I was pleasantly surprised to see this post on the EA Forum. This has never seemed like a space to talk much about the humanities. Quite reasonably: how do we justify something so indulgent as poetry when we are in triage? Can there be art after cost-effectiveness analysis, but before utopia?
I’m much less surprised to learn you’ve studied poetry. Something literary has always suffused your writing, bringing the clarity of words carefully chosen and the ambiguity of language at its limit. I don’t want to reduce poetry to something purely instrumental, but one part of its value to me has always been to draw up imperfect words for pre-concepts that still resist clear articulation and for pre-sentiments too primordial or too novel to be yet cleanly felt. That’s what I mean by language at its limit. It’s a gift to the philosopher, or to anybody trying to make sense of the world. I think that this skill in voicing things beyond words, like suffering and death, is what Glück offers the effective altruists, and offers humanity.
I only discovered Glück after she won the Nobel Prize, and I still have much left to read. I have a feeling I’ll learn a lot from her poetry. Soon enough, I’ll be feeling jealous that you got to learn from her in person. But for now, I’m feeling sympathy for those who knew her and will be especially keenly stung by her loss. My thoughts are with you.
Since her passing, I’ve been reading two of her short poems about death, ‘The Gold Lily’ and ‘Mother and Child’. In my reading, these pieces both teeter on a panpsychism or a oneness of being. Before gestation, ‘Mother and Child’ tells us, we were:
[...] earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.
And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.
Glück finds herself at the edge of something unknowable. She’s reaching out for those imperfect words for pre-concepts and pre-sentiments, and all she can do is gesture out at the expanse of the unsayable, into the darkness, beyond the veil. The raw edge, as you say, Joe.
How does Glück orient herself towards death, knowing that there is more than is dreamt of in her philosophy, yet knowing nothing concrete of a metaphysics beyond the veil? ‘The Gold Lily’ is bleakly physicalist: the speaker is “not / a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt”. Only her “yet” offers hope of reintegration into what Glück calls, with a touch of Whitman, the “leaves and grass”, by which I think she means, like Emerson and his transparent eyeball, a selfless unity with nature. But ‘Mother and Child’ says something more interesting. Glück didn’t find answers for suffering and ignorance and purpose, but she thought that life was an intergenerational project and that we could keep on asking. The poem continues:
This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.
I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:
Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?
Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;
it is your turn to address it, to go back asking
what am I for? What am I for?
Here we find motivation for the next generation, and perhaps motivation that resonates with the effective altruist: we should reckon with suffering, reckon with ignorance, and be agentic: “be pivotal, [...] be the masterpiece. [...] be driven”. Let’s demand to know. Address the machine. Keep asking: what am I for?
And so goes Glück’s wisdom on how to survive her. Thanks for your thoughts, Joe. Thanks to anybody who has read mine.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Ben. And also, for putting the “The Gold Lily” and “Mother and Child” on my radar—they hadn’t been before. I agree that “Mother and Child” evokes a sort some kind of sort of intergenerational project in the way you describe—“it is your turn to address it.” It seems related to the thing I was trying to talk about at the end of the post—e.g., Gluck asking for some kind of directness and intensity of engagement with life.
Hi Joe
I was pleasantly surprised to see this post on the EA Forum. This has never seemed like a space to talk much about the humanities. Quite reasonably: how do we justify something so indulgent as poetry when we are in triage? Can there be art after cost-effectiveness analysis, but before utopia?
I’m much less surprised to learn you’ve studied poetry. Something literary has always suffused your writing, bringing the clarity of words carefully chosen and the ambiguity of language at its limit. I don’t want to reduce poetry to something purely instrumental, but one part of its value to me has always been to draw up imperfect words for pre-concepts that still resist clear articulation and for pre-sentiments too primordial or too novel to be yet cleanly felt. That’s what I mean by language at its limit. It’s a gift to the philosopher, or to anybody trying to make sense of the world. I think that this skill in voicing things beyond words, like suffering and death, is what Glück offers the effective altruists, and offers humanity.
I only discovered Glück after she won the Nobel Prize, and I still have much left to read. I have a feeling I’ll learn a lot from her poetry. Soon enough, I’ll be feeling jealous that you got to learn from her in person. But for now, I’m feeling sympathy for those who knew her and will be especially keenly stung by her loss. My thoughts are with you.
Since her passing, I’ve been reading two of her short poems about death, ‘The Gold Lily’ and ‘Mother and Child’. In my reading, these pieces both teeter on a panpsychism or a oneness of being. Before gestation, ‘Mother and Child’ tells us, we were:
Glück finds herself at the edge of something unknowable. She’s reaching out for those imperfect words for pre-concepts and pre-sentiments, and all she can do is gesture out at the expanse of the unsayable, into the darkness, beyond the veil. The raw edge, as you say, Joe.
How does Glück orient herself towards death, knowing that there is more than is dreamt of in her philosophy, yet knowing nothing concrete of a metaphysics beyond the veil? ‘The Gold Lily’ is bleakly physicalist: the speaker is “not / a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt”. Only her “yet” offers hope of reintegration into what Glück calls, with a touch of Whitman, the “leaves and grass”, by which I think she means, like Emerson and his transparent eyeball, a selfless unity with nature. But ‘Mother and Child’ says something more interesting. Glück didn’t find answers for suffering and ignorance and purpose, but she thought that life was an intergenerational project and that we could keep on asking. The poem continues:
Here we find motivation for the next generation, and perhaps motivation that resonates with the effective altruist: we should reckon with suffering, reckon with ignorance, and be agentic: “be pivotal, [...] be the masterpiece. [...] be driven”. Let’s demand to know. Address the machine. Keep asking: what am I for?
And so goes Glück’s wisdom on how to survive her. Thanks for your thoughts, Joe. Thanks to anybody who has read mine.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Ben. And also, for putting the “The Gold Lily” and “Mother and Child” on my radar—they hadn’t been before. I agree that “Mother and Child” evokes a sort some kind of sort of intergenerational project in the way you describe—“it is your turn to address it.” It seems related to the thing I was trying to talk about at the end of the post—e.g., Gluck asking for some kind of directness and intensity of engagement with life.