De Anima

a poem, and a bit of Greek philosophy

De Anima

Don’t think about how much you’re missing him.
You’ll only make it worse, to make it new.
Don’t conjure scenes of walking in the heat
Or paint behind your closed eyes his soft hair. 

A Greek once said that memory keeps mankind
From living in a blur like animals.
But if a life of ever-present sense
Erases pain, I’d take a smaller soul.

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This past weekend, I wrote an essay about the nature of Time in T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.”¹

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, because I’m a philosophy nerd. And because I’ve been writing this essay on Eliot, and reading a book on divine impassibility and another book about the debate between Bergson and Einstein on the nature of time², and it’s all come together into a big brain soup of “what is time, and how are we affected by it?” This poem is a little bit about that. It’s riffing on Aristotle’s De Anima, which is a philosophy book about the soul. And I don’t usually write up notes on my poems, but this one is sort of a sad girl poem qua Aristotle, so I figured some SparkNotes might provide a little context.

In De Anima, Aristotle talks about the different faculties, or “parts” of the soul, and a big one for him is memory. According to Aristotle, memory is what keeps us from being mere animals. Because we remember things from one moment to the next, we can use judgment and reason, instead of acting by pure instinct. Without memory, we could only know what we were actively sensing: I see a chair, but as soon as I stop looking at the chair, it blinks out of my mind and seemingly out of existence. In fact, I couldn’t even really know a chair when I looked at it, because our idea of what a chair is comes from having seen a lot of chairs and remembering them.³ So memory is a big deal. It’s one of the things that makes us truly human. (Although it can become a trap, as I talk about in my forthcoming Giant Eliot Essay.)

When I wrote this poem, I wanted to play with that idea, nodding at Aristotle, but with a twist: what about the situations that we want to forget? If memory can bring up an old moment and make a past hurt new again, is a life of present memory better or worse than a life of present sense? Or, said in another way: heartbreak sometimes makes us wish we could diminish ourselves, as if shrinking our feelings can be an escape from great emotion. I often struggle with that idea: is it better to feel intensely, and get knocked around, or to try not to feel anything at all? Tennyson would say, “I hold it true, whate’er befall / I feel it, when I sorrow most; / ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all.” I’m not always sure I agree with him, but the question makes for good poetry.

1. Dr J, if you’re reading this one and the note, I do cite you in it, don’t worry. Some major senior Moral Philosophy influence for sure.

2. I say “reading” like it’s an ongoing thing, but I’m full-swing in teaching at the moment, and so it’s really just a few pages here and there.

3. Indebted here to freshman Arithmetic class at New College Franklin, where we read De Anima.