ethics and the post-avant

Interview about ethics and post-avant poetry, translation, and Rhode Island Notebook

I am sure to become old; I cannot avoid aging. I am sure to become ill; I cannot avoid illness. I am sure to die; I cannot avoid death. I must be separated and parted from all that is dear and beloved to me. I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, actions are my relations, actions are my protection. Whatever I do, wholesome or unwholesome, to that will I fall heir.

Aṅguttara Nikāya, 5.57, trans Nyanaponika Thera

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St Joseph River I-94 Rene Cavalier Sieur de LaSalle December 1679

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Lake Huron from the bridge into the States, Sarnia, Michigan

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A Rationale for Writing Poetry with a Kind Mind

Considering the conflicted phenomenon called Ezra Pound and the performance of reactivity and anger associated with the conception of poet in western letters, and considering the way the notion of the ethical is conflated easily with the agitation for social justice through displays of ill humor and quarreling, it occurred to me that someone should probably ask, as we continue this life's course of writing together, that we do so as people who actively wish one another well.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle posits the basis of all good society and in fact all friendship as “beautiful mind.” Eunoia -- sometimes translated “goodwill” or “tenderness of mind” or even “lovingkindness" -- is the ability to retain the capacity to be surprised by the other.

If the aesthetic is closely federated with the ethical, the practice of verbal and cognitive skills necessarily entails the practice and modeling of dialogic emotional skills such as forthrightness, forgiveness, renunciation and lovingkindness. Conceiving the aesthetic as inseparable from ethical questions is especially important for anyone who considers herself a practitioner of poetry writing, a genre culturally perceived as all too often marked, since the Modernist moment, by a clear fetish of isolative emotionalism, reactive expression of affect, monologic narcissism and aesthetic preciosity, over civically responsive and ethical concerns.

This genre is in fact so fraught with symbolic violence, with its social economies relying so heavily on disincentives toward the development a warm vibration, that you kinda havetah wonder if poets in particular shouldn't richly buy into an overt and activist devotion to lovingkindness as a means of proactively countermanding the profound brutality of this genre.

No reason that poets should continue to see themselves as exempt from normative socioemotional economies. Our imaginative, cognitive, and linguistic skills must be founded in an overt and almost activist devotion to the good. It’s an old fashioned and conflicted term, but by “the good” one might mean those actions and attitudes that shape and support the cultivation of goodwill at both civic and interpersonal levels. In fact, I straight up tell my students that to write exceptionally well, to think creatively and perspicuously, it is necessary to have a mind that is rooted in the good and characterized by kindness and tenderness. You don't need to be a jerk to write well, despite the preponderance of modernist examples to the contrary. One could even say, and Pierre Bourdieu really does, that "being a jerk" is a frequently used, and effective, masculinist tactic for artistic consecration.

On the other hand I think it's probably true that certain writing communities have throughout the history of letters helped in the restructuring of reactive, harmful, automatic (that is to say knee-jerk) cognitive and socio-emotional habits. I would in fact go so far as to argue that the tactical modeling of positive affect styles has been a principle function of certain writing circles throughout the last three centuries (I think immediately of certain positive affect styles modeled by NY School folk, e.g., jubilation, rejoicing, attentiveness, renunciation [of authoritarianism both aesthetic and political in particular]). By forwarding subaltern positive affect styles, these circles have probably time and again exercised the power to re-calibrate an imaginary and reformulate an affective milieu. Because the ideologic binds to us principally through affect and emotion, becoming aware of the functionality of affect in one’s life, and actively cultivating helpful affect states, could be considered a social responsibility, if not a civic duty.

And though it is not a principle reason for doing so, the active cultivation of a loving mindstate will almost certainly improve one’s own writing. My thinking in this is in accord with Emerson’s who writes in “Friendship” that "Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection." Emerson saw in 1841 what social scientists have recently begun studying with hard data: cognition and emotion cannot be separated; an open, vibrant mind is predicated on an open, vibrant heart. It is a fact that no longer can be pedagogically ignored: people learn better and write better within environments that are positive, humorous, and filled with genuine warmth.

Following Emerson, such a mind, a kind mind, is more likely to be sharp and easily concentrated. It is, further, more likely to be flexible, light, ductile, malleable, plastic, and creative. The virtues are inherently dialogic, in the Freierian sense, and a mind that actively practices the virtues will inevitably become invested with confidence, courage, straightforwardness, honesty, wonder, determination, discipline, concentration, forgiveness, patience, tolerance, renunciation, sympathetic joy, compassion, lovingkindness, generosity, and equanimity. Such a mind is willing to take the risks necessary to effectively write and think and act in the face of adversity. Such a mind is better able to retain the capacity to be surprised. Such a mind is better able to remain responsive to the variety of worlds, both textual and actual, that it will encounter. This is the perfect mind to cultivate in the transtemporal worldwide writing seminar and the transhistorical literary commune we sometimes call humanity.

In the Aristotelian tradition of moral thinking, human beings don’t face a zero-sum choice between fulfillment and moral righteousness. They strive, instead, to fulfill a holistic vision of human flourishing that includes both happiness and nobility. Or rather, this vision of human flourishing treats happiness as inseparable from nobility. This is what Martin Seligman and the best of his colleagues in the positive psychology movement have in mind when they speak of the importance of “purpose” in a fulfilling human life.

A life spent in endless pursuit of egoistic self-satisfaction (Kant’s vision of corruption) would end in wretched desolation, but so would a life devoted purely to acts of exalted self-sacrifice (Kant’s moral ideal). A genuinely purposeful life, by contrast, is one in which an individual strives to become a good human being in the fullest sense—contented as much by work, career, and material reward as by devoting oneself to the flourishing of one’s children.

- Damon Linker