show up anytime.

All existence asks in return is that we pay it attention.

Some years back I was stuck on a train from Preston to London just outside Waterloo. It came to a halt just as the tannoy announced the delay was due to “customer action”. Those of us familiar with the euphemistic jargon of public transport knew that this meant a suicide — someone had jumped from a bridge onto the track in front of the oncoming train. This was not unknown, but it was a rare event.
The commuters, including myself, resigned ourselves to the inevitable hourʼs delay pronounced by the ticket collector.

We were so tantalizingly close enough to the actual station that I considered opening the car door, jumping onto the track and walking the short distance. I reconsidered. Instead, I leaned my face against the passenger window and stared
onto the adjacent track, thinking only of how I was going to miss my connection to Oxford in time to see my daughter setting off of school, and our ritual of grabbing warm beverages in a café and recounting the days of our lives to each other. I was distracted and unfocused; willing the train to start up again so that I need not miss my rendezvous.
In the midst of my anxious reverie, I discovered that my eyes had absently settled on an object resting across the track parallel to the track the train was stalled on.

I thought nothing of the object until I began to realize that I had no idea what it was. I squinted, thinking my prescription might need updating, but to no avail. I tried describing the ragged object to myself, searching its features for some glimpse of
recognition. It was as if I was blind. Try as I might, I could not discern what the object was. It appeared to be covered in torn patterned rags, but I saw red and white protruding from the dark covering.

I focused even more, intrigued by my mindʼs inability to identify this object, that without argument was lying on the track not twenty
feet from my window. How could I be so close and not make it out? Was it a bag of trash? It might be, but there was a strange coloring to it, a
blurred blend of stark white, thick reds and muddy browns I became fixated with the object and used my phone to take a picture. I felt that my faculties were abandoning me, all of my senses, all of my cognitive focus was on the object in front of me but for the life of me, I could not see it. It wasnʼt like anything. It was completely new to my senses and I had no framework of experience to give it meaning.

Until the two rail policemen who had been walking along the track to the object of my fascination covered the dismembered torso with a blanket. Suddenly I could see the object, now covered, for
what it actually was: the mutilated torso of a human being that had leapt in front of the train from the bridge overhead. I had never seen a violently mangled body before, all blood (the thick dark red), sinew and protruding bone (the shock white that extended from the object).

In this moment I not only caught sight of something I had never before seen in my life, but equally I caught a glimpse of what it was like to confront the unknown. In my face. The disorientation, the desperate need to recognize what my mind could not identify.

I opened the photo app on my phone and looked at the picture I had taken. It resembles an image I had only seen in the forensic paintings of the artist Francis Bacon. Blood, sinew, carnage all blurred into a misshapen form, no longer recognizable as human except in its essential ingredients of blood, bone and muscle. 75 This recognition was made even more profound by the knowledge that what I could not at first recognize was what I was, what I was really made of; what all the passengers on the train were equally comprised of: blood, muscle and bone. The elements of our bodies that we never see
but are nonetheless there, whether we can see them or not.

My mind, through my senses, had crossed over into the unknown, from the safety of familiarity to
the discomfort of unnoticed truth.
To recognize the object as a human torso was to recognize it as mine. Underneath all of our skins, we are all carnage.
I forwarded the image to an artist friend I was working with. He immediately texted me back, demanding to know what it was a picture
of — he didnʼt recognize it either. I made him guess, and when I finally confessed to what was now known to me, he paused as his own self-recognition set in. A journey into the unknown is available to all of us who bother to pay attention to what we perceive, and have the patience to
await our own comprehension.

But of all this I can deliver one truth, one certitude:
What becomes known may be forgotten but can never be unknown.
Now I know what a mangled bit of a bleeding human torso looks like.
Next time, I will recognize it.