On Loyalty
by Troy Jollimore
Dear Troy,
In your paper titled The Importance of Whom We Care About, you analyze how love is viewed by Kierkegaard, Frankfurt, and Velleman and you even mention Woody Allen and his movie Manhattan. Finally, you remind the reader of “the importance and value of the things and people we love, in all their glorious specificity and individual particularity”. Is that more difficult or easier in today’s world? How so?
As far as I know, it’s never been easy. Appreciating a person in her full individuality, not letting your mind be distracted or disoriented by clichés or your vision be clouded by stereotypes and expectations, is always difficult. So often we see what we expect to see, are prepared to see, or just want to see, and it’s easier, and more comfortable, that way. I think that’s deep human psychology, though I could be wrong; maybe it’s more culturally conditioned than I realize. If anything, you’d think that modern American society would be a cultural landscape in which perceiving and appreciating people as individuals would be encouraged and facilitated, because the U.S., according to its official story, puts so much emphasis on individualism and the importance of the individual. But that’s the irony of American history: the official story is so often at odds with the reality on the ground. American society, as writers beginning with de Tocqueville have observed, is quite hostile to individuality. It is deeply conformist. There are categories of oddity – the “indie” – that purport to be set against the mainstream but are in fact accepted and approved sub-categories of the mainstream. Meanwhile people who actually are different in any substantial way are labeled “weird” and shunned, they are exiled to the margins. I’ve been noticing this with respect to my students lately, how quick many of them are to reject anything, or anyone, that doesn’t meet the set of standard expectations they have inherited from their consumerist culture. People today feel unsafe around things that are different, because they don’t know where they are going, what might happen. So they stay out of art museums, they stay away from films that don’t fit into some recognizable genre, and they spend their time in the company of people who hold the same beliefs and positions they do. And once you get in the habit of doing that, you can completely avoid ever having to really look at anyone at all, you can avoid seeing other people as the unique and strange and fascinating creatures they are. You can just assume that everyone is just like you, and then you can feel comfortable all the time; people become mirrors to you, reflecting back your own clichéd expectations. When in fact the truth is that everyone is strange; even the people who are closest to us, who we might feel we know so well that they are in fact incapable of surprising us, are in fact, if only we could open our eyes and really see them, strange, extraordinary, breathtakingly odd.
Taking flight from the same philosophy paper, where you also consider the question, “Why do you think life is worth living?” can you tell us any recent examples you’ve encountered in which you found the most inspiring answers to that same question?
Since you have mentioned Manhattan, I’ll adopt Allen’s strategy: in the scene I reference in my paper, his character, Isaac Davis, makes a list of things he loves, things that makes his existence worthwhile. My list is constantly changing but at the moment – and you requested “recent” examples so I’ll stick mostly to the past few years -- it would include James Richardson’s During; Dean Young’s Shock by Shock; C.D. Wright’s book of essays with the very long title that starts The Poet, The Lion…; the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis; Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel; the Public Theater’s 2013 production of Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, starring Shawn and directed by André Gregory; an extraordinary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by actors from the London Stage, which I saw in Houston early last year; Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog and her album United States Live; Joe Henry’s album Invisible Hour; the Atlantic Ocean. And many more; but any single one of those is enough to do it for me.
What’s your philosophical position on dealing with The Importance of Whom We Don’t Care About?
Traditionally philosophers have thought more about what we owe to people who are not close to us (I’d rather say, people we don’t care about as much rather than people about whom we don’t care at all) than about the people – friends, lovers, relatives – who are close to us and with whom we tend to be strongly and often passionately concerned. And I don’t take myself to have a particular position on the question of what we owe to strangers, except to say that, whatever it is that we actually owe to them, it’s probably a lot more than most of us tend to think. We – by ‘we’ here I mean people living in economically privileged countries – share the world with many people who are much less well off than we are, and that’s due far more to luck than to anything else; most of us just happened to be born into circumstances that treated us, on the whole, very well indeed. This isn’t something we earned; it’s just a cosmic accident; and I don’t think there is any deep sense in which we have a right to this wealth that so many other people have been excluded from. So, as I say, I don’t know exactly where the level of obligation is – how much should we be doing to make other people’s lives better, exactly? – but I strongly suspect it is much higher than what we tend to think, and that most of us, even those of us who think of ourselves as generous and charitable, really aren’t doing as much as we should be.
Sun And Air
|
Pluck them out of their natural habitat and they die. That’s the general rule for things that crawl, things that stick to the dank cave wall, things that breathe, things that purchase insurance. An air can be what we die when we don’t have enough of it in our lungs, or a piece of music or, spelled otherwise, somebody biding his time, waiting for a throne. Somebody is going to have to die before he gets to sit there, which is why one ought always keep one’s blade well-oiled and sleep with the window open. So the son and heir feels the sun in his hair and sits with his back to the wall. The last remaining passenger pigeon was spotted this morning pickpocketing crumbs on a patio table at Nordstrom’s. Gone are the days when it would perch on its own dedicated link of the Great Chain of Being and calmly survey the agonizing decline of the century of Marx and Darwin. As for me, I like to wait just as long as I can before slicing the envelope open, then savor the delicious resignation of the cream-white paper relinquishing its secrets. You get angry at people when they die, they take a part of you with them. Stop that! we all want to snap at a funeral. At least we got to put on our nicest suits and gather around a fresh hole in the ground like a flock of itinerant birds that appears at the same place on the same day of the same month each year, on their annual voyage north, their DNA etched with ancient designs, schemata of regions unknown. |
You conclude your essay In Defense of Clutter with a paragraph by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips who writes, “…to frustrate one version of the self is always to gratify, to promote, to re-find another version.” On that note, would you recommend not fearing clutter as a healthy way of reinventing one’s self and would you say it can be seen as a tool of trade for artists more so than for others?
Probably each artist has his or her own working methods, and I’m sure that living or working in a cluttered environment wouldn’t work for everyone. But it seems to work for me, at least a lot of the time, simply because I seem to be the sort of person who finds inspiration in my immediate environment. It’s the same reason I like wandering around in bookstores or libraries – I mean physical bookstores and libraries, actual buildings full of actual physical books. These are spaces that encourage serendipitous discoveries, lucky finds, the operations of chance. Browsing shelves, opening books at random, all sorts of things can present themselves to you and feed your work in ways you couldn’t possibly have come up with on your own. The richer the environment – and, to some extent, the more chaotic the environment – the more opportunities there are for the world to give you that gentle nudge you need, to push your work in a different direction, to open something up for you that had remained closed or hidden. The kind of white, hygienic interior space you see, in, say, an Apple Store – that’s my nightmare. I couldn’t possibly work in a space like that. I feel like I can’t even breathe in a space like that.
In your essay Godless yet Good you ponder on the Aristotelian idea on emotions as “mental states that reflect and hence inform us about the world”. Based on that idea, what do you see as the most prominent emotions shared by modern day people and how do they reflect on the way we are informed about the world?
It’s hard not to think about the recent election in this connection. Looking at that, the most prominent emotions felt by the American public today would seem to be anger and fear, and the defensive contempt that anger and fear in combination tend to give rise to. And I’m not just attributing those to the other side, so to speak; in the wake of the election I myself have been feeling a huge amount of anger and even more fear. I hope that the fear, at least, will prove to have been unjustified, but it’s too early to say yet. At any rate, these are not the most promising emotions to have running through the engine of your political community. Not that we should eliminate them altogether; every emotion has its place, and there are occasions for genuine, justified anger and legitimate fear. But when those two come to be so dominant, there is little room for the other, more positive emotions – love, kindness, trust – to do their work. And their work is so necessary. When we are informed mostly by anger and fear we perceive the world as a place in which love is foolish, in which kindness and trust make you into a sucker, a person to be taken advantage of. They prompt us to conceive of the human community as a horde of enemies, and make it seem unwise if not absurd to try to contribute to any larger social project, to act out of one’s more generous impulses, to try to do anything for the good of the community. This of course is the way the United States has been going for some time, and perhaps it’s the way a community that takes individualism and competition as its core values must inevitably go sooner or later. But there are better ideas and better values in America’s founding documents, in its literature, in its cultural traditions, in its landscapes. I hope it’s not too late for us to wake up and start going back to those, not too late to say, okay, competition is fine in its place, it can be useful, but enough is enough, and the degree of competition and ruthless, aggressive self-interest we have cultivated in our citizens – not to mention the degree of indifference and neglect American society has subjected its young people to, the degree to which people my age and older have said to the young, in a variety of ways, ‘We don’t really plan to leave you anything worthwhile, not good jobs, not a stable society, not the riches of culture, not the opportunity to get a real education, not even breathable air or drinkable water, because we plan to consume everything we can while we’re still on this planet and we reject the idea of paying the costs of raising you properly or, for that matter, leaving you a livable world’—is way more than enough. It’s too much. It’s just too much.
Based on your book On Loyalty what do you make of the place of loyalty in the current political arena and do you foresee any trickledown effect of it in other fields?
Loyalty in personal relationships can be a wonderful thing. But in politics it is quite dangerous, and the role loyalty seems to be playing in current American politics seems to me very, very destructive. We seem to have reached a point where there are perceived ‘sides’ in the U.S., loosely identified with the two dominant political parties, and where a large number of Americans decide where they stand on various matters (I am saying ‘where they stand’ rather than ‘what they think’ because the process I am describing seems to involve a profound avoidance of anything resembling thinking) not by looking at reasons or evidence, or referring to historical precedent and placing matters in a historical context, and so forth, but simply by sticking to the party line. How do you know if it’s serious if a political candidate refuses to share their tax returns, or has sensitive emails on a private server, or threatens to ban American citizens from entering the country on the basis of their religion, or is elected partly as the result of meddling by a foreign power? Well, check to see who it is: if it’s the other guy doing these things then it’s terrible, a cause for indignation, but of course if it’s your guy doing these things then hey, it’s okay, what’s the big deal? So loyalty to party ends up dictating belief. And it helps, of course, that people today don’t know history, they don’t study their culture and they don’t read books, because in that kind of historical void people just aren’t going to recognize, for instance, that for the Senate to refuse to hold hearings on a candidate for the Supreme Court nominated by a sitting president is an unprecedented, outrageous dereliction of duty. They’ll think it’s merely “politics as usual,” because their perception of what is “usual” is confined to the past couple of decades, because that’s all the history they know, what has happened in their lifetime and what they happen to remember, as filtered through whatever media sources they happen to gather their information from.
This combination of loyalty and willed ignorance has always been a force in the deeply anti-intellectual politics of this country, but it has not typically been this powerful a force, this deeply influential. And because it is a closed system – because the people who decide where they stand in this manner are not interested in reasoning or evidence – it is not at all clear what can be done to create a consensus in this country, even regarding the most basic of facts. It would help if we could start by somehow reinvigorating the view, in the public at large, that knowledge, judgment, and intellect matter, and that being deeply familiar with and informed about parts of the world, and parts of history, that go beyond what you can immediately perceive or remember, are valuable and admirable things. But I think we may be too far gone for that.
In your poem, On the Origins of Things, you write, “But did you know/ that anger began as music, played/ too often and too loudly by drunken performers/ at weddings and garden parties?” What inspired this poem and especially these words that paint such vivid and meaningful visual settings?
I became aware at some point that in a lot of poems I like, the parts I like best are parts that are completely false, entirely made up – “out of whole cloth,” as the lovely saying goes – parts of poems that show a kind of delicious irresponsibility that takes the form of the utter lack of any aspiration to represent reality accurately. So “On the Origins of Things” was an attempt (not my first) to write a poem that played with the idea of how absurd, and how delightful, made-up stories and “facts” can be. (In their place, of course. In art they can be wonderful; in politics they are disastrous!) Each false claim about origins had to be both obviously false and, in some interesting way, true. Which suggests, I suppose, that the claims are metaphors, because that sounds like the characteristic features of a metaphor: an equivalence claim that is obviously false, but also true, accurate, or insightful in some interesting, non-literal way.
The final lines of your poem Some Men are very poignant and maybe true for many during this time of year. You write, “he has felt—not dead,/exactly, but/ at the same time/not quite/entirely alive.” What’s the poet’s remedy to these kinds of feelings?
What is special about this sort of feeling is that really, it’s a lack of feeling: to feel that you are dead, or not completely alive, is to feel that you are not feeling much of anything at all. So the solution is, has to be, to wake up; and the question is, what wakes people up? I don’t know. I think that experiencing art helps, experiencing beauty helps. Being in love certainly helps, but it’s a hard thing to engineer. Reading also helps, not just in terms of comfort but in terms of being awake; more and more I think that the people in our society who are genuinely awake are the ones who read, who let their minds play and explore in the fields of thought created and cultivated by other people, and that this is more and more an uncommon thing; most people seem to subsist on a shallow media diet and seem to feel no need to learn about history, to learn about their culture, to know the world they are inhabiting. When you do that, you go to sleep. You live in a trance. You take the most miraculous gift you have been given, your brain, and you say, Well, I can do without this.
Of course, if what we are talking about is genuine depression, reading on its own won’t solve the problem, and neither will beauty or art; it can be hard, in such times, even to appreciate beauty at all, to make a connection with art or nature, let alone fall in love. So I don’t have anything like a foolproof remedy. But I have learned to trust in life’s capacity to keep moving forward, even when I don’t feel that I am moving at all; to trust in the idea that wherever I am at the moment, it won’t be long before, existentially speaking, I will be somewhere different.
Regret is a truly captivating poem with these final lines, “…even as I now sit alone, frantic and mad,/racing to unread the book of our love/before you can finish unwriting it.” Any regrets you left behind in 2016? What are the points of satisfaction you are concentrating on now?
Thank you. I don’t know if I have ever managed to leave behind any regrets. I tend to take all of them with me into the new year. This year I think I have taken more than most. As for satisfaction, that’s not a feeling I identify with or experience very often, other than for very brief periods. Even when things on this planet are going well – and they certainly do not seem to be going very well at the moment – I have a hard time feeling satisfied. I think that what tends to mean more to me than satisfaction, and what I will be focusing on in 2017, and perhaps for a long time to come, isn’t so much satisfaction as hope. It’s hope that keeps me going.
Probably each artist has his or her own working methods, and I’m sure that living or working in a cluttered environment wouldn’t work for everyone. But it seems to work for me, at least a lot of the time, simply because I seem to be the sort of person who finds inspiration in my immediate environment. It’s the same reason I like wandering around in bookstores or libraries – I mean physical bookstores and libraries, actual buildings full of actual physical books. These are spaces that encourage serendipitous discoveries, lucky finds, the operations of chance. Browsing shelves, opening books at random, all sorts of things can present themselves to you and feed your work in ways you couldn’t possibly have come up with on your own. The richer the environment – and, to some extent, the more chaotic the environment – the more opportunities there are for the world to give you that gentle nudge you need, to push your work in a different direction, to open something up for you that had remained closed or hidden. The kind of white, hygienic interior space you see, in, say, an Apple Store – that’s my nightmare. I couldn’t possibly work in a space like that. I feel like I can’t even breathe in a space like that.
In your essay Godless yet Good you ponder on the Aristotelian idea on emotions as “mental states that reflect and hence inform us about the world”. Based on that idea, what do you see as the most prominent emotions shared by modern day people and how do they reflect on the way we are informed about the world?
It’s hard not to think about the recent election in this connection. Looking at that, the most prominent emotions felt by the American public today would seem to be anger and fear, and the defensive contempt that anger and fear in combination tend to give rise to. And I’m not just attributing those to the other side, so to speak; in the wake of the election I myself have been feeling a huge amount of anger and even more fear. I hope that the fear, at least, will prove to have been unjustified, but it’s too early to say yet. At any rate, these are not the most promising emotions to have running through the engine of your political community. Not that we should eliminate them altogether; every emotion has its place, and there are occasions for genuine, justified anger and legitimate fear. But when those two come to be so dominant, there is little room for the other, more positive emotions – love, kindness, trust – to do their work. And their work is so necessary. When we are informed mostly by anger and fear we perceive the world as a place in which love is foolish, in which kindness and trust make you into a sucker, a person to be taken advantage of. They prompt us to conceive of the human community as a horde of enemies, and make it seem unwise if not absurd to try to contribute to any larger social project, to act out of one’s more generous impulses, to try to do anything for the good of the community. This of course is the way the United States has been going for some time, and perhaps it’s the way a community that takes individualism and competition as its core values must inevitably go sooner or later. But there are better ideas and better values in America’s founding documents, in its literature, in its cultural traditions, in its landscapes. I hope it’s not too late for us to wake up and start going back to those, not too late to say, okay, competition is fine in its place, it can be useful, but enough is enough, and the degree of competition and ruthless, aggressive self-interest we have cultivated in our citizens – not to mention the degree of indifference and neglect American society has subjected its young people to, the degree to which people my age and older have said to the young, in a variety of ways, ‘We don’t really plan to leave you anything worthwhile, not good jobs, not a stable society, not the riches of culture, not the opportunity to get a real education, not even breathable air or drinkable water, because we plan to consume everything we can while we’re still on this planet and we reject the idea of paying the costs of raising you properly or, for that matter, leaving you a livable world’—is way more than enough. It’s too much. It’s just too much.
Based on your book On Loyalty what do you make of the place of loyalty in the current political arena and do you foresee any trickledown effect of it in other fields?
Loyalty in personal relationships can be a wonderful thing. But in politics it is quite dangerous, and the role loyalty seems to be playing in current American politics seems to me very, very destructive. We seem to have reached a point where there are perceived ‘sides’ in the U.S., loosely identified with the two dominant political parties, and where a large number of Americans decide where they stand on various matters (I am saying ‘where they stand’ rather than ‘what they think’ because the process I am describing seems to involve a profound avoidance of anything resembling thinking) not by looking at reasons or evidence, or referring to historical precedent and placing matters in a historical context, and so forth, but simply by sticking to the party line. How do you know if it’s serious if a political candidate refuses to share their tax returns, or has sensitive emails on a private server, or threatens to ban American citizens from entering the country on the basis of their religion, or is elected partly as the result of meddling by a foreign power? Well, check to see who it is: if it’s the other guy doing these things then it’s terrible, a cause for indignation, but of course if it’s your guy doing these things then hey, it’s okay, what’s the big deal? So loyalty to party ends up dictating belief. And it helps, of course, that people today don’t know history, they don’t study their culture and they don’t read books, because in that kind of historical void people just aren’t going to recognize, for instance, that for the Senate to refuse to hold hearings on a candidate for the Supreme Court nominated by a sitting president is an unprecedented, outrageous dereliction of duty. They’ll think it’s merely “politics as usual,” because their perception of what is “usual” is confined to the past couple of decades, because that’s all the history they know, what has happened in their lifetime and what they happen to remember, as filtered through whatever media sources they happen to gather their information from.
This combination of loyalty and willed ignorance has always been a force in the deeply anti-intellectual politics of this country, but it has not typically been this powerful a force, this deeply influential. And because it is a closed system – because the people who decide where they stand in this manner are not interested in reasoning or evidence – it is not at all clear what can be done to create a consensus in this country, even regarding the most basic of facts. It would help if we could start by somehow reinvigorating the view, in the public at large, that knowledge, judgment, and intellect matter, and that being deeply familiar with and informed about parts of the world, and parts of history, that go beyond what you can immediately perceive or remember, are valuable and admirable things. But I think we may be too far gone for that.
In your poem, On the Origins of Things, you write, “But did you know/ that anger began as music, played/ too often and too loudly by drunken performers/ at weddings and garden parties?” What inspired this poem and especially these words that paint such vivid and meaningful visual settings?
I became aware at some point that in a lot of poems I like, the parts I like best are parts that are completely false, entirely made up – “out of whole cloth,” as the lovely saying goes – parts of poems that show a kind of delicious irresponsibility that takes the form of the utter lack of any aspiration to represent reality accurately. So “On the Origins of Things” was an attempt (not my first) to write a poem that played with the idea of how absurd, and how delightful, made-up stories and “facts” can be. (In their place, of course. In art they can be wonderful; in politics they are disastrous!) Each false claim about origins had to be both obviously false and, in some interesting way, true. Which suggests, I suppose, that the claims are metaphors, because that sounds like the characteristic features of a metaphor: an equivalence claim that is obviously false, but also true, accurate, or insightful in some interesting, non-literal way.
The final lines of your poem Some Men are very poignant and maybe true for many during this time of year. You write, “he has felt—not dead,/exactly, but/ at the same time/not quite/entirely alive.” What’s the poet’s remedy to these kinds of feelings?
What is special about this sort of feeling is that really, it’s a lack of feeling: to feel that you are dead, or not completely alive, is to feel that you are not feeling much of anything at all. So the solution is, has to be, to wake up; and the question is, what wakes people up? I don’t know. I think that experiencing art helps, experiencing beauty helps. Being in love certainly helps, but it’s a hard thing to engineer. Reading also helps, not just in terms of comfort but in terms of being awake; more and more I think that the people in our society who are genuinely awake are the ones who read, who let their minds play and explore in the fields of thought created and cultivated by other people, and that this is more and more an uncommon thing; most people seem to subsist on a shallow media diet and seem to feel no need to learn about history, to learn about their culture, to know the world they are inhabiting. When you do that, you go to sleep. You live in a trance. You take the most miraculous gift you have been given, your brain, and you say, Well, I can do without this.
Of course, if what we are talking about is genuine depression, reading on its own won’t solve the problem, and neither will beauty or art; it can be hard, in such times, even to appreciate beauty at all, to make a connection with art or nature, let alone fall in love. So I don’t have anything like a foolproof remedy. But I have learned to trust in life’s capacity to keep moving forward, even when I don’t feel that I am moving at all; to trust in the idea that wherever I am at the moment, it won’t be long before, existentially speaking, I will be somewhere different.
Regret is a truly captivating poem with these final lines, “…even as I now sit alone, frantic and mad,/racing to unread the book of our love/before you can finish unwriting it.” Any regrets you left behind in 2016? What are the points of satisfaction you are concentrating on now?
Thank you. I don’t know if I have ever managed to leave behind any regrets. I tend to take all of them with me into the new year. This year I think I have taken more than most. As for satisfaction, that’s not a feeling I identify with or experience very often, other than for very brief periods. Even when things on this planet are going well – and they certainly do not seem to be going very well at the moment – I have a hard time feeling satisfied. I think that what tends to mean more to me than satisfaction, and what I will be focusing on in 2017, and perhaps for a long time to come, isn’t so much satisfaction as hope. It’s hope that keeps me going.