Monthly Archives: July 2009

Just when I think I am ready to work with my dream material, I wake up and assert, “No! I won’t have this dream in my head.” Ugh, don’t ask. It was an unpleasant visit with my ex-husband. I tried to forget the dream and only succeeded in forgetting the second half. I remembered the first half, which was the truly terrible half. The second half might have been the triumphant resolution for all I know. That’s usually where the triumphant resolution falls in dreams, but I missed it. Serves me right for being a coward. I could try again tonight, I guess.

Here is today’s poem:

#1129, c. 1868

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

So, the topic is Truth or a variation on the Truth. Today when I woke up I turned away from a truth coming through in my dream. I assume my subconscious always tells the truth. But I didn’t want it. Perhaps it was too dazzling. The dream already speaks in metaphor. How much more slant could that be? Not slant enough apparently.

In the category of Good News this morning, the gardenia by my front door coughed up a single blossom. I plucked it right away before the midday sun burned it. The weather has been too hot for the gardenia to flower, but we received a whisper of cooler, drier air in the past few days. The temperature went down to 90 degrees! So the gardenia felt brave enough to push out a blossom. I took it. This cultivar is called Mystery Gardenia, selected and planted by me for precisely that reason. I invite mystery in at my front door. You won’t find any bludgeoning clarity in this house.

So . . . Truth! We come circling back around to it again. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” Remember all the dream. The truth comes twisted through images.

For a recovering journalist, the idea of telling all the truth but slant is quite engaging. Most people take that for granted. They’ve been doing it all along. Telling partial truths. Or a “version” of the truth. Not me. I tell all the truth and tell it straight on, cold, unvarnished, piece by piece, and I’ll repeat a few pieces in case you missed any. I’m famous for hitting people between the eyes with the truth. (or what I think is the truth.) How boring.

Also those half-truths or versions of the truth won’t do. Emily does not advocate lying. A half-truth is a lie. She says, “All the truth.” But adds, you must bring the truth out at an angle so that it may slide through our peripheral vision. The truth is always more than anyone can bear. She does not suggest slant-wise truth telling in order to protect the teller from some consequence of the truth. That’s usually the cryptic justification for half-truths. No, Emily says you’ve got to ease into the truth at an angle to protect the fragile listener. No one can see it directly without turning away. It’s a kindness to be slant.

They say dogs won’t make eye contact with their humans because that is too invasive, too challenging. Not true in my house. Lance and I look directly into each other’s eyes with no difficulty. He gazes with pure trust and safety into my eyes, and I likewise. He’s not afraid of me or my eyes. And I love his eyes. No slant needed between us.

The other analogy is the solar eclipse. Something so extraordinary that we may not look directly at it or we will be blinded. There’s a solar eclipse tomorrow by the way. Don’t bother watching for it unless you live in China. So it is with the greatest truths. We must receive these by indirection. I’d say all truths come to us by indirection, both great and small. We don’t get anything except by means of a metaphor.

I have spent most of my life asking questions that people didn’t want to answer because the answer, the obvious answer, no one wanted to say out loud. Or being told to shut up because I was saying something no one wanted to hear. The implications of such an answer were more than anyone felt like dealing with. Not because these were so enormous. Only that they’d require some unpleasant acknowledgment of smallness, meanness, or irresponsibility. Some cobweb on the soul.

I’m usually the one dropping the other shoe. Or no actually, grabbing the other shoe from the hands of one who refuses to drop it and then throwing it onto the floor. See, now there’s a metaphor. Compress all the unruly ideas into a nice compact image. The truth by indirection.

My point being, of course, that I am a klutz when it comes to the truth. I crave the truth and am maddened by its deliberate absence. But I approach the truth as a predator, not a poet. I do love Emily’s dazzling grace, but I don’t have her ability to render the truth with such elegant precision. She is a gymnast. I take out the garbage.

One day I’ll get it right. In the meanwhile, this much I know is true: I would sit with Emily’s indirection and be happy for all of my life.

This poem sits right across the page from one of Emily’s Greatest Hits: “I dwell in Possibility —/ A fairer House than Prose —” These tend to cluster in thematic batches. So for today Emily has this to say:

#655, c. 1862

Without this — there is nought —
All other Riches be
As is the Twitter of a Bird —
Heard opposite the Sea —

I could not care — to gain
A lesser than the Whole —
For did not this include themself —
As Seams — include the Ball?

I wished a way might be
My heart to subdivide —
‘Twould magnify — the Gratitude —
And not reduce — the Gold —

Since the above lines come so close upon “a fairer House than Prose” I have to see the “this” in the first line here as a reference to her work, her poems. Her fairer house is the one in her imagination.

Emily knows herself very well. She knows where she lives and what is most important to her. The daily explosion of words from her mind onto the page. She can’t live without that, for it is her ability to conceive that near-perfect poem each day that makes the day. Without her gift for inner sight and outer expression, there is nothing. Everything around her ceases to exist or falls into the distance across the sea. Everything falls away against the vast ocean of her inner life.

She asks: Doesn’t this ability to imagine and craft the vision actually bind up the world and keep it whole as the seams do the ball? Without her work, her poems, the world, not just her world, but the objectively perceived world, falls to pieces. Unravels. Like the Tibetan monks who keep the planet spinning on its axis by maintaining a constant flow of prayer, Emily serves us by stitching together the seams of our senses with her words.

The last stanza is somewhat arresting. Can a woman who is devoted to a life’s work, such as finding the right word, also subdivide her heart to share with another?

Emily says, “No.” Her avocation demands the complete and total dedication of the heart to the task. This is not the sort of task that she dispenses with in a day, so that she is free to turn her attention and heart to another. When the shoemaker puts down his tools at the end of the day, for a brief time, until he takes up his work again, he is not a shoemaker. He may be a lover, a husband, a father, brother, son or friend. But when the writer puts down her pen, she is still a writer. She is still writing when she pours the coffee. Takes a bath, still writing. Walks the dog, yep still writing. On the phone with her mother, most especially. Sleeping, yes. Dreaming, absolutely. She is never not writing. Making love? Sorry, but yes, then too. Her heart may never be subdivided. Nor her attention. That flow of words and images never ceases. The story-making machinery between her ears never rests.

Emily wishes it was possible for the Lady Poet to exist in devotion to another and knows she could do that without loss to her avocation. She knows her heart is big enough to encompass all that she opens it to. The lack of space is not the problem. It’s that she simply cannot divide her love. She has married herself to her first love, the world inside her imagination. There may not be another.

I imagine that she permits visitors from time to time. But Emily remains clear that no one else may share that place of honor within her. No one and no thing will ever equal the love for her own ability because it all begins and ends with her words. These are her words. Everyone else is on the outside.

A casual observer might conclude that Emily is a lonely girl . . . and well . . . the soft animal of our body wants what it wants.

Emily is not lonely.

This poem voices her simple truth, a direct understanding of herself. Her serenity lies in knowing where her real attachment lives. That is to the wondrous realm she carries around within her. One that will never leave her. And never die.

It’s hard to explain this contentment, but I’ll try. The gift of imagination means never having to explain. That’s love. The wordy child begins a conversation with herself at a young age that springs from complete understanding and yields only pleasure. All obstacles dissolve into nothing. She may explore with complete freedom anything that she devises. No one ever says, “No.”

Mainly it’s just better in here than out there.

How to make a way in the world by making something beautiful, if that’s my job, your job, our job. And I use the word “job” loosely to mean the activity your nature compels you to do.

#880

The Bird must sing to earn the Crumb —
What merit have the Tune
No Breakfast if it guaranty

The Rose content may bloom
To gain renown of Lady’s Drawer
But if the Lady come
But once a Century, the Rose
Superfluous become —

Emily explains how or why she wrote nearly two thousand poems and only bothered to publish seven of them. One for each day of the week, one for each Blessed Sacrament, once for each color in the rainbow, one for each chakra and the quality of consciousness associated with it.

She looks at those whose entire being is devoted to the creation of something beautiful, such as the bird — or realizing its full potential as beautiful, such as the rose. And by the way, such a thing is not merely beautiful, but it serves a valuable function, which is to scent a Lady’s drawer. Some of you may think this is not the best use of one’s life purpose. Or that it is not the most practical. It’s not like building roads or manufacturing can openers. You know . . . something useful and worth money. No, the rose exists for the purpose of being beautiful and smelling good. The bird’s reason is to fill the air with beautiful song.

So, I would argue (and Emily would argue) that putting beauty into the world, anything that pleases our senses, constitutes a job well done. These things are worth paying for. And still . . . and yet . . . in her poem, the bird goes hungry and the rose becomes superfluous. If these beautiful things are not needed, what then?

Emily is being snarky here. She suggests the question: Why make something beautiful? If my work, my poem, my rose, does not adorn some lady’s drawer, isn’t it wasted then? Emily’s question is only posing as a serious question.

No one would forswear the existence of a rose or a bird’s song. She’s rubbing our noses in our value system. That’s the system that says a thing must fetch a price in the marketplace to have value. That it must serve some utilitarian purpose in order to justify its existence.

She drops this snide comment with such delicacy, you might miss it if you didn’t know better.

If you sing your song or open your beautiful face to the world, or craft a poem because you believe any of these things ought to fetch a good price or serve someone else’s need (scenting a drawer, etc) then you are done. You have destroyed the value of your own gifts.

Emily puts up the payment against these talents. A crumb? For a song? “To gain renown of Lady’s Drawer”? C’mon, that’s sarcastic. Renown? What paltry recompense for the perfume of a rose. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay for an act or being of such beauty. Beauty comes from innocence. And by innocence I mean devoid of any calculated hunger for recognition or payment. She alludes to art that arises from this innocent drive to create. No one ever made a birdsong or a rose because they though they’d be famous for it, or rich or grow fat on crumbs.

Emily says: Make your beauty. Don’t get lost in the marketplace. Stay in a state of innocent creation. . . . if you can.