Tough Love

Goodness,

Allow me to channel your sister Truth for a bit and be blunt. I don't want to hurt you, but you need to understand where you came from before I can answer your question.

You say that Truth would tell you that when love is elsewhere, it can't be with you. But that's exactly why I needed you, daughter. There is too much for me to do to be everywhere at once, and so I made you and your sisters with specific aspects of who I am, to try to bring part of my love to the places I am not.

You're going to ask why I left you in that tower if I wanted you to do work for me. But you're my children, darling, not my creations, so I had to let you grow up and figure out what you were supposed to be doing on your own.

Goodness isn't the highest aim. Neither is truth or beauty or joie de vivre. Love is the highest aim. Goodness that grows out of love will be happy; goodness without love can be neither happy or good. I understand you want to rebel against me, daughter, and I'm sorry to give you such a hard truth. I want you to learn to be good, and happy, because you are loving. Being good will not necessarily make you happy, but I hoped that learning to be happy could make you more loving: and therefore more good.

I chose a hard life for you when I gave you the attribute of Goodness, my dear daughter. You have fulfilled the letter of your duty admirably. You say you are crushed that you haven't done enough for me: but there will never be enough for me. I will always want more from you because I want to make you and your sisters perfect. But I will also always give you more of myself.

Love,

your mother

A Maternal Exhortation to Wayward Daughters

Dearest daughters:

I'm sad to see you fighting among yourselves like this. Didn't I teach you better?

Truth, who told you to stay in that tower? Really, dear, I thought you'd have realized by now that you can't do any good if no one can hear what you have to say. Your sisters have learned that at least. Get out. See the world. Find your sisters, if you don't know what else to do.

Goodness -- it's lovely that you're helping people, but you needn't sound so self-sacrificing about it! You've learned that you need to be a doer, but you mustn't just do: you must let yourself enjoy it. It's in your nature to enjoy the work you're doing, if you'd just stop being uptight and worrying about what Truth tells you. Of course you can't win against nature and time. That's why you're needed.

Beauty, my dearest baby: couldn't you make time to visit your sisters once in a while? You look better with them than you ever could alone, you know. Bring your devilish friend; maybe if Goodness has someone to argue with she'll recover some of her joie de vivre. You were right to go gallivanting off, my dear. You were the first to realize I never meant you to stay in that tower forever, but you need to come home, at least occasionally.

I look forward to seeing you all as soon as I can get free of my business elsewhere.

Your devoted mother,

Love

An Empathy Problem

I just read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep for either the second or third time, and I'm beginning to articulate for myself the challenges it raises to the value of empathy. Empathy makes it possible for humans in the novel to remain hopeful and productive on a post-apocalyptic and decaying Earth. Humans distribute their pain (which lessens it) and also share in each other's happiness (which enlivens everyone). As far as this goes, empathy appears as an unqualified good, a non-zero sum game; and in the novel this empathy consists literally of people sharing their emotions through an "empathy box" – a machine that allows collective participation in a religious allegory.

Furthermore empathy appears to be valuable not just for humans, but for animals, too. In the post-apocalyptic environment, with hundreds or thousands of common species very recently extinct, every animal left alive is the subject of human veneration, and empathy. P.K. Dick doesn't literalize this empathy, but he underscores its importance by making its presence a basic method for distinguishing authentic humans from the advanced artificial humanoid servants – androids – who occasionally kill their masters and try to pass as human. Bounty hunters, like the novel's hero, Rick Deckard, ask subjects to imagine and respond to scenarios that involve obvious or implicit harm to animals, and androids always fail to react with the appropriate horror. But the tests are obviously culturally coded: you and I would probably fail, too.

From here things become more complicated, because Deckard, whose job is to "retire" escaped androids, empathizes with some of them; and Deckard detests another bounty hunter, named Resch, for his lack of empathy towards the androids. In fact Deckard becomes convinced by Resch's callousness that Resch is himself an android, and when Resch tests out as human, Deckard is dismayed.

Parts of this novel simply don't cohere, as is common in P.K. Dick's oeuvre. But a generous reading of the novel has it asking this question: Can one reconcile the glorious expansiveness of empathy with making the distinctions upon which one's survival may rest? It seems to me that without a machine that permits a heterogeneous population literally to pool its emotions, people in fact empathize with other, recognizably similar beings. Empathy cannot make a bridge to what is alien or radically different, and in fact in can exacerbate feelings of alienation. When empathy is widespread, anyone left out of the loop becomes suspect, potentially the object of hatred or intense fear. If empathy is what makes "us" human, dare we embrace that humanity? Do we even have the alternative – to know the android, too?

The Chinese Cauldron

SECRETIVE HEART

What’s this? This is an old toolshed.
No, this is a great past love.
[Yehuda Amichai]

Heart falters, stops
before a Chinese cauldron
still good for boiling water.

It is one of a dozen or more,
it is merely iron,
it is merely old,
there is much else to see.

The few raised marks
on its belly
are useful to almost no one.

Heart looks at it a long time.
What do you see? I ask again,
but it does not answer.

Poetry is my loo reading at the moment, and it’s working well; I’m through an anthology of horse poems, Li-Young Lee’s Rose and into Jane Hirshfield’s The Lives of the Heart, where this poem stopped me, got me to re-read, read it aloud, and then hold a monologue to myself about why I love it. The monologue went something like this:

This poem describes, simultaneously, three different experiences that have made me feel isolated. They all take place in museums or places like museums, places where the primary goal is attention.

The first experience is of not being able to lose myself in anything, of feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to see, and maybe also by what I’ve paid to get in. The frustration of bouncing off the surfaces of everything around me, and getting more and more irritable and harried, can be exacerbated by a companion who’s been caught and stopped by something. Then I am like a three-year-old child: Stop looking at that. Look at me. Mommy, let’s go. I want to join in the absorption, but the only questions I can think of are ones that attack the object of absorption, that list all its unremarkablenesses. “It is one of a dozen or more, / it is merely iron, / it is merely old, / there is much else to see.”

The second and third experiences are similar. One is losing myself in something and being asked to explain it, and either growing tongue-tied or sullen, depending on the questioner, or hearing my mouth give out words while an inside part of me says “What in God’s name are you talking about? That isn’t at all what attracts you. And it’s not even true.” Then I am like the heart in Hirshfield’s poem, either unwilling or unable to answer.

The last is losing myself in something and being alone. It is the experience the poem most directly describes, the most mysterious of the three. In that case, I am the absorbed one and the bouncing-off one at once, the heart and its questioner saying “Why this?”

I see the epigraph as an answer to that question: because this thing means more than can be empirically or pragmatically determined. In this case, the toolshed and the cauldron both mean love, mean long years of work and handling, someone’s devotion.