A Letter to Blake About Killing, Desire, and Craft

Please do not agree with the following. Please push back because in this push and pull is lively awareness of each other as others, as separate beings not owned, not fully domesticated, not too cultivated and not too wild to argue. I will make an ethical argument, and I am in love with your willingness to see it differently and to disagree with conviction. Your conviction is passionate, and comes from experience in the world. It is grown in rocky ground, sun-scorched, and wind-bent, so different from callow and ingenuous opinion that I want to know you as you, and to argue 'til one of us dies. And if one of us ever comes to agree with the other on the following topic, let it be from experience, not from acquiescence or bullying, and let us continue arguing about everything else, orbiting around each other's positions and raising tides.

Let me start with an illustration: I find a piece of twisted, sun-bleached and silver juniper on the ground, and take it home because it is beautiful. It is part of nature, not crafted. It has never been mulled over, converted to any use, altered for any purpose, because nature has no intentions or preferences or needs. I take it home because it will be interesting in juxtaposition to something crafted, maybe as it sits on a bookshelf or by the front door, there to be seen in a fresh context, moved there by human hands and will. Maybe I'll put it next to the incense box I made out of boards from that apricot tree I cut down. The juniper, uncrafted, gains something from being next to the box.

The box is two things in tension: an idea and a material. The idea came from my mind, in which right angles, flat planes, and seamless joints exist in a kind of mathematical-spiritual perfection. The material has no ideas, just its own strength and structure, which, from my perspective, is resistance to geometry. As a craftsman, I can alter the wood to approximate my idea, but the wood pushes back, and no matter how much I fuss with it and force it, it will always exert its own strength. As a more or less wise and thoughtful and skilled craftsman, I know that I need to stop working at some point, and live with the imperfections. The imperfections show my limits of skill, patience, and strength. They show the wood being the only thing it can be. The box ends up containing what is probably best described neither as perfection nor as incompleteness, but as erotic tension. This is what I meant when I wrote that bit about two bodies in orbit, raising tides. The box is not at all static and resolved. It's not a safe thing at all, because it shows eyes and hands that no amount of intention will ever make even a scrap of wood conform to our ideals.

Another example: the apple tree in Rachel's orchard was neglected for years, and had become wild, all water-sprouts and canker and rank ingrowth. It was producing some good apples, but your brother thought it should be cut down to make way for a younger, more productive tree. Instead, I pruned in rather severely, taking off all the sprouts, removing the crossing branches, and painting over the bare wood. This year it looks like it will produce a thousand pounds of apples. It's healthier than it was. Its wild state, which Nathanael seemed to prefer for vague aesthetic and Romantic notions, was neither useful to us, as people, nor good for the tree, out there in full sun in the orchard. It was growing rampant because it was out of its natural element, so it needed human management. But what my pruning did was set up tension between the natural, wild state of the tree and my idea of what the tree should be. My idea is too simple for a real, live, organic orchard, and the reality of the untamed tree is too wild and intractable for our needs and plans, so we have settled into an uneasy and unsettled dynamic orbit, always pulling away from the useful center, raising tides. Seen this way, pruning a tree is an erotic act, and the result is a tree that contains the same lively fascination we can see and feel in the box, at least for now. It's never done.

You are a devout Buddhist. Every day you wrestle with your harmlessness, which you swore to, and which is an impossible ideal. You can't even take a step without killing a sentient being, but you can hold harmlessness in your mind and maintain the flawless purity of your intentions. Then one night a skunk breaks into the coop and kills two chicks, and the neighbor offers to shoot it. Your vows require you to let the skunk go, and to examine your complicity in his killing. You had left the door open. That's how he got in. Regardless of your complicity, even if he had broken in despite your best efforts to keep him out, you would not shoot him.

I have been in Buddhism's orbit for a few years now, at once fascinated by its promise and not quite convinced by its insistence on harmlessness per se. I insist on always deferring harm from being to being, and insist that at some point I must act, and that the ethical imperative is to act as thoughtfully and lightly as possible. I hold open the possibility that the least harmful act may involve killing. If we can keep the skunks out of the coop, then by all means let's do that. If it works, we are free of the burden of further contemplation and action. If it doesn't work, if that skunk and others keep getting in and keep killing and eating eggs and harming our charges, then maybe the best, least-harmful option is to kill the skunks. Their bodies buried around the fence can deter future invaders, your chickens will be spared, the restaurant will have more of those excellent eggs, the dogs will not get sprayed so often... I trust in the ability of my mind to come close to ascertaining the path of least harm, and in the cleanness of conscience that such well-contemplated action allows. I want to avoid hubris, which tends to barge down the path of least resistance: it is easier to shoot a skunk than to complete all the carpentry jobs that would secure the hen-house, but I believe my stewardship requires that I do the repairs and shoot the skunk only when I think killing will be more harmless than not killing. I have to remain open to new insight that may inform my decisions [and, indeed, my ethical system per se], and I need to stay awake to the boundary between what's wild and what's ideal. We live in this margin, in a zone of artifice in which both wildness and the ideal are terrible places. Wildness feels no compunction, and the ideal brooks no contemplation, revision, or repentance.

So, can you live in the orbit of a man who kills? Can my continual, tortured puzzling over the best way forward exist alongside your absolute vow of harmlessness? I say, emphatically, yes! These two positions can't be rectified, but they can inform each other, keep each other in check, and keep our otherness alive and passionate. I hope I never absorb you or become absorbed by you. Complete agreement, when two become one, is the end of desire, and without desire there can be no real conversation, no tidal surges of longing.

"The lover wants what he does not have... All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its motive energies. Who ever desires what is not gone? No one."
-Ann Carson