Empathy: A Thought Experiment

I love the idea of there being "no inherent limits to the gulfs of otherness that empathy can bridge" (see previous post). The following is not intended as a reductio ad absurdum of the claim, but as an ethical nudge, a challenge, or a dare – unless it is simply a poem. It relies the following premise: that to empathize is to be able to say, "I am that..." and to mean it.

• I am that child.
• I am that man.
• I am that woman.
• I am that mother.
• I am my neighbor.
• I am my enemy.

• I am that orangutan.
• I am that dolphin.
• I am that dog, that cat.
• I am that lizard. I am that bird.
• I am that mollusk.
• I am that arthropod.
• I am that sponge.

• I am that fungus.
• I am that bacterium.
• I am that cell.

• I am that rock.
• I am that cloud.
• I am that equation.

• I am that plate.
• I am that key.
• I am that tool.
• I am that program.
• I am that machine.
• I am that model.

• I am that robot.
• I am that replica of myself.

Re: Poets vs. Critics, part II

I'm going to respond briefly to Ezra's arguments against my poets/critics distinction. I hope to show how our positions differ, but also that we are not in as much disagreement as he suggests.

On the question of what poetry is: as a literary theorist, I first have to insist that poetry, the kind that critics study, is primarily an artifact of language. Poetry is a particular form of language. From a Formalist viewpoint, it is language that is at some level talking about itself, whatever else it may be about.

This description is somewhat disingenuous in the context of my previous post, however, since I was using poetry metaphorically (as I think Ezra does in his response) to describe a number of different actions and expressions. In that wider sense, I agree with Ezra that poetry is "a quality of grace…a kind of victory." This is the more general creative impulse that I group under the name "poetry" in my post.

On to the question of whether poetry is "a mixture of critical and aesthetic focus," whether "every good work of art practices criticism." I want to clarify, first, that I am not using criticism to describe the practice of evaluation, but rather a practice of organization. That said, I appreciate Ezra's argument that poetry practices criticism of the world. Much poetry is undoubtedly a practice of organization of features of the world; an attempt to understand and explain it.

Perhaps the distinction I'm trying to make is more between the particular and the universal. In my experience, creative work explains the world in terms of a particular event, a particular description, a particular instance. The work I would call criticism tries to draw generalities from the works of art. (Works of poetry can perform criticism by expressing generalities as well, but I think it is less common.) I think the difference in focus, on generalizing or explaining creatively by example, is more important to the distinction than whether a work is a "poem" or not.

re: Poets vs. Critics

I find a lot to argue with in Hannah's post, "Poets vs. Critics." I suppose one might look at the following comments as an instance of the poet trying to take a critic to task. But in fact I want to attack the distinction, and not the critic at all.

I approach from two angles. First I want to claim that every good poem and every good work of art practices criticism – not of itself (so the poet is not necessarily a literary critic) but of some feature or bug of the world itself: a structure, a pattern, a piece of chaos, a failure. Second, I suggest that poetry is something other than all the things that are poems, taken collectively.

We speak of poetry in physical movement, in the changing of the seasons, and in a thousand other places. Poetry is not poems, though good poems are usually poetry. Think of poetry as a quality of grace; think of poetry as a kind of victory; think of poetry as a lovely mixture of critical and aesthetic focus – critical and aesthetic success.

That is poetry.

Poets vs. Critics

When Stephanie asked me to join the conversation on this blog, I was nervous to be writing with two “real writers.” I don’t consider myself a writer, in the creative sense. Through my education, I have focused on analytical writing and criticism. Instead of being a poet, I became a critic.

Let me explain the distinction that I draw between “poets” and “critics,” which I think applies outside of the realm of literature as well. A poet is someone who creates. Writing poetry is an inherently creative process. The poet makes something from nothing. (After all, the words “poet,” “poetry,” and “poem” come from the word for “to make.”)

The critic, on the other hand, describes the work written by the poets. The critic’s job is to categorize: to find similarities between the work of different artists and determine a “school,” or to understand the underlying processes that make the poet’s work “work.” As a critic, I am interested in understanding poetry as a whole, not just the expression of an individual poem. Of course, poetry consists of poems, so in order to generalize about poetry one must carefully study the individual works.

The poet creates; the critic categorizes and explains. I don’t think this distinction is only applicable to the criticism of poetry. Criticism seems like more of a science; poetry, more of an art. Consider the work of mathematicians, however. While the study of math in classes is focused on generalizing, and you understand new mathematical concepts by analogy with concepts you already know (working in a “scientific” manner, like a critic), the practice of research in math is a creative process. The research mathematician chooses a particular area to focus on, and studies that area, trying to understand/invent interesting properties it has. (There is often discussion among mathematicians of whether math research is a process of discovering things that already exist, or of creating them. While I tend to sit on the "discovery" side of the fence, there is no question that the act of discovery can feel a lot like the act of creation, as inspiration often has to strike essentially out of the blue.)

The distinction is not complete: poets benefit from understanding general principles of the form in which they work (by doing critical work), while critics can write poetry (although my poetry, at least, is often more informed by my understanding of poetic form than any essential inspiration). In many studies, however, it seems that the work can be divided up between the creative and the critical. What would it mean to bridge that divide? Is such a synthesis something that would improve our understanding and production of art, or is it better for artists and critics to specialize?

On Roses and Poesy

The third line of “Moses supposes” puzzled me at first. I always imagined that "posies" were themselves a kind of flower, and I’d only encountered the word in another nursery rhyme, "Ring around the rosie, / A pocket full of posies..." A posy is "a small bunch of flowers," as my computer's Oxford American Dictionary tells me.

Imagine my joy in finding, as I kept reading the entry, that an archaic meaning of “posy” is “a short motto or line of verse inscribed inside a ring.” Moved to consult the Oxford English Dictionary online, I found further that “posy” was originally a variant of “poesy,” so that a bunch of flowers and “a poetic composition” (1.a.) or “poetic expression” (1.b.) shared a location in the language.

They shared a word. I was tempted to write that a bunch of flowers and poetic expression were once, somehow, the same thing, but this obviously not the right way to talk about a word with many meanings. I wonder whether the metaphor I’ve chosen – a location in the language – shows any promise at all.