Ethos and imagination
Milk Drop Coronet, an ultra-high-speed photograph of the splash of a drop of milk, Harold Edgerton, 1957
1.
When I was in my twenties, thinking about what to do with my life, nothing (within reach) felt meaningful: I felt alienated, bored, and millennially troubled by every line of work I encountered or knew of. This was a lack of imagination on my side—I’ve known that for a while now. But I had a few experiences recently that made me realize just how very very much imagination I lacked, and still lack.
The main thing happened last July as I was in the South Harbor waiting for a man who was going to sell me an old writing desk from a warehouse.
As I waited for the man, I drove around in a Toyota Yaris I had borrowed from our neighbor, looking up at the pipelines that ran in the air above the road, connecting the white diesel silos with the ferry terminal. I don’t know if it was the light (the sun shone through thin drifts of cloud that blew shadows across the illuminated silos) or the mood I was in, but seeing those silos, I felt such an emotional surge I had to pull over and stop the car. The intensity of the emotion surprised me, but I can only describe it as awe—awe at the intricacy of the work involved in making sure the ferries kept running and kept supplying the goods needed at the island. How did the know-how needed even end up in this remote place? Like, if you had to start from scratch, how would you even do it? I felt the lives of the people who had first ferried people across the strait in sailboats, and how generations had built on and extended this know-how into the maze of pipelines and silos I was surrounded by, and the supply chains servicing it . . .
If you had asked me, before this, I would have said, yes, of course, logistics matters—but I had never felt it. It had not struck me with the moral urgency that I experienced that afternoon in the harbor: without this labor, everything I love about the island would fall apart. I can’t remember if there were any open positions to work at the ferry terminal when I was looking for a job after we moved here; if there were, I’m sure I skimmed right past it, bored, my heart numb. But now, standing under the pipelines, I felt genuine sadness seeing that my life had turned out in a way where I would not contribute to this.
It wasn’t about ferries, or engineering, or logistics—it was the realization that my ethical imagination had been debilitatingly thin. I mean ethics here as in “seriously wrestling with the question What to do?” and imagination as in “the capacity to feel the possibilities.”
When I was in my twenties, I thought of myself as a poet; I wrote short surreal novels; and yet I failed to imagine what was right in front of my eyes. Yes, some of the work I encountered really was degrading and unethical (my one day in telemarketing), but the problem was, to a much larger extent, my lack of ethical imagination. Just because I couldn’t see the fruits of my work, or because I was annoyed at a particular boss, or because the job was so routinized, I became blind to the grandeur of it all. But it is everywhere. So much to do, and do well. If you can see far enough, and make your heart large enough, you can find the meaning of life in an uncleaned ferry toilet.
Now, this was only the first realization. I later had several other similar epiphanies, and they were made deeper by several things I read. Just this week, the experience in the South Harbor came back to me again as I reread Foucault’s “Self-writing” and read Joe Carlsmith’s essay “Seeing more whole.” The connection between the essays and the silo made me realize something useful and also, I have to admit, vaguely unsettling.
2.
In “Self-writing,” Foucault discusses what Plutarch called the ethopoietic role of writing. The word ethopoietic is derived from êthos (character) + poiéō (making), so the idea that Plutarch is gesturing at is that writing, if done in a specific way, can reshape our moral character and help us live lives that are more deeply aligned with us.