Monthly Archives: January 2010

January 25, 2010 · 8:57 am

Pigs Can Fly

Well, it’s official. Now anything is possible. Pigs can fly. And the New Orleans Saints are going to the Superbowl.

Here are Emily’s thoughts on the subject.

#572, c. 1862

Delight — becomes pictorial —
When viewed through Pain —
More fair — because impossible
That any gain —

The Mountain — at a given distance —
In Amber — lies —
Approached — the Amber flits — a little —
And That’s — the Skies —

This poem came to hand last evening as I listened to the car horns honking all over the city, my neighbor Ivan shot his homemade cannon into the bayou, the street outside my house filled with the dazed and the dazzled, the long-suffering and now joyful. Last night before the game I said that I wasn’t sure what scared me more: That they might lose. Or that they might win. A loss to the Vikings would be crushing, but if the Saints won then they’d have go to the Superbowl. Then what if they lose that? The anxiety and pressure around this potential high point might kill us. It occurred to me that it might be easier to back off before we got there. Boy, I’m glad no one was really listening to me. Still, I have flutters of nerves around what comes next. The delicate balancing point here is to say that this victory, the step before the Superbowl, is both great and good enough. Even if they lose from here, the Saints have still shattered the curse that has been hanging over their heads for 43 years.

There is something a little frightening about reaching a long dreamed-of goal. A lot of responsibility comes with the joy, which is fragile and requires protection and vigilance so that the weight of ordinary circumstances does not snuff it out. When there is so much farther to fall after a dream dies, then it might seem better to strangle it in the cradle to get the disappointment over with early rather than later. After all, the pain of disappointment is more familiar and seems to fit better.

Consequently, many people choke when they find themselves within reach of what they said they wanted. It’s an understandable weakness. Yet, there is nothing sadder in the world than someone who backs down from his own joy. And nothing more noble than the one who steps in to claim it and love it.

Let’s savor this joy a little before succumbing to the old anxiety. Perhaps in these days, we can absorb a healing tincture from this new sense of what is possible. Sometimes just claiming happiness can change a person.

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January 21, 2010 · 2:34 pm

Panther In the Glove

Begin where you are.

Trust Emily to put a Panther in a Glove. How did the Panther get into the Glove? Trouble put it there. Only the sort of trouble that a sensitive girl poet could find.

#244, c. 1861

It is easy to work when the soul is at play —
But when the soul is in pain —
The hearing him put his play things up
Makes work difficult — then —

It is simple, to ache in the Bone, or the Rind —
But Gimlets — among the nerve —
Mangle daintier — terribler —
Like a Panther in the Glove

Even when she doesn’t feel like work (terribler! and curiouser, too) Emily is working. She can’t help it. The factory between her ears never shuts down. Well, maybe after she’s dead. Although knowing her, she’ll find a way to continue producing a poem a day even after that change in management.

Yet even when her soul feels like a panther tearing at the inside of the glove, her skin, she writes her daily missive from the darkness behind her eyes. She does this by bringing her attention to what is, instead of dwelling on what she’d rather be. Imagine the force of will it takes to come to the task and craft a sensible work of beauty, when you feel as though the underside of your entire body’s worth of skin is opening to shreds beneath the claws of a wild animal. We have each felt that way at one time or another, although we might not have pulled that precise image from the darkness: a panther inside a glove. Most of us would not be able to make coffee in such a state, let alone write a poem.

Emily sits down to work and makes work out of the thing that wants to stop her work. Even the most ugly, most threatening, all these are fit for her pen because she is writing herself always.

It’s a good thing she is so complex, otherwise this self-interest could become sterile. Sometimes I think Emily withdrew from society because she knew her inner life was so rich, too rich really, that it would require all her attention to investigate. The world must have shrunk into trivial chaff by comparison.

She is sometimes criticized for being self-absorbed and not writing about the worldly events of her time. For example, she lived through the Civil War, but does not take this as material for her poems. My sense is she was after a form of purity by compulsion. A mind seeking an unadorned sense of itself. Anything that did not contribute to that investigation undermined the work.

Not merely a miniaturist, Emily telescoped into the war within herself. When you can conceive of your own soul as a panther, you are locked in a psychic civil war. Not the quivering mouse, her soul is the wild hunter (characterized here with the masculine “him”) driven by pain to ferocious attacks on its own container. The image of the panther does not make concrete the “pain” of the poem, not the cause of the distress. The panther is the soul transformed by pain.

That such a slip of a girl could envision her own soul as something so enormous, destructive, savage, intractable, muscled, fur-covered, ravenous, crazed with pain . . . (Here again is that spiritual hunger for the communion table but now enlivened, shocked, made violent and huge.) All this strikes me, not as self-absorbed or self-indulgent, but astonishingly self-aware. Subtle difference. What an intimidating revelation of Self to Self. Daunting because she knows that once she names it and claims it, she has to hold that panther, live with it, feed it. She has to find a place at the communion table for this ravenous animal.

It must be exhausting to be Emily all day.

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January 18, 2010 · 12:50 pm

Happiness Level Eight

Last night over dinner, Geoff required that I assess my happiness level—on a scale of one to ten—over the Saints’ victory against the Cardinals on Saturday, the NFC championship game. We agreed that giving it a ten was too much, as a rating of ten signifies absolute Nirvana, merging with the Universe in a state of such pure ecstasy that I leave my body. We’re not there yet. Working backwards from that, we’d have to say that assessing my happiness level at a nine has to be saved for when (if?) they make it to the Superbowl. So we settled on scoring my happiness at level eight. That seemed reasonable. Then I wondered: Why do men always have to quantify things? Scores, yardage, happiness levels? They’re obsessed with math. It’s unwholesome.

My contribution to the mathematics of the current season of miracles was to point out that Drew Brees’ birthday was January 15th, right smack on that solar eclipse. As a Capricorn native, he also has Pluto transiting his sun, so this is a period of sublime transformation and self-mastery for him.

When I first saw Brees I dismissed him as a Dudley-Do-Right. Too sweet, too clean, too good to be true. Not interesting. Since then, I have seen a real animalistic quality erupting out of him. He is exciting when he gets his back up. (Always dissed for being short, Brees more than makes up for the lack of height with an abundance of grit.) Often when he runs, he looks like an Angry Dad. This is not the self-indulgent, Prima Donna Quarterback hissy fits. No, Drew Brees is the Angry Dad, coming on the field to say: “None of us is going to do well if you keep screwing up like that.” It’s the non-egoistic, all-Capricorn sense of duty and responsibility and enforcing the law within the family for the good of all concerned. A leader you can trust.

Add to that Jupiter, the planet of expansion, abundance, great achievements—just moved into Pisces. This is very nice for Piscean Reggie Bush, speaking of which . . . Reggie Bush! Goodness gracious! Talk about the Drama of the Gifted Child! Finally, the most expensive, narcissistically wounded and over-anticipated player is emerging from the weight of too-high expectations and running forward instead of backward. We were very pleased with Reggie on Saturday.

So I believe the signs favor the Bless You Boys. I’m not looking into Brett Favre’s chart because I don’t want to know. I’ll only confuse myself with too much information. Focus, focus, focus! We just need to get past this Sunday . . . and then maybe a nine on the scale? Don’t think . . . focus.

Emily sends a poem today, but I’ll be damned if I can see how it connects with anything else on my mind.

#547, c. 1862

I’ve seen a Dying Eye
Run round and round a Room —
In search of Something — as it seemed —
Then Cloudier become —
And then — obscure with Fog —
And then — be soldered down
Without disclosing what it be
‘Twer blessed to have seen —

Em is still working with the matters of sight and darkness. She will be for a while. Psyche’s journey is not yet complete. Here Emily tells us the dead don’t give up what they know. Or what they seek. They possess a vision sharpened by urgency as life slips away. So they can “see” things no one else can. Emily has seen them seeing. The only problem is the dead and the living may only glimpse each other over this line. At first the poem suggests a vain search, clouded, fruitless. But then the one who searches ends with a blessing. The dying one found what he or she was looking for but can’t tell Emily. One approaches that doorway alone. Peering through may reveal some insight but nothing that anyone else may know or see.

Only the dead know what they know. Their journey is solitary. Emily can see that much, but even the poet with her enhanced vision can’t cross over that line with someone else. It’s a vision that benefits only the seer and can never be translated.

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