The Soul of Empathy

Wallace Stevens makes the claim that poetry restores to us a "supreme fiction," giving us back the meaning we lost when we ceased to believe in God or practice religion. Empathy, to me, is not an activity which parallels the belief Stevens calls us to have in necessary fictions; it's not about convincing myself that I am something or someone else, but rather about being willing and able to imagine myself, temporarily, inside the other's experience (which is tricky for me with rocks, but I'm willing to try). In the moment of empathy, that imagination does precisely take the form of "I am that." But believing that I am that arthropod or that person or that machine, permanently, short-circuits empathy -- in order to function, empathy needs me to feel, as me, for another. And if empathy is going to have any ethical function, saying "I am my brother" is not going to help me navigate between my brother's needs and mine.

Though John Donne would seem agree with Ezra: "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Donne's argument is that we are all part of the same thing, that anyone's death diminishes us because we are inseparably linked. (And he begins his meditation with an empathic experiment: hearing the bells tolling, he imagines a man whose friends have caused the bells to be tolled for him because they know he's too ill to recover, while he himself does not yet know it -- and Donne takes this further, saying, Who knows? I may be that man who is sicker than he knows; the bell may be tolling for me, though I think I am well.)

Progressing further into a dissolution of my own point, here is a poem by Mary Oliver -- who, like Ezra, goes all the way to rocks:

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn't?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?