This post has been haunting me for days... Pity, Power, and Presence — I’ve found myself scribbling the ideas in my sketchbook and re-reading sections and attempting to diagram them, but something was nagging at me, it felt like something was missing... I think I may have put my finger on it this morning. It’s the emotional, empathetic impact of the words on this digital screen, through which I am encountering this essay. That bit of Auden has power not just on its own but in the context of this essay, online, in a networked community. And the story of Priam imploring Achilles. And the story of Frodo’s fear. The idea that disembodiment and frictionless action gives us the sensation of power and that being physically present offers an impediment to cruelty absolutely ring true to me. I think there must be an unaccounted for element though, when there exists poetic images and otherworldly fictions that make us feel feel feel so much, and when those bits of poetry and prose have the power to evoke empathy and tremendous pity despite us reading them in the frictionless power-simulating disembodied digital world. It is easy to get whipped into an unethical frenzy by a twitter feed, but it’s still possible to read a tweet that re-grounds you and reminds you of your humanity. How can words on a page or screen make us feel the embodied presence of people who are long dead or who never lived or who lived primarily in the imagination of a poet who observed the casual cruelty of a neglected child and drew a verbal connection between the way the child was treated and the way the child treats the world? Pity, Power, Presence, and Poetry... I think is the missing element. The presence of another counter to simulated disembodied power that impedes pity, other than actual presence, there’s also the possibility of a kind of a simulated humane non-bodily “presence” through art, through which the reader finds again empathy, pity, shared sorrow, and all humane feeling.
This is an excellent point. I would certainly grant this (potential but not automatic) power to fiction and poetry. And I wonder, too, whether attention is a thread that runs through these considerations. Presence, I suspect, can activate pity even without our conscious attention, catching us off guard as it were, but I'd say that it ordinarily demands a measure of attentive care on our part, a willingness to look. Poetry and fiction demand something similar, a degree of attention that allows the story or poem to weave its spell. In any case, thank you for adding these reflections!
RE FOOTNOTES. Listening to one of your podcasts, you mentioned that you have trouble integrating footnotes into a podcast. One way to do it is to have someone else, who has a clearly different voice from yours, read the footnotes as they occur. She could start the first one by saying "footnote" and thereafter, it will be obvious.
That bit of Auden in the footnotes will be chilling my soul for the foreseeable future…!
This post has been haunting me for days... Pity, Power, and Presence — I’ve found myself scribbling the ideas in my sketchbook and re-reading sections and attempting to diagram them, but something was nagging at me, it felt like something was missing... I think I may have put my finger on it this morning. It’s the emotional, empathetic impact of the words on this digital screen, through which I am encountering this essay. That bit of Auden has power not just on its own but in the context of this essay, online, in a networked community. And the story of Priam imploring Achilles. And the story of Frodo’s fear. The idea that disembodiment and frictionless action gives us the sensation of power and that being physically present offers an impediment to cruelty absolutely ring true to me. I think there must be an unaccounted for element though, when there exists poetic images and otherworldly fictions that make us feel feel feel so much, and when those bits of poetry and prose have the power to evoke empathy and tremendous pity despite us reading them in the frictionless power-simulating disembodied digital world. It is easy to get whipped into an unethical frenzy by a twitter feed, but it’s still possible to read a tweet that re-grounds you and reminds you of your humanity. How can words on a page or screen make us feel the embodied presence of people who are long dead or who never lived or who lived primarily in the imagination of a poet who observed the casual cruelty of a neglected child and drew a verbal connection between the way the child was treated and the way the child treats the world? Pity, Power, Presence, and Poetry... I think is the missing element. The presence of another counter to simulated disembodied power that impedes pity, other than actual presence, there’s also the possibility of a kind of a simulated humane non-bodily “presence” through art, through which the reader finds again empathy, pity, shared sorrow, and all humane feeling.
This is an excellent point. I would certainly grant this (potential but not automatic) power to fiction and poetry. And I wonder, too, whether attention is a thread that runs through these considerations. Presence, I suspect, can activate pity even without our conscious attention, catching us off guard as it were, but I'd say that it ordinarily demands a measure of attentive care on our part, a willingness to look. Poetry and fiction demand something similar, a degree of attention that allows the story or poem to weave its spell. In any case, thank you for adding these reflections!
If you're interested, I put my thoughts into longer form here: https://amyletter.substack.com/p/why-are-some-words-poetry?r=88zn9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=
RE FOOTNOTES. Listening to one of your podcasts, you mentioned that you have trouble integrating footnotes into a podcast. One way to do it is to have someone else, who has a clearly different voice from yours, read the footnotes as they occur. She could start the first one by saying "footnote" and thereafter, it will be obvious.