The Strength of Kindness

 

Over at my academic blog, I have written a post about ideas of strength and kindness. Part of it is about teaching (hence the reason it is at the academic blog), but a lot of it is also about reading and writing, and it ends with a poem by Liu Tsung-Yuan, so it may be of interest to a more general audience as well.

Here is how the post begins:

Take a moment, settle yourself, and note your immediate emotional response to these words:

kindness
joy
contemplation
generosity
love
peace

Now think about them in the context of your work. Would your work be better if there were more of these things? Do you feel that they are relevant to what you do every day?

I’ll be honest: a deep part of myself resists these words.

On one hand, this makes no sense. Since adolescence, I have described myself as a pacifist (or aspiring pacifist); I don’t have many heroes (I’m skeptical of the whole concept) but if I have any they are people who in one way or another devoted themselves to the ideas in those words; I loathe so much that is the opposite of those words: cruelty, misery, thoughtlessness, hate, war.

However, even as I know my affinity for those words intellectually, I often must pause when somebody says their goal is to bring kindness, joy, and love into the world, to increase peace, to practice contemplation. I, too, want all these things — and yet when I am tempted to identify my own work with those words, a demon within me inevitably screams out, “SOFT-BRAINED SUCKER!!!”

This demon is not helpful. But it is illuminating. It illuminates the toxic swampwater we swim in every day, the swampwater of received ideas we are drowning in, the murderous connotations disfiguring the very words we need.

The great weird American poet Jack Spicer’s legendary last words were ones true for us all now: My vocabulary did this to me.

Continue reading at Finite Eyes

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