Monthly Archives: July 2009

I am on an aeroplane, heading toward New Jersey for a visit with my family. (Ah, New Jersey! My New Jersey! Cradle of my girlhood!) The pilot apologizes for the failed air conditioning and also tells us that we are cruising at 30,000 feet. Emily wants to talk about the persistence and the inadequacy of memory.

#1259, c. 1873

A Wind that rose
Though not a Leaf
In any Forest stirred
But with itself did cold engage
Beyond the Realm of Bird —
A Wind that woke a lone Delight
Like Separation’s Swell
Restored in Arctic Confidence
To the Invisible —

What sort of wind blows without stirring a leaf? The swift flight of unbidden thoughts racing across the poet’s inner landscape. In Emily’s case, this is the forest between her ears.

The Invisible appears again here. Now it gives cold comfort. She changes her mind on a dime, this girl. Her prerogative, I guess. The power of thought sweeps her back into memory of a “lone Delight.” This ability to summon delight from the past, from an airy place where no bird can fly, is sealed in cold secret. This is the “Arctic Confidence.” No one will ever know. A girl’s mind can be a fortress. Be warned. Emily herself may not grasp it in warm living form. It remains out of sight, shut away, frozen in time.

Such delights yield no real pleasure, only the memory of pleasure. Something like pleasure, but not the real thing.

Memory gives a transient sensation, caught in the net of time, one may brush up against a passing ghost from history. It lacks the warm shock of the new. The tangible now. Memory is a chilly place of no up or down, or side to side. It is a sterile atmosphere. It engages only with itself because no one else is there. Nothing may grow because there is no rude intrusion of the other. Only the cold, clean remembrance of things past, sealed and fixed as in ice.

What I find remarkable about memory is that it is so intoxicating. A memory, whether of past delight or past pain, draws me in as if it were a drug I can’t resist. Like most addictive substances, the rush of sensation from wallowing in the memory is over, almost before it has begun. Finally, it fails to satisfy. It is engaged only with itself. There is no helpful cross-pollination. No movement of solid forms through space. Only the pale flickering images on the mind-screen.

When Emily closes by returning to the Invisible, she’s asking us to think about where these memories come from. Or go. Or what is their purpose. To think again and again, no matter how this chilly wind fails to love the soft animal, still it draws us toward that ineffable thing — the Invisible. The web of divine intelligence that animates the world may not be perceived with eyes open.

I hear a woman, gazing within her own superb mental and imaginative processes, who sees that profound strength. She sees it for what it is, while also recognizing — cold comfort there.

Today brings a peppery dismissal of the dirty business of publishing. Emily does not favor it.

#709, c. 1863

Publication — is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man —
Poverty — be justifying
For so foul a thing

Possibly — but We — would rather
From Our Garret go
White — Unto the White Creator —
Then invest — Our Snow —

Thought belong to Him who gave it —
Then — to Him who bear
Its Corporeal illustration — Sell
The Royal Air —

In the Parcel — Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace —
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price —

Emily, my goodness, why such a snoot? It’s okay to publish. Try not to think of it as selling your soul, but sharing your soul. Sharing is good, right?

Okay, I know why this bothers her. It bothers me too, but not for the same reasons. Furthermore I don’t entirely buy Emily’s rejection of publication as somehow a degradation of her poems as emanations of her spirit. After all, she did send a parcel to the learned reader Mr. Higginson to ask if her poems “breathed”. She wanted to know if they were alive. I love that she made her poems into living entities. Clearly she saw them as beings separate from her, that she would send out to live in the world on their own. Did they breathe? Did they have legs? Could they be published?

Writing is a tool for communicating one person’s ideas and experiences into the mind of another person. The symbols have meaning, and the system of symbols we’ve conceived as writing is the way one idea gets to its destination into the mind of another person. Without that tool that makes a record of the thoughts, no one else would get it. Publication is just the next step in the process that begins when any one of us picks up a pen and a notebook. Publication moves that record farther out into the wider world so that more people may receive what the writer has recorded. The mistake is thinking that publication matters more than the initial writing in the notebook—the quiet private conversation between writer and page.

What begins in privacy will want to move into the larger world. A child is conceived and nurtured in the dark, out of sight. Eventually that child must enter the world and be seen. The same with the poems.

Some say: Why bother trying to publish at all? Just write what you want. Forget about publication. It’s all a trap anyway. Just write and enjoy! Writing for money is like having sex for money. It takes all the joy out of it. Hmmmm . . . . not sure what I think about that. Will let it stand for the moment.

Emily’s point is a good one, the one about reducing human spirit to disgrace of price. The money part of publication is sticky. As soon as money enters into the process, the excitement of pure creativity deflates. Money sets up a standard that has nothing to do with telling a good story. That makes it hard to accept money for your writing and still preserve the living, breathing center of the work. Like selling your baby.

Unfortunately writers do not live on air and sunlight. They live in homes, wear clothes and eat food just like regular people. It’s troubling, I know, but true.

Also I can’t help but think that Emily speaks from a rather privileged place. She lived in her father’s house all her life and was not required (as far as I know) to do anything in the world to earn her keep. She was free to follow the wanderings of her imagination because someone else was providing her livelihood. I am grateful to Emily’s father that he was willing and able to support her because if he had not, we would not have this big, fat book of poems now. It is an ugly fact of writing that it must be subsidized or the writer will perish. (I hear Virginia Woolf humming in the back of my mind right now. That’s where she keeps her room of her own.)

At this writing, I am mindful of the fact that two of my former students from my creative writing workshop recently had their work published. One wrote the cover story for our local weekly paper. The other has published his first novel. Both are over the moon. Happy. Simply joyful to see their work realized in the world. I know how that feels. It’s a total rush. No doubt about it. There is something undeniably magical and purely pleasurable in seeing your “baby”, something you crafted from your own imagination . . . (I would argue that everyone, even the journalists and non-fiction folk are crafting from imagination) . . . out there, externalized, whole, complete . . . and making sense to someone else. That’s what we live for. It never gets any better than that.

The first time this happened for me was in the third grade. I wrote a poem for the school newspaper. The poem described a sunrise, comparing it to a newborn fawn while hundreds of dewdrops greet the dawn, etc. It was a work of genius, rhymed and everything. When it was published, my mother read it aloud at the dinner table for my family. She smiled as she read, her gaze directed downward to the page. I still have a visual memory in my mind’s eye, an image of her lips as they spoke the words I had written. In that instant, it all clicked into place. I come up with the ideas and the words, those go onto the page, someone else reads it. And likes it! Gets it! This was power. Immense. I was eight years old, and I had found my calling. This is what I would do with the rest of my life. I have never been more happy or more tortured since.

(Writing is like a mad, bad boyfriend that I am besotted with and can’t get away from. Still, it works for us.)

I’ll close by saying that Emily is privileged and so can afford her lofty refusal to “Sell/ the Royal Air”. The rest of us are not so fortunate. Yet, I am glad to have Emily, once again, glad that she has enjoyed her privilege, her safety, her tidy home life. All that made it possible for her to remain faithful to an ideal the rest of us can’t afford. We need her and her sterling clarity, to hold something pure at the center. The reason we do this. Otherwise we might forget.

Good morning. A gray, wet day. Took Lance and Leo for our walk, and they both came home covered with mud and joy. Leo is staying with us again, and the all-day wrestling match continues. Here is Emily’s contribution.

#1201, c. 1865

Far from Love the Heavenly Father
Leads the Chosen Child,
Oftener through Realm of Briar
Then the Meadow mild.

Oftener by the Claw of Dragon
Than the Hand of Friend
Guides the Little One predestined
To the Native Land.

So why do some of us get easier and more pleasant lives, and some of us get the Realm of Briar? It’s the question that just about everyone asks at some point. No one thinks of himself as the one with the Charmed Life. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Gosh, my life has been easy so far. I expect that to continue for the rest of my days.” Everyone thinks his troubles are the worst.

Yes, some of us learning to practice Gratitude. That is the habit of thought that moves one toward recognizing and emphasizing the things that work in your life, rather than the things that don’t work. There is surely some of both in the vast web of circumstances that surrounds any one life. So the quality of that life is a matter of emphasis or choice. Pull the background to foreground. It’s all there, the dross and the gold. It will always be there as an undifferentiated flow of stuff. The degree to which you are satisfied with your own life depends on your ability or willingness to notice the gold and pull it to the foreground of your thoughts. There will always be another Realm of Briar. That doesn’t prevent you from dwelling on the Meadow mild.

Emily’s idea about a Chosen Child intrigues me. The chosen one is not the good child or the deserving child. It is the child who has strayed far from God’s love. The one who is in the most trouble is the one Heavenly Father chooses for glory. Or in this case Native Land, which is really just a sense of home and safety, not glory.

Emily sees the whole thing as being orchestrated by Heavenly Father. He leads the chosen child into the briar. God only knows why. I have a different idea, splintering off Emily’s. (Sorry, Em but here I go.) The experience of being a chosen child is a collaboration between the one who has strayed and Heavenly Father. The child is, not only chosen by God, but chosen by himself as well. The child chooses to stray far from love. That choice makes him the ideal candidate for whatever God has in store. The Heavenly Father is looking for children like that. The wayward ones are the strong ones who can bear the briar and the Dragon’s Claw. These children would love strong and wide because they have stretched themselves by their own choice.

The complicated, headstrong, self-directed children choose the most difficult path and therefore most deserve that arrival. Because they come to it with all their doubts and rebellion, and knowing themselves and their own nature first. Hard to write about this without sounding condescending, but I think Emily would share my view that the hard-fought, hard-won victories over despair are the most precious. The Realm of Briar, the dark night of the soul, all these experiences open up the blood vessels and scour down to the roots of self. You have to go the most horrible places within yourself and see these for what they are before moving into what Emily calls love of the Heavenly Father. Or Native Land. (You can call it something else, if you like. Peace of mind, perhaps? For now, I’m using Emily’s language, since this is her poem.)

Only when you are no longer a mystery to yourself can you accept the larger mystery.

Maybe.

This morning I woke from a dream that I shot a man in the throat. I was the assassin assigned to the job. I don’t know why this guy had to die, but there were other conspirators demanding it. The man was a doctor and had a dark face, elegant and refined. I held the pistol to the base of his throat (right at the fifth chakra where we speak our truth) and tried to pull the trigger. It was difficult because the gun was old and rusty. I used both hands and shot him. He looked mildly surprised but not afraid. The bullet opened a neat, round hole in his throat, and I could see the fluid of life inside. His eyes flickered as the life escaped him. I ran away and hid, utterly consumed with shame. As I pulled myself to the surface, out of this dream, the thought came across: “Boy, it’s not easy to kill someone. You have to watch them die.”