Notness Poem by gershon hepner

While epiphanies reveal the whatness
of our being in the spirit pot,
what we hide conceals the notness
of the knots we tie becoming not
what we had hoped while growing up to be
or claim to be when we become mature,
in denial all the time that we
are victims of the Kampf of our Kultur.

Louis Menand reviews John Updike’s stories in The New Yorker, December 1,2003. He writes:

The difficulty of putting into words the effect a story produces is part of the point. The story is words; the effect is wordless, or, at best, whoa. James Joyce called the effect an “epiphany, ” a term whose theological connotations have led, over the years, to a lot of critical misunderstanding. What James Joyce meant by an epiphany was, he said, just “a revelation of the whatness of a thing”-a sudden apprehension of the way the world unmediatedly is.


12/1/03