Fanny Howe's "Bewilderment"

I think it’s funny that Shiloh assigned us to come up with a definition of bewilderment from the essay because going into the reading I was expecting something very difficult like Sartre’s “Existentialism,” and like Sartre, I was expecting her to give clear definitions of the ideas expressed. Instead, Howe, being a poet, leaves us to do the dirty work. Due to the poetic style of the essay, I’m not entirely sure what she means by the “bewilderment,” though I will give you my interpretation. Howe describes the dictionary definition of bewilderment is “to cause to lose one’s sense of where one is.” Though she that the wilderness metaphor is “not evocative enough because causing a complete failure in the magnet, the compass, the scale, the stars, and the movement of the rivers is more catastrophic than getting lost in the woods.” Though even this more elaborate definition doesn’t seem to satisfy Howe. To me, it seems that she views bewilderment as being the state of being one is in when, attempting to find truth in the world, one only finds that one is getting farther and farther from the truth. This causes us to feel lost and confused. When we try to find certainty, we come across more positions that seem more viable and we throw out things that we once thought were viable. It reminds me of something that Friedrich Nietzsche said about the abyss. “When you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” When Howe talks about language and how we wish there was a way to signify actions that happen simultaneously, it seems that she advocates for certainty. She wants us to be clearer when we talk to one another. In the rest of the essay, she states bewilderment as both a problem and a solution. We have no other choice but to be bewildered. “Strangely one tries to get in deeper and to get home at the same time.”