Mouse Knowing

The skill of it is what impresses him the most. The flick of the wrist that sends the dish up and out of the wok. The plunge of the spatula that stirs and controls the movement and orientation of the ingredients. The cook’s eye simultaneously watching the heat, the moisture, the fire, the seasoning, and sauces with the careful precision of repetition and familiarity of task. It’s a love letter to food, repeated daily with subtle chemistry and mystical nuance.

When the cart jockey turns back and drops the bowl he smiles broadly to the carpenter, “You still sniffing around all the wee corners of the place, e hoa?”

He chuckles, “Yeah, nah, some of these habits are hard to break man.” And stuffs noodles into a broad smile.

The jockey tilts his head sideways a little. “What are you finding out there bro?” he asks quietly.

The flash of concern across the carpenter’s brow is brief, but noticeable enough the jockey sees it. A moment’s vulnerability quickly smothered by self-consciousness and fear of embarrassment.

From behind the low counter in the cart the jockey rocks back on his heels a little, “There’s some pretty crazy stuff hiding away in the dark places in this city, aeh?”

The carpenter pauses, looks away to the street, then looks back to his friend, thinks, upwards to the sky. “Do you know that feeling when a map falls open to you?

“Like, not when you open a map, but when a place becomes a place in your mind? So, say you moved to a new neighbourhood aeh. At first you learn a bit about your home. Like, where the bed is relative to the kitchen, or that you can go round the side of the building and there’s the backdoor and now you know what that wall is like from both the inside and the outside?”

“Yeah bro, you get that picture in your mind aeh, and you feel it out from then on.”

“That’s the one aeh. But then after a bit you learn the way from your house to the local shops, and you follow that way for a bit, then you find a shortcut, or you figure out that the other shops are two streets over, and you can work your way through to them too, like you’re exploring out the map of the place?

“Then, at some time after all that wandering around you have this full map of at least some part of the city in your imagination, and it sticks in there and you just know what all the bits are and how they all slot together. And then there’s all these people who make their way around the map in the real world, but they see the map differently aeh? Because they didn’t put all that map together in their heads in the exact same way you did?

“So everyone is bouncing around in this big space carrying their own maps and making changes and memories differently along their own lines, and seeing inside some places that others can’t, and it’s chaotic and muddled, but, all together, it’s a full knowing of the shape of the city both inside and outside?”

He pauses to look back to the jockey, who’s settled back onto the edge of the counter near the cooker, his head still just slightly tilted, listening, motionless, “Yeah man, we each carry our own, aeh.”

“Yeah,” the Carpenter pushes his meal to one side, “but even then… even when all the spaces are filled with people, there has to be spaces inside the people map that just can’t be known by us aeh, just these wee tucked away corners that hide the knowings none of us can ever really grasp, maybe because they’re outside our imagination, or because we just don’t have words to explain what they are, and there’s… there’s… things that live in there and live their own lives outside our reckoning…

“Like, maybe they know that there’s a spot there that’s good to sun yourself in the morning because cats can’t reach you, or maybe that there’s a tiny gap in the walls that you can run along to get from your sleeping place to your feeding place, and you live in those spaces for your entire short life.

“So there’s this universe imagined by people, and we use it as our knowing, but there’s other knowings aeh, like, Sparrow knowing, or Mouse knowing, and they’re alien, and strange, and useless to others but kind of make up the foundation of everything people know because Mouse knowing clears our streets of rubbish, or turns what we know as dead spaces into living ones.

“But all this knowing is based on the things we have aeh. Like, we can’t imagine new things out of thin air, because we need to take our knowing from the things around us, and they root us to the spaces around us. It’s this long, slow cycle of knowing from the times we’re wee kids until we’re old geezers, all the time filling up our imagination with the shape of the city and the people, until we pass and take all that knowing with us…” He pauses again, and an uncomfortable silence follows till the jockey steps into it.

“You spending a lot of time up in that workshop all on your own e hoa?” He smiles, “Because it’s sounding a lot like it.”

The carpenter laughs a little, “Maybe… but it’s still true bro. There’s layers on layers that we aren’t seeing, and I feel like I just scratched the surface of something bigger, because sometimes… sometimes even when you get that there’s a city with in a city, there comes the edge of a knowing that you feel will drag you in, and totally change the map, like there’s a door no one has ever opened, and inside it there’s a new knowing that might end up out in the world for a first time, and if anyone is taken inside then all the knowing around it will shift outwards and sideways, and that new space is now real for the first time, and we can’t control how it moves or affects everything else…”

The carpenter trails off, and they both sit in silence for a short time, the hubbub of the city settling around them, an ever-present soundtrack to the lives of countless individuals hustling too and fro, churning the air of the streets and houses, a chaotic music with a rhythm too complex for human ears.

“You gunna let that dish get cold e hoa?” remarks the jockey, “I worked hard on that.”

“Best not,” smiles the carpenter, “dunno who else knows how to make noodles this good.”