Reading Aristotle While My Sick Baby Naps

I have a daughter. She’s eighteen-months-old. She has a runny nose and a terrible cough, and she’s had then for awhile. She’s sick. Her illness is not life-threatening, but it’s serious, and it might be the start of something chronic, something persistent and time-consuming and sad. It requires multiple medications. It leaves me weary and worried—by which I mean more weary and worried than usual.

While she naps, I read Aristotle. I read the Poetics. As Aristotle describes the qualities of good poetry, he demonstrates many of them in his text, and just as pleasure is one of the effects of good poetry, so do I find that it is one of the effects of reading the Poetics. Learning, as Aristotle argues, is gratifying, and it’s simultaneously humbling and uplifting to recognize that the features of compelling narrative that the philosopher identified more than two thousand years ago still pertain today. This treatise is large enough to be grand in scope, but the whole is still comprehensible. Aristotle arranges the elements of art neatly by genera and species, and one thought follows logically from the one preceding it.

The world of the Poetics could hardly be more different from my own world when my daughter is awake. At the best of times, life with Frances is one of barely contained chaos, and, while her illness has added regularity in the form of medicines to be administered at set intervals, it has disorganized her sleep and her eating and, certainly, the schedule that my husband struggle to maintain so that we can get some work done. And there’s snot everywhere. Everywhere. To read the Poetics is to be released into a type of harmonious order that does not exist elsewhere in my life.

It occurs to me, while I read, that my daughter and I do not make for good poetry. The relationship between mother and child can be an appropriate subject for drama, but the boring fact is that I love my daughter, and her illness has not tested or transformed that love. It has not twisted it into something dark and deadly. There is an inescapable hopelessness to mother-love—it is never perfectly requited—but, thus far, my love for Frances is not suitable for tragedy.

It occurs to me, also, that, our lack of artistic appeal is just one aspect—and hardly a vital one—of our general imperfection. It occurs to me as I write about my daughter and the Poetics that the fact that I have given birth should, as Aristotle has argued elsewhere, exempt me from assaying his work at all. My child is the sign of my permeability, my changeableness, my incompleteness, my lack of reason. Just as a good poem must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, so must the ideal human be finished, self-contained, and well-ordered. I think about Frances’s incessantly runny nose and I think about our pitiable wetness, our lack of vital heat. I think about the mess a child creates, and the bodily excrescences are the least of it: Frances and I are entangled in an emotional mess, too, an intense interdependence that will never be resolved and that is, by all the aesthetic metrics that Aristotle defines, grotesque. It is, if I’m being honest, appalling to me, too, sometimes, and, even though my thoughts on the Poetics no longer echo Aristotle’s stately calm, I can return to the text and find that it is still as soothingly rational as it was when I left it.

My daughter wakes up, and I leave the Poetics with a pang of longing and a brief flash of annoyance. And I realize that the Poetics is so appealing to me—at least in part—because I can, in fact, leave it. The Poetics exists outside of me. It exists without me. It doesn’t need me, and, really, I don’t need it. My daughter, on the other hand, exists because of me, which means that, now, I exist for her. I hear her cry, and I go.