Kay Ryan, "We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It"

Hi all --

It's hot enough in Odessa. The sun blares. My upstairs apartment fills with the noise of the air conditioner. It's never quite cool or quiet.

I know: this is nothing, it will get a hundred times worse, what am I complaining about.

I lived in Dallas long enough. Toward the end of my time there the heat refused to go below 80 degrees Fahrenheit; for over a month, daytime temperatures were in the 100's. This resulted in the thick concrete of the Interstate cracking. You intuited that people suffered far more than we accounted.

This is the beginning of my third year in Odessa. Moderate heat makes you pay a tax each time you deal with it. Sometimes that tax is felt; there's a little discomfort, a touch of not-enough-water, a tiny bit of tiredness. Sometimes you have no idea what's happening.

I want to be as comfortable as possible. A paper on Heidegger is nearing completion. There's a second one on Nietzsche I plan to finish next month. Because Philosophy Club enjoyed Spinoza, I'm reading him too. And I'm putting together notes for a book and welcome recommendations and help. There is a lot to do. You've only got so much time when you're privileged to do what you love.

I want to be more comfortable, but I am privileged. It's weird to say, so I might as well celebrate Christmas. Yeah, I've been listening to the Katy Perry song I blogged about last time, but after a while, the soundtrack turns classical. In the middle of some choir geek's playlist, there's That Choir's performance of "The Holly and The Ivy." It's a bright carol with dark lyrics; the sacrifice of Christ is the subject of a number of them:

Living in these uncertain, sneakily perilous times can bring you to another perspective. If you want to achieve something, you've got to try for it now and risk being ridiculous. I want to try and write a book, though I know I'll sound like a lunatic. I have to take seriously that there may not be another opportunity. People increasingly are cooking at home; the cuts to universities will devastate not just research but local economies, "local" meaning "Baltimore;" companies are unsure what to do in this regulatory climate. A recession looms, yet a recession may be the least of our worries. When you add in eliminating federal contracts with vaccine manufacturers, the gutting of research when a new COVID variant is claiming lives, and a federal force that goes into courtrooms and arrests people over a judge's objections, the only safe conclusion is that we have no idea where we will be in the near future.

I can see why another age fervently prayed to God, marking the sacrifice. Some aspects of humanity require transcendence.

Some causes that can use your help

I'd like to advertise a few places I'm giving. If you're so inclined, please do help them out and let me know. The sooner we support each other's causes, the sooner we will see the changes we want:

• I'm giving a little to Marfa Public Radio each month. I depend on them for reliable information, as Odessa is filled with "pink slime," local media taken over by hacks and turned into partisan garbage. I think it's important that the people who run MPR know we value them.
• I give to the Inside Books Project, which provides Texas prisoners books while incarcerated. Please do check out the work they do.
• Detention Watch Network can also use help. This interview is from December, but in the face of the current outrages, it has proved prescient.
• Jesus House in Odessa feeds hundreds of the homeless each day. An exceptionally effective place to give.

Kay Ryan, "We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It"

Over the years, some stray bits and pieces of Aristotlean reasoning have stayed with me. One is the idea that a political regime taken to an extreme is no regime at all (e.g. insist on too much democracy, you get tyranny). Another I’ve put as a maxim: you shouldn’t reason the same way in emergencies as you do when things are normal. In an emergency, you grasp for what works. You need solutions, a feeling of reprieve, a need addressed. This leads to a fatal tendency: insist too much on solutions and the actual problem becomes obscured. If there isn't an emergency, but you pretend like there is, medium and long-term planning gets thrown aside for quick wins. Those quick wins go hand-in-hand with bad habits. Kay Ryan, in “We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It,” dwells on how artifacts of terrible but urgent reasoning stay with us:

We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It (from Poetry)
Kay Ryan

The first fear
being drowning, the
ship’s first shape
was a raft, which
was hard to unflatten
after that didn’t
happen. It’s awkward
to have to do one’s
planning in extremis
in the early years—
so hard to hide later:
sleekening the hull,
making things
more gracious.

You would think life conceived as a ship means mastery of waters calm and harsh. In this case, life as a ship takes a distinct, problematic shape: "The first fear / being drowning, / the ship’s first shape / was a raft." Fear means panic, and panic means throwing any old thing together, including something that may not suffice for the future. The raft "was hard to unflatten / after that [drowning] didn’t /happen."

Ryan provides three ideas which expand upon our Aristotlean maxim. First, if you build from your fear and your fear only, you’re doing hack work. You’re not actually building anything useful for later. Second, you’re not appraising the situation correctly. Maybe drowning was a legitimate fear, but you exaggerated it at the expense of every other concern. Finally, what you built haunts you throughout your journey and should be replaced.

Regarding that last thought–you still have to float. You can’t just throw the raft away. The fear of drowning was legitimate enough. "It’s awkward / to have to do one’s / planning in extremis / in the early years — / so hard to hide later." This doesn’t mean Aristotle was wrong and we should laud those with advice which just barely works. It’s more like this: no matter what, we’re going to be informed wrongly, stuck with some degree of fear or panic and reliant on some relic of it.

So this is the hand we're dealt. We’ve got some fear and bad reasoning hiding in our not-so-reshaped ship. How, then, is it possible to sleeken the hull? To make "things / more gracious?" Ryan has a joke going on; I don't think you can use a raft as a basis for a clipper ship. (Maybe someone who plays Minecraft can.) At the same time, we do build the ship–that's the title of the poem–and the sleeker we believe it is, the more gracious things are, and the more the original priorities will stand out in the construction.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm reading Heidegger's "Ister" lectures now, where he talks about the poet Hölderlin and his tributes to German rivers. A river, for Heidegger, points the way to another kind of philosophical thinking. I explain it the following way. Instead of metaphysics (e.g. Aristotle's four causes, Plato's forms, natural law), logical investigations, or dialectical theories of history, you engage Heraclitus and the flux. You can't step into the same river twice, though we identify it as that river. Becoming marked by being. Heidegger notes that entire peoples have grown alongside rivers, that their history and all it entails–traditions, customs, laws, art, politics–can't be disentangled from the landscape. For Heidegger, this turns into an appeal to nostalgia, to an experience of the homeland that modern materialism and the political orders associated with it cannot appreciate. It goes further, unfortunately, becoming Nazi apologetics at points.

We don't have to go as far as Heidegger to note that an honest reckoning with the past is valuable. Life wouldn't be life if the ship were perfect. That there's some element of who you were in who you are is a good thing, no matter how awkward or suboptimal it seems. Of course, it actually isn't suboptimal. There is grace in survival, and there is grace with what you do beyond survival.