#250, c. 1861

I shall keep singing!
Birds will pass me
On their way to Yellower Climes —
Each — with a Robin’s expectation —
I — with my Redbreast —
And my Rhymes —

Late — when I take my place in summer —
But — I shall bring a fuller tune —
Vespers — are sweeter than Matins — Signor —
Morning — only the seed of Noon —

Sound brought the universe into existence and so does everything else come to life with sound.  When we speak an intention or desire, that begins it.  “I love . . . I want . . . Why don’t we?  Would you . . . Will you?” All these sounds lead to trouble and change.  The ground shifts because someone says, “I want.”

Emily does something a little out of character here when she writes: “I take my place in summer . . . “  which pleases me.  She announces her right to occupy space.  She is a fully realized person of weight and substance.  That “I take” borders on aggression, assertion certainly.

Then at the end in the direct address to “Signor” her tone dials back from the hungry tigress to the coquette.  “Vespers are sweeter than Matins . . .”  She veils her energy in a pretty and holy metaphor.  By the time we get to the end of the poem, however, it’s too late.  No one can mistake the fierce woman behind the flirty words.  She has already tipped her hand.  She may soften her note to persuade, rather than frighten.  But this Signor faces a woman of appetite.  He should be so lucky.

What is she up to?  Emily sings in celebration of the late harvest, the fuller tune of that mature season of summer that comes after the callow, youthful spring.  Furthermore, her song lasts forever, long after the Robins have been silenced by age, death, winter.  The song that Emily sings onto the page is informed by the intelligence of a long life and all the shocks that give her voice dimension and timbre, the story beneath the song.  This song is sweeter because it is more interesting, complex, veined with an awareness of death, thus more sustaining.  Em says that time has made her the better lover.  Her song isn’t kidding around. Signor is an idiot if he doesn’t recognize the value of that.

Tonight for the solstice, I’ll make a meal—not sure what yet, but something good.  Then we will have grilled figs, our own late harvest.  We’ll light the candles on the Christmas tree, and sit in the darkness to watch the small flame flicker against its opposite.  We’ll do all that just to know what it looks like to hold a light in the dark.  We will complete these gestures, as we do every year, to see our hope external and playing shadows on the wall.

#415, c. 1862

Sunset at Night — is natural —
But Sunset on the Dawn
Reverses Nature — Master —
So Midnight’s — due — at Noon.

Eclipses be — predicted —
And Science bows them in —
But do one face us suddenly —
Jehovah’s Watch — is wrong.

The poem gives us a solar eclipse, not quite consonant with today’s weather, but I’ll take it.  The “Sunset on the Dawn” is the line I like.  She points to an eclipse, which darkens the sun just at the time that we expect it to be most bright, as a reversal of Nature.  Yet it can happen and often does.  Eclipses occur all the time.  We know about these events and what causes them.  Yet the eclipse still touches some atavistic fear that the sun may be dying and the world coming to an end.  In our primitive reactive lizard brain, nature is perverted when the sun doesn’t do what we expect.

Given that we see eclipses happening all the time, albeit not often, wouldn’t that make it “natural” insofar as it does happen in nature?  Apparently not. Astronomers map out eclipses well into the future in their star charts.  They always know what is happening out there and calendar celestial movements with mathematical precision.  Even with all that comforting information, these events still arouse an old anxiety about the correct order of things.

The eclipses that change us, that reverse Nature, are the ones we didn’t predict.  Here Emily means “eclipse” more broadly as a sudden change, something gone, or something returned.  I want to ask what makes one thing a product of Nature and another a reversal of Nature?   If it happens in the physical world then that is Nature doing its work, right?  If it surprises us or “face one suddenly” that is only because we have not yet fully understood our Nature.  These unexpected “eclipses” that Emily suggests serve only to reveal the unseen parts of ourselves.

I particularly enjoy her blasphemy at the end:  “Jehovah’s Watch — is wrong.”  There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio . . .  Jehovah’s Watch is Adam and all the humans that descended from him.  The human body and mind comprise the watch tower that houses Jehovah’s presence.  Emily says that Jehovah’s Watch is wrong.  Not Jehovah.  She does not presume to know the mind of God.  But she is willing to dismantle the bricks of the self-appointed watch tower—those fallible humans who have missed a few turns in the road along the way.

She is not willing to genuflect to Science, either.  There are a few things that the astronomers failed to predict or explain.  For Emily the truth is in the middle, in that tension between faith and knowledge, where the foreground and background shift past each other in a constant optical illusion.   The middle ground where poems rest.

Speaking of reversals of Nature . . . my fig tree gave me five ripe figs this morning.  Here we are on the cusp of the Winter Solstice and my silly fig tree, who apparently can’t tell time, has decided to bear new fruit.  Geoff’s fig tree (which I gave him—everyone I love should have a fig tree) has also fruited spontaneously and mysteriously in this early winter.

I was thrilled to receive these fruits, no matter how unnatural their arrival.  The pickings in Summer are usually slim because those idiot Blue Jays eat all my figs before I can get to them.  The birds can spot the ripening blush sooner than I do, which makes sense—they’re more invested.

In any case, my answer is Yes!  I will take this late harvest.  The figs are fat and sweet.  Perhaps a little tougher than what I’d get in July.  Still, this fruit will feed me just fine.

Despite the cheery season, Emily returns to her favorite subject.

#976, c. 1864

Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
“Dissolve” says Death — The Spirit “Sir
I have another Trust” —

Death doubts it — Argues from the Ground —
The Spirit turns away
Just laying off for evidence
An Overcoat of Clay.

Here Death is the argument between the matter of the earth and the ghost in the machine.  Death gets to say something, but Death owes its existence to the tension between the physical outcome of organic degeneration and our imagination’s stubborn refusal to give in to that.  So much spirit talk is born out of sheer obstinacy.

My focus goes to the line where she characterizes Death as a dialogue, not an entity, although Death does assume form and speech in the poem.  Death is a conversational exchange.  It takes two to create Death.  An essential split in our nature is where Death emerges as a character with something to say.  Without that duality within ourselves, we don’t have anything to talk about.  Or rather we have no one to talk to . . .  No dialogue, no Death.  Only changing form.  Skin, hair, bones, teeth, dust, mud . . . fertilizer.  And then some other form.

My own conversation with Death has been lively off and on since I was fourteen years old, both as a theoretical concept and as a more brute consideration.  This past September is a good example.  If you want my advice, don’t get cancer.  It puts a damper on things.

All right, I’m being glib.  That’s how we roll in my tribe, especially when considering Death.  The way to get through life with any dignity is to act the fool.  Afraid of Death?  Grab him by the throat and crack wise.  You’ll never make a friend of Death.  But do make him your straight man.

For the record:  I’m not dying.  Not yet, at least.  But I had an interesting brush with malignant melanoma.  A bad mole on my left arm.  The good news is that we found it at an early stage, so the surgeon removed it all in one swoop, along with a large portion of my skin.  No need for further treatment, no chemo or sentinel node biopsy.  I will have to be on high-alert for other bad moles, but for now I am in the clear.

Those are the clinical facts, over and done with in the space of a month.  The waves that move out from those facts continue to roll up against my thoughts, and I expect will do so for the rest of my life, which I hope will be a long one.  My sister who is a survivor of stage III breast cancer has talked about “the gift of cancer.”  My friend Shaun who is also a melanoma survivor used the same phrase.  They were talking about cancer as a great awakener.  That it clarified how they had been neglecting some essential part of themselves.  They said cancer gave them the power to love their own lives and act accordingly.

So I have been looking for the gift of cancer in my medical adventure.  It’s here.  What great material.  I can run my engine on this for a long while.  And I’m not done yet.  Not by any means.

Lance swam like a sewing machine.  Chucka, chucka chucka.  Sturdy and desperate at the same time.  He paddled over to me and looked me straight in the eye to make sure he got credit for the effort.  The he swerved over to Geoff to check on him.  Geoff was wearing a snorkel mask at the moment and was looking down into the sandy floor,  so he did not see the heroic Lancelot striding the waves toward him.  Lance poked his snout into Geoff’s side, and Geoff startled, lifted his face out of the water.  Having thus satisfied himself that Geoff was not dead, only floating face-down in the sea, Lance turned and returned to shore.  The slow rising humps of water pushed him along when his skinny legs failed.  Once on land, he shook himself off and rolled in the hot, loose white sand, so he appeared to be dusted in flour.  Then he came right back into the water to make the same trip all over again.  He kept this up all day.  We had to drag him home in the late afternoon.  What a difference a little wind makes.  Suddenly I have a brave new dog.

Emily has been having sympathetic brain spasms.

#556, c. 1862

The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly — and true —
But let a Splinter swerve —
‘Twere easier for You —

To put a Current back —
When Floods have slit the Hills —
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves —
And trodden out the Mills —

That splinter that has put my brain out of groove? Tiger sharks.

We took a guided snorkeling expedition to another part of the peninsula, near the state park.  They dropped us off on a sandbar that led in one direction (about a half mile) to shore and in the other direction out to deep water.  On our way there, we encountered a pod of dolphins.  One swam close, brushing against the hull of our boat. Without fail every human on the boat clambered to the railing and leaned out to coo and sigh, as if apprehending the Baby Jesus, Himself.  I was first in line, cooing above all the others.  How do they do it?  Dolphins, I mean.  They inspire a near-universal response of awe and love.  Our mysterious friends of the deep.  We can be with the dolphins and not be afraid.  Even our crusty, grumpy Captain Gary turned soft on us when the dolphins appeared.  He sped the boat in their direction, knowing they would swim along, racing and leaping to keep up.  Apparently they love the hum of the engine, especially a catamaran.  The shape of the hull amuses them somehow.  Reminds them of another dolphin, perhaps?  Who knows?  But they definitely respond to the racing boat, much the same way that Lance will snap his head around and rivet his attention to my hand when I hold a tennis ball.  I hold him in my thrall as I wave the ball.   The dolphins are locked in similarly.  The boat’s shape and sound must strike a chord in their brain history.  They know what to do with a boat.  They play with it.

When we got to the sandbar, Captain Gary dropped anchor and turned us loose for about three hours to explore on our own.  The area immediately around the boat was shallow enough to walk.  While Geoff and I were snorkeling in the deeper water, I attracted the attention of a remora, which is a long gray fish with white stripes down either side and a suction cup on its underside.  These generally attach themselves to sharks and then coast along waiting for the shark to kill something. The remora scoots out to eat the bloody remnants floating around after the shark has taken its meal.  Anyway, this remora would not leave me alone.  It darted in and around and all up and down my legs, gliding along my skin, looking for a place to attach.  I swatted it away, but it kept coming back to me.  The fish ignored Geoff and only wanted to attach itself to my legs.  I swam away from it, flippering fast in the water, then stopped and looked down.  The damn thing had followed me and continued its fascinated inventory of my legs.  “Why?” I asked.

“He senses your predation,” Geoff said.

“I’m a vegetarian!” I yelled at the remora.  It didn’t seem to believe me.

I climbed back onto the boat so I could re-apply sun block.  Sound carries beautifully across water,  so I could clearly hear our snorkeling guide Spencer casually chatting with other folks in our expedition. He was reassuring them that they did not need to worry about sharks.  “Wherever you find dolphins, you won’t see sharks,” he said.  Apparently dolphins dominate sharks.  When they play Rock-Paper-Scissors, dolphins win every time.  The reason is not that dolphins love us and want to protect us from sharks.  Another cherished myth shattered out there on the sunny Gulf coast.  The reason is that dolphins and sharks compete for the same food supply.  And dolphins beat up sharks because they can.  They’re smarter, faster, and more aggressive.  Even more importantly, dolphins know how to work in groups to protect their food supply, whereas sharks tend to be solitary feeders.  Sharks are dumb, but they have figured out that it’s healthier to stay away from dolphins.

A minute later I heard shouting.  “Oh look!” Spencer was pointing, very excited.  Then a saw it.  A black, knife-shaped shadow, about three feet long, darted through the shallow water where Geoff and the other folks in our group were paddling around.  It moved super fast and then disappeared into the forest of undersea grass. “There’s a shark, right there,” Spencer cried, pleased with himself, as if he had produced it himself.

“What was that story you were just feeding those kids? ” I demanded, trying not to sound shrill.

“Oh, I tell that to everybody,” Spencer said as he climbed into the boat.  Our crusty, grumpy Captain Gary had just returned from his foray into the deeper water.  He already knew about the shark—a bonnet shark and an old friend, it seemed.  “Yeah, this is his hangout,” Gary said.  Wonderful.  Our guides have brought us to a “shark hangout.”  I must have looked as stricken as I felt because Spencer launched into the spiel:  Most sharks shy away from people.  They’re more afraid of us . . .  etc.  I am suddenly lonesome for my couch.

The conversation turned, naturally enough, to tiger sharks.  Spencer described them as “garbage can fish” because they literally will eat anything, regardless of nutritional content.  Plus, they differ from other sharks in that they do not shy away from humans.  Oh, no! Tiger sharks yearn to embrace their human cohorts—in the most intimate manner imaginable—tear their limbs from their torso and wear their intestines like a necklace.

The only local tiger shark attack that Spencer knew of was a man who was fishing in waist-deep water.  He had packed the bait into his pockets.  A passing tiger shark liked the smell of that and tried to get into the man’s pockets . . . violently.  “The way I see it, “Spencer said. ” The guy baited himself.” Then he raised his shoulders in a philosophical shrug and fanned out his hands, as if to say, “I rest my case.”

Yeah, hard to argue with that one.  The guy was totally asking for it.  Oh, but Spencer wasn’t finished with his story.  He and his nephew had recently caught a 12-foot tiger shark and released it.  I asked where, hoping the shark was living happily in Hawaii now.

“I’d rather not tell you,” Spencer said.  I stared at him until he succumbed to my will.  “A couple of miles from here.”

Great.  That’s just great.  Rather than think about this too much,  I sank back into the water and returned to my patrol of the grass beds.  Beneath my snorkel mask, the flickering blue and green ovals of fish first zigged and then zagged in their group fish-think when they felt the water shift with my movement.  The sunlight illuminated their skin with triangles of gold.  I happened upon an extremely large conch shell that had fastened itself to the lip of an equally large scallop shell.  I nudged it with my flipper.  The creature inside the conch shell reacted with a furious poof of sand and disengaged its hold on the scallop.  The conch creature (I later learned) had been in the middle of feeding on the scallop creature.  More predation.  When had I first glimpsed the two, I thought they were having sex—some exotic, inter-species coupling.  It could happen, right? But no, this was hunting, not loving.  I’m always misunderstanding things by filtering the world through my own prism. The sorrow of my life.

My brain, Lance,  tiger sharks, dolphins.  Our respective mental engines are going chucka, chucka  . . .  It’s a miracle that any of us manage to co-exist at all, if only because each of us is running in an entirely different groove.  Back to language and communication.  I have been thinking about why we all react with such romantic exhilaration when the dolphins show up.  The simple reason may be that the dolphins respond to us in a way that shows they are aware of our presence as something other than food or a threat to their food.  They play with us.  What else could that be?  They swim with us in a manner unmistakably frivolous.  This suggests some imagination at work.  Their capacity for play and willingness to involve us in their game tells us that they are imagining things about us—just as we also involve them in our imaginative vision.  We’re having a simultaneous and briefly mutual fantasy with the dolphins.  This is how love affairs get started.

The startling point for us humans (because we believe we’re at the top of the kingdom) is that we feel seen by the dolphins.  A barrier between us drops.  We see real evidence of understanding.  We feel we could have a relationship with the dolphin that we could never have with a shark who looks at us with the same dead, empty eyes as we look to our own grilled steak on the dinner plate.  With the dolphin we look into a lively mind  that is utterly alien from our own in its wildness and self-possession.  A dolphin is really not like a dog, who also plays with us.  We have a  contract with dogs, who goof around to curry favor, so that we’ll feed them snacks and give them pedicures.  The  dolphin doesn’t need us.  Yet, the dolphin seems to want us for its own benevolent reasons.  When we feel ourselves folded into this strange intelligence, we are both thrilled and humbled.  Do we deserve to be loved?  Probably not.  That makes it even more exciting.

The sight of his human cohorts disappearing into this strange, moving, noisy, foaming mass that Lance has no frame of reference to understand, however, moves him to override his fear. At least he attempts to override his fear.  He doesn’t get far.  The first biggish wave sends Lance in an abrupt dancing retreat.  It’s interesting to watch him weigh his options and evaluate the competing threats.  He hates the ocean, but he also hates being separated from the pack.  So his fear of the pack breaking up temporarily trumps his fear of death-by-water.  Until the water grows larger than his brief courage.  Then he flees to the beach and the torture of indecision.

Once in a while, Geoff  stays on the beach, while I swim.  That doesn’t help much.  Lance runs back and forth between Geoff and the shallow waves, barking in a state of high anxiety, as if to say: “Go in there and get her!  Are you mad?  How can you stand there and do nothing?!”  Then he advances to the point where the gentlest wave edge brushes his toenails, plops his butt in the sand and stares at me in agony until I return from the sea.  Poor dog.  He’ll never come on vacation with us again.  Between the Trivial Pursuit and the bathing, this trip has been one trauma after another.

The moon still hangs in the sky this morning.  A pale white shadow against blue.  It was full a couple of days ago, and it doesn’t seem to want to give up the stage.  The wind has died down from the storm.  The water is barely moving today.  Maybe Lance will feel more inclined to swim in this gentle sea.

Emily sent the following:

#1284, c. 1783

Had we our senses
But perhaps ’tis well they’re not at Home
So intimate with Madness
He’s liable with them
Had we the eyes within our Head —
How well that we are Blind —
We could not look upon the Earth —
So utterly unmoved —

The world is shocking. Maybe it is better that most of us sleepwalk through it. If we were fully awake with open eyes, we’d stay fixed on the beach and not move. Too dangerous.

Of course, Emily doesn’t really mean what she says. She’s toying with our complacency. However, the suggestion that paying attention with our full range of senses might lead to madness or at least feel like madness is not her joke. Rather, it is her isolation. It’s an intimacy with chaos that she is willing to live with but no one else would.

# 1473, ca. 1879

We talked with each other about each other
Though neither of us spoke —
We were listening to the seconds’ Races
And the Hoofs of the Clock —
Pausing in Front of our Palsied Faces
Time compassion took —
Ark of Reprieve he offered to us —
Ararats — we took —

She suggests there is a difference between talking and speaking. That two people may outwardly appear to be communicating or at least talking, without actually speaking. There is something more dense about speaking that is absent from talking. The poem speaks to me without uttering anything out loud. I can hear the sea, receive its presence as though we are conversing, without a shared language. And Lance, you say? There is not another dog more vocal than he, yet he doesn’t say a word. He makes himself understood perfectly. Emily might say that Lance and the sea are better “speakers” specifically because they are not hampered by language.

Only humans with their sophisticated complex of symbols — the pinnacle of creation!— get lost in their own virtuosity. One word really isn’t as good as another. It matters. “June” is better than “day”. But the arrogance that arises from our own superb talent for speech does more to cripple us in the end.

I would like to write sentences that roll onto the beach like the waves. Paragraphs that break at their peak, curl forward with a decisive froth, and then descend into a smooth, flat resolution on the wet sand. That would be an interesting goal, to make speech that does not remain to admire itself, or wait for a response. Words that pull back and then roll forward, perfectly formed, yet not fixed, only perfect again.

I’ll leave you with Emily’s last remark:

#1472, c. 1879

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie —
True Poems flee —

#1218, c. 1878

Let my first Knowing be of thee
With morning’s warming Light —
And my first Fearing, lest Unknowns
Engulf thee in the night —

The daily fabric shifts when you expand your home (either literal or psychic) to include one more. So much that is new comes into the house with another person. Not only that simple fact of physical presence, but waves of change all through the rooms. It is as if the house itself and the apparently invisible air inside it were made of some warp and weft that has to open or move aside to make room for a new person. To shift from one woman (plus a brown dog) to one woman, a brown dog, and a man is like cracking open an egg. Something is lost, and something is gained. The two conditions cannot exist simultaneously, and the house breathes differently as a result.

It would be nice to keep the egg whole and perfect in its bottom-heavy wobble. The potential inside could remain there for good and maintain its integrity as potential. (I love that “potent” root of “potential”.) However perfect, the unbroken egg does not offer its nourishment. It doesn’t go anywhere or do anything. It does not explore the scope of its destiny and never fulfills its potential.

I suppose I could remain on my porch forever . . . or at least a long time. I could find those perfect boundaries of my constructed world. Then after I’d had enough, I could let it crack open and see what sort of potential flows out of that into realization. It’s messy, sure. Nothing more disturbing than another consciousness in space. Also nothing more stimulating. I allowed this shift. I invited the change. As I adapt to it and find my new posture in shared space, I can’t help but notice what was lost and what is gained.

In her poem, Emily looks at the arrival of consciousness. Once she allows another into hers, she loses that peace and purity of strict selfhood—the night empty of others. It’s inevitable. You never sleep entirely well again once you choose to love. You have been cracked open. You gave away your peace in exchange for the shock of knowing yourself in love. The gain? To be fed again and again, nourished body and soul.

No one lives without destroying something.

In honor of her soul sister Jeanne, Emily sent this note from the dark.

#1323, ca. 1874

I never hear that one is dead
Without the chance of Life
Afresh annihilating me
That mightiest Belief,

Too mighty for the Daily mind
That tilling its abyss,
Had Madness, had it once or twice
The yawning Consciousness,

Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue
When Terror were it told
In any Tone commensurate
Would strike us instant Dead

I do not know the man so bold
He dare in lonely Place
That awful stranger Consciousness
Deliberately face —

There is so much in this poem that I can’t hold it all at once. I’ll try to swim a straight line through it. My first response is to observe the similarities between Jeanne d’Arc and Emily Dickinson. They were both precocious, neurasthenic young girls with talents far exceeding their society’s ability to appreciate. Both were caught in a time that could not comprehend a woman of any age who possessed the power that each wielded in her own way.

Both, I’d argue here, were “afflicted” with consciousness. By that I mean that these two were both missing a layer or two of the usual protection (that “bandage”) that most of us carry around with us. The layers that shield us from a too intimate knowledge of ourselves or our consciousness. These two could not escape or ignore the experience of awareness. Most mortals can’t survive without ignoring their own consciousness. Em alludes to this protection in the line: “Too mighty for the Daily Mind”. A lesser sort born with Emily’s raw openness to the eternity within would fall into that “Madness.” No one sinks into the darkness behind her own eyes with any real willingness. It’s usually a forced step. Emily is the one with the curiosity and the courage to go there as a regular practice. And then write about it. Maybe that writing spared her from the madness. She was angling slant-wise toward this when she wrote “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind —” The fact of conscious existence, our ability to be aware of our awareness, is too excruciating to dwell on in any direct or lengthy manner. For Emily, the most excruciating part, is her ability to hold awareness of life beyond death.

I’ll warrant that Jeanne wondered if she was going mad, as well. Both of these extraordinary girls were shocked, dazzled, and then finally drunk like madwomen on their own talent. Their power to “see”. Both had the sight or visions, which of course, according to the contractual terms of magical power, comes with a big responsibility. The difference between them is that Jeanne left the safe anonymity of her family and went out into the world to become a warrior of enormous political influence. While our little brown sparrow, Emily stayed home and drove herself deeper inward. Her vision bored infinitely into that mustard seed, her kingdom of Heaven.

Emily’s power exploded onto the page in private. “My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —” She knew what she was sitting on—an atomic bomb of awareness, her own consciousness. Maybe it was out of compassion for her society that she withheld herself from public view. If she had unleashed her vision, she might have brought a nation to its knees (like Jeanne), and she might have been torn to pieces for her crime of greatness (like Jeanne). So a little of both. Pity for the ignorant society she was given at birth. And a healthy dose of self-preservation.

Who can say what was the better path?  Jeanne changed the tide of history and died in agony before her 20th birthday.  No one got to see Emily’s iconoclastic poems in her life time, but she was granted a long career, made good use of her time, and died as quietly as she lived.  I guess we need both of them.

The gift I receive from Emily is a trapdoor and an invitation. She lifts the cover from the opening and points into the darkness. Readers like me may descend, floating on a dark wave, comfortable, room temperature. There limits melt and open toward the infinite unfolding that lies just outside our peripheral vision. Emily shows us how to turn and see deeply behind our own eyes. That loss of solid space/time boundaries might scare us back toward front and center. But no. It’s okay to follow Emily’s directive. She’s gone there first. We don’t have to be afraid.

I have not been writing about the Saints this fall because it has been such a weird season for our “Bless You Boys”. On the anniversary of her birth, Emily suggested the following:

#1541, c. 1882

No matter where the Saints abide,
They make their Circuit fair
Behold how great a Firmament
Accompanies a Star

So far, this season the only half-way intelligent noise raised by the talking heads in the NFL “commentators league” has been: Why the deafening silence about the defending World Champions? We’re all wondering that. The Saints are the reigning Superbowl Champions, and yet they are still being treated like some unlikely and ignorable upstart potential loser.  The answer may be that it’s been a really weird season.

You could chalk it up to the fact that they opened with Mercury retrograde. Even taking the sky into account, most would have to agree that—although a nine and three record is nothing to sneeze at—those early losses were embarrassing.  Hartley muffed the field goal that would have won the game against the Atlanta Falcons, an easy 29-yard field goal.  We’re still scratching our heads over that one because Hartley loves those 48-yard field goals. (??) Then the Boys lost to the Cleveland Browns, a team with a terrible record, a team that hasn’t been able to do much of anything this season except beat the defending World Champions.  I guess that’s why they call it a game, to paraphrase Zen Master Drew Brees.

The third loss was a legitimate hard-fought engagement with the Arizona Cardinals that we don’t need to discuss here.

Those other two losses, however, are what’s known as “embarrassments”.  The words we save for those are “silly” and “unnecessary”.  It was as if the Ghost of Saints Past had come back to haunt us for a couple of games.  A taste of the old days.  Just to keep us mindful of . . . what?  That it stinks to lose. And it really stinks to lose for embarrassing reasons.

If that’s not weird enough, the Saints’ winning games have also been embarrassing, like the Cinncinati Bengals last week.  (Geoff calls them the Bungles, which is cruel but accurate.)  Sure the Saints won but only just, and only after making a lot of bad mistakes.  Twelve men on the field?  C’mon!  That’s strictly amateur hour.  The Thanksgiving game against Dallas?  The Boys squeaked by in the end, but only after allowing a 17-point lead to evaporate into nothing.  This is weird.  Maybe they’re haunted.  Or maybe it’s just a touch of the Sophomore Slump.  Whatever it is, they better snap out of it because we don’t have time to waste.  Embarrassing losses are bad enough, but embarrassing wins are actually worse.  Those haunt your conscience and make celebration feel hollow.

It is hard to feel triumphant, when we know they won by accident or by means of the other team’s momentary incompetence.  For example, drawing the Bengals offsides in the final 30 seconds of the game for a 5-yard penalty and a first down.  Okay, Drew still had to throw that picture-book pass to Colston for the touchdown.  And no one handed that balletic perfection to them.  It was their own true beauty that we have come to expect from  the Brees-Colston mojo.  Still, what it took to get there was embarrassing in the haplessness of it all.  If the Bengals had just managed to just stay in control of themselves for a FEW SECONDS and NOT MOVE off the line, they would have won.  If the Saints have to depend on the other team’s ridiculous lack of discipline to win, then it’s a hollow victory.

A lot of fellas around here wake up Monday morning and say:  “I’ll take the win.”  After this season is over, no one will remember the embarrassments, only who won.  That phrase, “I’ll take the win” is a rueful acknowledgment that some wins are not a source of unalloyed joy.  Further that “win” focus works against Brees’ own Zen-like philosophical  emphasis on “process” over “outcome”.  The process matters . . . if it’s important to like yourself at the end.  Guru Drew has said in so many words:  It matters less that you get there than how you get there.

I have to agree with him, and Emily does too.  Process makes the difference between a Saint and an ordinary mortal.  Both die in the same way in the end.  Both are made of vulgar flesh that will rot and fall away.  The difference between a Saint and you or me is that the Saint’s progress through mortal life is illuminated by a quality of character and devotion that elevates the vulgar body above its mean concerns.

Process matters.  Don’t just take the win.  Don’t be satisfied with a hollow victory; it’s a lie.  I know why Guru Drew and Payton are not thrilled with their own progress this season and why no one is handing them any bouquets just yet.  They are not living up to their own name, and they know it.

There are a number of important games still  left in the season.  The Rams this weekend—I’ll be there!  Then the Ravens—nevermore!  Then after Christmas, the looming Falcons again.  Geoff and I are going to Atlanta for that one.  It’s official.  I’m in the club.

So we are entering a lovely season of miracles, which also progresses beneath yet another Mercury retrograde.  That means:  review, reconsider, re-wind, re-work, renew.  I wish all of us a careful and deliberate consideration of process.  Do you like yourself after your accomplishments? Not because of these accomplishments, but are you happy with how you got there?  Pause, examine, rinse, repeat.

#814, ca. 1864

One day is there of the series
Termed “Thanksgiving Day”
Celebrated part at table
Part in memory -
Neither Ancestor nor Urchin
I review the Play -
Seems it to my Hooded thinking
Reflex Holiday
Had There been no sharp subtraction
From the early Sum -
Not an acre or a Caption
Where was once a Room
Not a mention whose small Pebble
Wrinkled any Sea,
Unto such, were such Assembly,
‘Twere “Thanksgiving day” -