I have lately been reading through the anthology Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics, edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright and put together from talks given at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. So much of the reading I do is pointed, meaning I am reading things for a particular purpose or project, and while there were many purposes to be found in reading this book, I came to it open, not hoping to walk away with any particular idea.
I miss this type of reading because I often find it to be the most productive. In Cross Worlds, in a series of talks titled “Po/ethics,” Harryette Mullen recalls a John Cage phrase, the belief in “minimum ethic: do what you said you’d do.” Mullen goes on to say “Acting ethically means paying attention. It means being compassionate toward yourself and others.” She adds, “I think we all have this basic ethical intelligence, so that we know when we are hurting someone, if we pay attention to what we are doing and the effects of our actions.” These sentences, although I was not looking for them, and although I have run into the John Cage line before, clicked in a new way.
Mullen’s ideas about what it means to live ethically excited me for two reasons. First, they are so straightforward: just pay attention. This does, in a kind of shocking way, cut through a lot of the murkiness that sometimes fills my head when I try to think ethics, and in most any instance I can recall where I have ethically failed, simply paying better attention would have prevented me from doing so. Mullen’s thinking also, however, aligns very neatly with my own thinking in terms of nonfiction writing and the essay. The task of the essayist is to pay very close attention to a thing (a thought, a landscape, a song, a lived experience), to do so with compassion, and to report back on what that attention has revealed.
While I believe it is impossible to strip any writing or art of ethics, the essay, with its particularly defined relationship to truth, has in turn a particular relation to ethics. It is not surprising, then, that the essayists who have most formed our modern understanding of the genre—Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, et al—all have clear ethical aims and components to their work. This could also be said of the essays that today are emerging as the most vibrant and urgent. The last few years worth of nominees in the National Book Critics Circle Awards criticism category help indicate this. Given the striking simplicity of Mullen’s statement, this makes sense: the project of the essay is to pay attention, and when we pay proper attention, we are ethical. It’s a very beautiful loop.
There is also a particular beauty to the way this observation can be applied to the ethical debates that rage around us. As I said, it clears the murkiness from my mind in ethical quandaries, but it also preserves the complexity and contradictions that are inherent in our world. Paying attention just means seeing those complexities and contradictions for what they are, after all, not erasing them. Jonathan Chait’s recently published and much criticized article on “political correctness” in New York Magazine, for instance, could be easily countered with the suggestion that Chait simply pay more compassionate attention to those he criticizes (a good summary of Chait’s flawed argument can be gathered by reading Jia Tolentino’s response on Jezebel). The sense of a “minimum ethic” is particularly useful here– what the essayist says she will do, by nature of writing the essay, is pay close attention to her topic.
The essay can be a tool for a better world, just as all writing and all making of art can be. I doubt many of us would turn to the practice if we didn’t believe this to be so. Still, it’s a nice reminder, how powerful paying attention can be. It’s why even when reading with no purpose, flipping through a book with no intention but to flip through it, paying the right attention means that ideas will form, that things will click, and that we will continue to learn from the world we build.