A quick brown fox jumped over the garden fence into muddy ooze. 

It’s not the traditional sentence for teaching touch-typing, but it does feature all the letters of the Roman alphabet, and additionally it’s true. A handsome dog fox crashed into our patch of mud this morning, panicking in flight from something; possibly the multiple Thames Water works juddering up many local roads at the moment, Victorian pipeworks overburdened by tons of new commuter apartment blocks built with no additional infrastructure or reservoir. 

The fox acted on the same assumption that you or I might make: if I got down here, I can get up again. But the parkour-like structure of walls, fences and ivy on the outside is not mirrored inside: instead there’s smooth, wet planks and then dirt. But it tried, springing with great kick, and scrabbling for a hold on the planks. It turned back and ran up the brick wall a few feet away from the fence, and raced down, getting up speed. It tried to bite the planks for leverage. 

And when I came down and opened the garden door to bring out a hard plastic box for it to jump on, it panicked harder and tried to run up the (half-glass) garden door, and fell. It hid, huffing, behind the mouldering chair and out-of-control bay tree. And then once I was safely indoors, it jumped on the box – but the box slid in the mud. I felt embarrassed not to have thought of that. The fox nudged the box back flush to the fence with its muzzle, then climbed delicately onto it, and tried for a vertical take-off. No go. The panic stink was palpable through the door now, the feral musk of an animal that likes to rove and to know its way. 

So I inched back out, moved the decrepit, slimy garden table over to the fence, with the box placed at its foot, before I inched back inside and closed the door. A pause. A stillness, then a blur of movement. A hop onto the plastic box, and a poised look back. A jump onto the precarious table, and then a stylish, calm leap over the fence onto the wall that leads to the street, and gone. 

While I’d moved the table, the fox had trotted behind the bay and crouched, curled up; waiting, watching. We’d established, I felt, that I was not a predator. I wouldn’t approach him, and I was trying to help. I’d understood something of his panic, the terrible fear of being enclosed – yes, but also of what you think you know (I got in here, I can get out) not being so. Not knowing how to know how to get out. 

*

Feeling trapped in January, in my own head, in the expense of feeding my body when working in central London, I have become something I’d never envisioned: a baker. A basic baker. I have turned to baking because I love carbs, especially sweet carbs, but I cannot eat refined sugar (thanks, alcoholism, yay!), dairy or wheat, so – tahini maple almond cookie from the High Llama aside – I am mainly likely to be hangry at work, or making regrettable choices. But I can do a couple of cut-and-come-again cakes, a couple of kinds of unfancy biscuit, a granola bar, and now one sort of bread, thanks to a friend sending me a super-simple, idiot-proof non-sourdough recipe. 

The original recipe had wheat and dairy, but the latter substitution was easy. I went like-for-like with spelt instead of wheat, and ended up with a sort of sticky gunk instead of dough. Much added flour later there was something bake-able. Only after it was out of the oven and crumbling on my plate did I look up ‘spelt for wheat substitution’. Notwithstanding my use of &udm=14 or -ai in search on DuckDuckGo with all AI settings to off, up came page after page of writing with the same sloppy, tacky consistency as my initial batter: the insta-gloop that is now the online experience. Hundreds of cloned food blogs suggesting I use yoghurt instead of buttermilk because spelt needs more liquid. 

To get an explanation (the gluten in spelt is more fragile and the fibre is more soluble than in wheat) for why you need less, not more, liquid, and an equation (cut liquid by ¼), I had to turn to a trusty ancient hardback 1970s guide to grains, pulses and vegetables. Books ftw – but I also feel boxed-in, because there’s all sorts of knowledge that I know has been discerned and disseminated since the 1970s, and beyond the confines of the board covers, and that is now enshittily hidden from me.

*

A slow silver fox, I stare at the fence, resignedly, wallowing deeper in the mud. Right now – in this extended now that begins I don’t know when but seems to extend backwards and erase other, more confident or hopeful moments – I struggle to know how to know, to know ways of knowing that offer steps to get over this hurdle and out of this trap. Or perhaps not to know them, but to trust them. 

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,

Are a substantial world, both pure and good.

Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

William Wordsworth wrote these words in the sonnet sequence ‘Personal Talk’, but I read them in a dictionary of quotations when I was 12, and copied them with a solvent-based marker onto my A4 lever-arch ring binder, alongside song lyrics and band names. ‘And books, we know’: the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was just such a book, giving me just the right gobbets of poetry and prose to pass for a knowledge I didn’t have. In fact Wordsworth’s verse had got detached from its surrounding sonnet and sonnet sequence not long after publication, being quoted in Bartlett’s. Still today those four lines are frequently quoted freestanding to support a love of reading, frequently enough to call it a meme. 

Books, we know: look how books and knowledge are yoked together, and turned into an organic form: substantial, like a tree trunk around which our Ivy League of reading and earning brownie points can entwine. Dreams may start the stanza, but they are abandoned: insubstantial, and presumably impure and not good. As someone who has always had more nightmares than nights of sleep, and is currently having more nightmares than I am cups of tea, this is a tempting, if not load-bearing, tendril to cling to. Books, unlike dreams, Wordsworth suggests, are material, rational, moral, and, yes, load-bearing. If, for a couple of hours, you repeatedly lift and move boxes that feature a bright orange sticker stating HEAVY 15 K., each containing 50 or so paperbacks, it’s hard not to agree.

I know from books, in both the English and Yinglish senses. Books matter to me: they’re my daily material as a bookseller, reader and writer. I’m fascinated by their history, their materiality, their presence, their survival and their ephemerality. And. And when I talk about why I am against genAI (‘the auto complete industry’, as I saw it called on Bluesky), I think about books and the impact that promoting literacy and the printed word had and continues to have on primarily orate cultures and communities. That doesn’t mean that I think we should be resigned to genAI being inserted into everything, and definitely not that I think it might one day be a tree trunk round which we can grow, but that there is a long history of riding roughshod over dreams, and genAI is the latest iteration of colonial capitalist missionising to want to have its way and do away with other ways of knowing.

*

I first encountered the word epistemicide – the destruction of knowledge, and of forms of knowing – in 2023, with reference to the IOF’s destruction of universities, archives, and media, and of journalists, writers and academics, in Gaza. I subsequently learned that it was coined in 1998 by a Brazilian sociologist, who defined it in the context of all forms of colonisation, writing that ‘unequal exchanges amongst cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, and hence the death of the social groups that possessed it’. The sociologist was Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who has recently faced credible claims of sexual harassment from thirteen women. 

When I was writing Bad Language there were several moments where I had to pause in citing a concept that was or had been useful or important in thinking about language, power, and communication, because the thought and the thinker are not, to me, separate. I’m still not sure how I feel about Heidegger having snuck in to the bibliographic essay on Sources, even as I’m quoting him via two other feminist writers who are also not sure how he’s snuck in to their work. 

While I practice feminist citation, it is unavoidable that the best-known, most influential, widely quoted and so-called foundational concepts are those propounded by white cis men, who are also most likely to be abusers, harassers, murderers, reactionaries, racists, and fascists, by both force of numbers and the corruption of power. In each instance, I asked myself about the necessity of citing their concept, and also how to make palpable the context in which that idea emerged – as I did, also, when shedding light on the contexts of friendship, family, work and desire in which feminist and queer concepts emerged. (I love Octavia Bright’s alternate method, in her memoir This Ragged Grace, of offering a running commentary on the relative hotness of the cis male writers that she cites. May I direct you to Hackney hipster barista hottie young Friedrich Engels to see the value of this method?)

Regardless of the relative merits of my approach – special pleading? distracting gossip? useful opportunity to reference queer Yiddish burlesque troupe the Shmutzik Shmates and their activism when discussing Freud? – what it brought up for me was a crisis of epistemology, or knowing how to know what we know, and knowing why we know it. What difference does it make when a concept is prised out of the abstractions of philosophy and placed into the context of thinking and knowing as lived experiences? And why are murder, rape and fascism not disqualifiers for ideas entering textbooks? Or – more broadly – in what ways, as de Sousa Santos suggests, are vaunted Eurowestern, patriarchal ways of knowing actually not epistemologies but actually epistemicides, destroying all alternates in their wake?

*

know is not a particularly interesting word to know about, except that it could probably be gnow (rhyming even more with grow) because it comes from the classical Greek verb gignomai, of which the best known usage is Socrates’ instruction: gnausi seauton, Know thyself! In Socrates’ terms, gnowing could be seen as endowed – and endowing us – with autonomy, reflexivity, curiosity and humility.

Knowing, meanwhile. Among the oldest recorded usages of know in English (rather than yknow, which is the Old English form) is to translate yada’ from Hebrew: Wycliffe’s Bible of 1382 uses know to translate yada’ in a range of senses, including the familiar one: to perceive, recognise, or identify; but also more widely as to take notice of or look after, to care for, guard, protect, regard with approval; and, as part of a grouping around interpersonal acquaintanceship or experience, specifically to have sexual intercourse with, almost always syntactically with a male subject and female object.

There’s nothing in the Greek root gignomai that is associated with sexual activity; the Gnostics were not getting it on as the root of their philosophy, which was a deliberate contrast with the drive of to know as complete and total, as a totalitarian ownership, staking a claim to a territory. Gnowing means an awareness of the vastness of ungnowing, whereas in knowing, there is a knower and there is knowledge: an inert, passive, material, and interchangeable object that confers power and status on the knower.

*

With every release of the Epstein files, the fence gets higher in front of me, and the muddy puddle muddier. I circle around my own feet in frustration, charging at walls and biting at posts, baring my teeth in fear. It gnaws at me, some gnowing I cannot articulate – because of the fear.

What I’m afraid of is the trap: that this is all there is, the house of patriarchal cards with no way out. No way to know a way out, to know how to know a way: to take a moment, breathe, listen, collaborate, try again. I slip in the mud, claws scrabbling down the wood, and I’m back on the ground, panting hard and frantic with lack of options.

Like genAI, like colonisation, like occupation, what sexual abuse does is hollow out your ability to know yourself – to trust what you know of yourself, and to trust that gnowing within the bigger, wilder, crucial ungnowing. First, without your consent, it extracts what you know, and then it stops you from accessing it. It claims that your way of knowing isn’t a way of knowing. It destroys the systems and structures you’ve built for housing and sharing that knowing. And then it turns you into an item of knowledge in its impenetrable, inaccessible structures, for an elite to use. Not you, you can no longer know yourself.

*

The so-called knowledge economy is exactly the same as all previous Eurowestern economies: predicated on homosociality and the violent exploitation of vulnerable people of marginalised genders, especially young, working-class people. The knowledge shared by people like Lawrence Summers and David Brooks and Noam Chomsky and Allan Dershowitz and Marvin Minsky and all the other clever-clever celebrated dudes, as well as politicians and financiers and aristos and whatevers, was dual: the rolodex of powerful white cis men ring-bound by a shared secret; and the Biblical sexual knowing of poor young white women, who are the shared secret. The knowledge circulating in the economy was that of the bodies of exploited and silenced women. That knowledge had, and has, value on which the elite is and was built. 

It is an economy: it is what is done instead of the supposed economic activity bound by laws, rules, company protocols and social understanding of work. Leigh Honeywell notes at Hypatia in their excellently titled article ‘The Al Capone theory of sexual harrassment’, that in their reporting on corporate sexual harassment and assault in tech, it became clear that ‘often people who engage in sexually predatory behavior also faked expense reports, plagiarized writing, or stole credit for other people’s work’. Sexual ‘knowledge’ takes the place of other, supposedly not only valued but required, forms of knowledge. And yet the so-called monetary economy – national, international – continues to function to profit these men.

Sexual assault is an economy: these are deal-making rooms, the rooms where it happens. The exploited body is a contract of silence and complicity between these men, a deed in both senses; an action undertaken and a binding document of its enactment and its erasure. It is – we are – their knowledge. 

They know. They all know. They knew. We say this over and over: the journalists knew, every politician knew, the cops knew. And then we say, shame-faced with complicity, and I knew. We knew. We didn’t know but we knew.

But the truth is: we couldn’t know what we knew, because we were told we could only be known, not knowers. Our ability to know, and to trust our knowing, was taken. We were made into their knowledge. It is an economy in which we are what is extracted. We have to bring it down. 

*

What this means is gnowing our dreams: sitting with the deep ungnowing that is the language of the night(mare), of going towards a placeless place that is outwith ourselves because it is beyond our gnowing, and that feels like catching our claws on the very top edge of a narrow fence, with no idea what is on the other side towards which we are leap-falling. 

If a dream is a wish that your heart makes, then a nightmare is a wish-fear of what your deepest heart wants you to know, and knows that you don’t want to know, that you don’t know how to know. And there’s no point narrating them: nightmares are compacted idiolects, memes for one extremely-online-to-itself brain. They are insubstantial and overdetermined, and that doesn’t help with the heart-pounding darkness where I do not know what is real, or how to determine it. 

But then, being awake means looking at 80s-hued snapshots of Andrew Mountwhatever with flashed-out laser monster eyes kneeling over a prone woman, there on the front page of a broadsheet newspaper. Everything Susan Sontag ever said about photography, as banal and evil as posed Insta reels from a genocide. An image from a nightmare, something revulsively intimate and familiar about that shitty snapshot and those casual clothes. It feels as idiolectic as any symbol or image-phrase in my nightmares, as weirdly personally directed and experienced and hard to explain why it’s so disturbing. That knowing look.

I write in Bad Language about moving towards a queer oneiric feminism in which we are guided by our dreams – but what does it mean to be guided by our nightmares, waking or sleeping? There is a long tradition of knowing thyself meaning confronting thy fears head-on, but there is something mean and unhelpful about confronting them in ttwisted nightmare form, dense with layers of meaning and un-meaning, deliberately sown with confusion and fear to induce panic, to reiterate my inability to know (myself or anything else), the nightmare as examination for which I could never study. 

*

But then, to a fox, I’m a figure out of nightmare: large and looming, human, a bad-smelling threat. Like the council workers who cut the hedges down to bare roots, to root out the fox dens under the auspices of getting rid of bushes where, they claim, drug dealers and flashers hide. So they wield their chainsaws and leaf-blowers, and how is a fox to know that I am any different? I live in the buildings built on their territory, and I lock my tempting tasty compost away in a bin instead of allowing it to be eaten. And I have put up fences (as legally required), fences that cut runs and break safety. 

And so the fox threw itself in desperation at the walls and panels and doors, leaping higher than my head in an attempt to get not just free, but away from me: from the stink of nightmare. And I thought about my neighbours – the ones who put a passive-aggressive note through our door when we let a pregnant vixen shelter in our garden one summer; the other one, who yells at his wife and kid and left poison on our doorstep – and I don’t blame the fox one bit. 

So I’ll learn from the fox, to watch and wait, wary, and then run. Nightmares can’t be apprehended at first or second or fifth attempt, not in the bared teeth of panic. It takes time, and a bit of hiding, and tentative steps, and a jump, and there’s still no way to gnow what’s going to be on the other side of that last leap. Ungnowing. I’ll take it.