By moving between a response to an article on the life cycle of eels published in Le Monde on 14 April 1971, and the spectral, visual experience of the wonderful structures of the Maharajah Jai Singh’s eighteenth-century astronomical observatories in Jaipur and Delhi, the poem articulates a proposition for a diff erent mode of cultivating that very peculiar kind of experience that we normally call ‘knowing’. A mode that, throughout this book, I will attempt to make resonate with some of the challenges with which contemporary forms of social inquiry are confronted today.