Now I’ve been trying for a while to find a way of suggesting that the good eludes or stultifies narrative. Shall I say it’s episodic rather than tragic? The good, I want to argue, is not a bounded whole, and we have no interest in enclosing it in a narrative with beginning, middle and end (especially not an end). When we talk about non-heroic good it’s likely to seem episodic, and as dramatically satisfying as a guided tour through a stranger’s family pictures. Of course it’s episodic not because there are no connections – good is all about harmony and openness to connection – but because the sequence in which goods happen to happen is not important. The cheese may ripen before you finish reading the poem, the sunset may bloom just as you stop to smell the roses you’re pruning, an old friend may call unexpectedly just after you noticed your older child smiling at his younger sibling. There may be resonances, and even subtle and complicated causal relationships at work here, but none something as monomaniacal as a single story could capture. (We may also not need to know the connections.) A good life participates in many goods, goods which don’t need to be united or (most of the time) prioritized, and may suffer from the effort to unite them.
[Aristotle has of course acknowledged this: The unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose,
in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befalls that one, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. One sees, therefore, the mistake of all the poets who have written a Heracleid, a Theseid, or similar poems; they suppose that, because Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must be one story. (1451a17-22; trans., 234)]So maybe a blog, in its very episodic character, is a good depiction of the good! Its growth with time makes it open to the always surprising newness of goods – one has to find ways of describing things one doesn’t yet understand, and learning to follow them. And hyperlinks are a good way of depicting the rarely linear ways in which things connect without conflict.
On the other hand (there’s always another hand, especially if Aristotle’s nearby), goods take time to grow, and care if they are to survive. A tragic narrative can make this point by showing the fragility of goods. By contrast a merely surface-skimming blog makes things seem random and unconnected, always available and never in need of commitment. Deeper, longer-term goods must be conjured up not as mere episodes, but as living, interconnected realities, works in progress rather than wholes, and works in whose progress the narrator participates, and invites you to, too. I wonder how one does that?
Today’s picture, by the way, is of the weathered wood of a retired Murray River barge. No connection to the content of the post, of course.
