I have cartesian doubts about the positive nature of
passion as such. Sometimes one must be critical on
what passionate feelings can produce. Passionate
feelings and actions can have a huge component of
narcissism (possibly of destructiveness.)

Passion is not a measure to value the rightness of an
action in ethical terms, of its justice. Also, I do
not think that the impulses of the self towards the
other can be blindly trusted as being pure and freed
from some form of hidden interest. What is moral
should not gratify the self, should not be used to
build up its status, in any sense, ideally....(how to
achieve this? I don't know). (How to give for charity
without being seen in the church by other members of
the community? I don't know!) Moral actions are heavy
obligations, dismemberments of the self's immediate
interests. I say: these actions are better performed
by a self who is not so convinced and secure of what
his immediate interests are or would be, who is
possibly not even so sure of what to possess a self
mean and implies.

I would prefer another term to define these projects
towards the others, for these feelings and good
intentions. If one self is perceived as beings
scattered, or else dispersed, in all the existing
other selves, then fine. But even in that case, I
would fear that the good actions acted in the interest
of other people, for compassion, are there to remind
of the existence and right of one’s own self.
All this to say that not always what is moral
coincides with what pleases one to do, what pleases
also one’s sense of aesthetics or what embellishes
one’s actions, since this could result in an
aestheticized altruism. This is no thought of mine, of
course, but the kantian imperative “you must” in
relation to the moral law as being something that
transcends the self. So one should always analyse
with honesty, while believing to be doing a good
action aiming to the wealth of someone otrher than
“oneself” if there is some hidden convenience we might
get, some reward which would therefore almost
annihilate the content of that “good” action.

Good actions for the sake of other people should be
sensed as burdensome, weighty, not rewarding. What
rewards the ego, even in altruistic actions, is not a
good measure for what is morally valuable in terms of
other people’s real sake. So moral actions should
appear and be perceived as a sacrifice not a passion.
Oh, I am expressing myself very clumsily today.
By the way, last night I met another, by chance , an
ex- list member . I was reading at an Open Mike
organized by Backroom poets, our Oxford group, and she
came and read a poem, a very beautiful one. At the
end, she approached me and said her name was Liz
Kirby. Charming woman. She said she is having
difficulties to re-enter the list, although she would
really love to subscribe again.

So, before going back to Italy after my visit here, I
am writing to Candice to see what she can do to help
Liz to join the list again.

Ciao, Erminia

--- [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Joe and David B wrote:
>
> ><<Otherwise I might do something really stupid:
> like caring for people.>>
> >
> >If I may be permitted to climb down from the high
> ironic mode for a moment,
> >surely THIS is why we have selves. Without the
> ethical self, poetry
> >becomes--what?--a game of language. (Not a
> "language game," which is defined
> >by a human situation.)
>
> Which makes me think of Muriel Rukeyser, whose
> commitment to the human
> must surely be beyond question, talking of form and
> other things:
>
> "It's difficult to make the equivalence of an
> experience, to make a poem
> that is so full of the resources of music and of
> meaning, and that allows
> you to give it to me, me to give it to you. All the
> forms of art come to
> us in their own ways and allow us to make more
> forms, and to make this
> exchange. ... I think the exchange of energy is
> what happens in art.
> There are so many ways in which one is conducted to
> learning, so many
> ways in which one seeks, and ways in which one loves
> the people from whom
> one can learn. The passion with which one reaches
> to such people goes on
> forever and ever; it is in one's own poems, and in
> the poems one reads..."
>
> Best
>
> Alison


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