Ethics and Time: After the Anthropocene 1

: This “treatise” on ethics and literary practice is a self-reﬂective piece that argues and enacts ethical criticism through poetic form as well as content. That is, I deliberately employ poetry not only as a literary genre but also as rhetorical arguments—investigative, demonstrative, and evidentiary—and as forms of ethical action. The two previously unpublished poems here are drawn from a larger, lyrical discourse sequence tentatively entitled “Heidegger, Ethics, and Time: After the Anthropocene.” The “poetic arguments,” then, concern the possible interrelations and e ﬀ ects of time and ethics within the philosophical context of post-human “being” collectively, and also of personal death as a shared event. There are a couple of famous theories of time and ethics that ebb and ﬂow within the di ﬀ erent formal abridgements of time in these two poems. One set of theories is expounded in Martin Heidegger’s major work, Being and Time , as well as many of his other treatises on language, poetry, and ethics. Another set of theories is founded in Emmanuel Levinas’ work on time and alterity. But unlike these philosophies, the two poems here deal in detail with (1) the potential particularities of lived sensation and feeling (2) as they might be experienced by sentient and non-sentient ‘being’ (3) that survive death—of our species (poem II) and / or individual death (poem III). However, rather than simply rehearsing philosophy or recasting it into poetic form, these two poems argue for and against the notion that time is a physical


II. The Ghosts of Objects (A Villanelle for the End of the Anthropocene)
"[T]ime remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality. Mortals have not yet come into ownership of their own nature. Death withdraws into the enigmatic." -Heidegger 1971c, p. 96. Time is not kind to material things. Eventually, all things are ravaged. Only spirit can survive and not be.
Time can't be seen, but is heard in the ring of a phone call that says you are average. Time is not kind to material things.
Time is not a dimension, but the zing of a force that bends, crumples you with age. Only a ghost can survive and not be.
Time carries you forward in its quickening spring; without time you might be frozen in space. But time's not kind to material things.
Can objects survive physicality? What about all the human alphabets of rage? Only spirit can survive nonbeing.
(You may ask questions; you may wonder, why? I will tell you we do not know the sage for whom time is Open, forthcoming, sings. Haggard, look me straight in the awful eye and tell me we are not all savages. Only a ghost can survive, not being.) What will remain after the Anthropocene? We can only hazard what catastrophes gather. Can only spirit survive nonbeing? Time is not kind to material things.

III. Time, Proust, Being, You
For Dr. Whitney Jordan Adams " [L]anguage alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness either of that which is not and of the empty". -Heidegger 1971b, p. 73 Putting up books that went astray, the house of eternity far away, I came upon my Marcel Proust, and could not help but think of you, who loves his work so ardently and took the time when in Paris walking over all of France to desist in the constant dance to visit his temporal chez.
As always, resplendent, to him you all a sudden appear in time that moves above him like a wave; then slowly on and through his grave. It feels like anxiety on our skin, and joy at the prospect of something unseen, distant a distant, final peace when time has had enough to eat; when time is like a memory, slow, and kind, a holiday, from ourselves; when time becomes a companion, a lover, succumbs to the still point of a mind, as if balanced from some twine unraveling from heaven, sleeps life's continuous wings, the wind-pendulum that swings to which we desperately hang on, precipitously, dangle, as if on a thread that becomes a thin bed, then back again, until we become utterly useless, numb, an emotion that clings to any everything around on which we discover solid ground, and rest from the motion that constitutes us, our notion of ourselves, who we are in relation to reality, a star in yet another galaxy, another looked-for fallacy that we may hear as pure sound.
O we all look for, and dread the long night of the end, the temporal crease, the infinite surcease of our entire existence, and so push on the resistance that we make ourselves deliberately, hesitant, but inexorably, and also have to fend off as it moves under and over and through us, sunders our successes forward from self-awareness toward our own best selves, takes us somewhere we don't discuss, don't really want to go, but inevitably must flow. In the end, time renders all. The dust awaits, shudders, becomes us, becomes another. Proust finds rest in rust, his repose an eternal bust. Time does not heal, as if a pardon, or repeal as is so often said, but kills itself, and dies in us, so oblivious, and Other Funding: This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest:
The author declares no conflict of interest.