I thought about Linda Pastan’s “Ethics,” a favorite of mine for a couple of decades, as Jim Groom and I were discussing the value of art — literary, visual or other. It’s fashionable to say we don’t know much about art, but we know what we like. Truth is, I think many of us do know quite a bit about art, as we’re surrounded by it — commercial art, religious art, pop art, even high art — and we register it and process it, but do we consider what it’s worth, how it fits in, what a world without art would be? Given the early appearance of art blown onto cave walls with earth pigments or smudged there with torches, it seems unlikely that the species can bear the world without art. But how does its value — symbolic or practical — compare to the value of a life? For some people this is a complex question, for others, less so.
Faulkner famously said that a writer will not hesitate to rob his mother and added that “Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” Probably an exaggeration for effect, but he understood that we’re making choices all the time, and he clearly chose to make art over many other options.
One thing I’m interested in hearing about from our readers is what you think about the dilemma posed by the teaching nun, about the girl Linda’s response and the nun’s riposte to that, finally what you think is implied by the adult poet’s conclusion to the poem.
How different are the implications of this poem for an artist — say a writer –and for an audience member/reader. And are these matters of daily importance, or just something else to save for discussions in the classroom or the pub?
If the museum is on fire, or the house, or the flood waters are rising how high on the list of rescue-worthy items are the books, the paintings, the music?
And by the way, the implications of “fall” right away encourage us to consider the resonance of “saving,” so “Ethics” cuts across our minds in more ways than one, as poems are inclined to do.
