You are reading something which you are passionate about. You stop: it needs time to sink in. You get up and walk around. You say a loud "Yes!" to no one in particular. You want to find someone else to read it to. In the light of it, everything now seems different.
I didn't know that before. What you've read presents itself to you as something new, quite unexpected, something which falls on you from outside, and which you'd never have guessed, given all the time in the world. But at the same time,
I knew that. I've actually known it all along. The new is also a recognition, of something which is already familiar--and it is this at the same time as it is new, unprecedented, a thunderbolt. What you've just read strikes you as true or right because it describes exactly what you already know. Or rather, it says something which now appears to have been so self-evidently central to you all along that it's impossible to conceive of yourself as ever not having known it.
What has happened is not the linear progression of:
I haven't known it until this point. From now on, I will always know it.
but the far more complex temporality of:
I haven't known I've known it until this point. From now on, I will always have known it already.
Focus on that moment of recognition, the Aha! reaction. There is an impossible razor edge between the I who does not yet know and the I who now does, between the I who hasn't known she's known it and the I who has already known it. There is nothing in common between them, because between the two, an entire past has been rewritten: I know now that I've always known it. Who is the knowing I in this impossible gap? No one. Blank, pure possibility. The blank body of Serres' dancer, perhaps; an empty body shot through with chips of Messianic time.
Sometimes when the light comes on, you just have to sit there in that empty time of "letting it sink in." Or you have to get up and walk about the room, or hit the table.
