Category Archives: Emily Every Day

February 7, 2010 · 9:24 am

Newest Grace

I can’t think about anything but the Super Bowl right now. Sure, we just elected a new mayor (at last!), and I have to make a sweet potato/turnip casserole for the party. And then there are the sundry Sunday chores to do around the house. Yet, I cannot hold a sensible thought beyond the game this afternoon. What has happened to me? I used to have my head straight. Now I’m a Saints fan.

Emily doesn’t care about the Saints or football, for that matter. Not really. She pretends to go along with the tide of enthusiasm, but I know she’d rather dither in the garden with a Bee.

# 896, c. 1864

Of Silken Speech and Specious Shoe
A Traitor is the Bee
His service to the newest Grace
Present continually

His Suit a chance
His Troth a Term
Protracted as the Breeze
Continual Ban propoundeth He
Continual Divorce

Maybe when she wrote “Breeze” she meant to write “Brees”? Maybe not.

How like a Bee is a man. Or how like a Bee is the masculinized Emily. What is it, Em? Are you the flower? One of many visited by the inconstant bee, who “marries” and “divorces” lightly and often. Or are you, Emily, the one whose shifty heart refuses to remain fixed on one love? The poem does not tell us where she stands in the scene. Nor does the poem tell us what we are supposed to think of a bee whose affections are so unreliable.

The bee is a “traitor”, guilty of pretty flattery (“silken speech”) and offering false footing in relationship (“specious shoe”). Yet he is present to grace continually. That appearance of the word “grace” holds my attention. It is the only wholesome word in the poem. The only inspiration to rise out of the wretched mass of deceit and betrayal and divorce.

Grace. The bee is the agent of grace at every moment. I am still struggling with grace. How to explain it? The best I can do is to describe the space or movement around grace. Grace exists in a spontaneous burst, unsolicited and unanticipated. Grace descends from Heaven, touches us and is gone. We can’t ask for it and can’t hold it. It is the only real gift from God.

Emily says that grace, this ephemeral treasure beyond measure, may come to us by specious means. Do not judge the agent of grace. He may appear as a corrupted form. Untrustworthy trickster, unfaithful, unreliable. No one you’d introduce to your friends. Yet he may bestow the only gift worth having. We may not understand the container that God chooses to deliver grace. That is not ours to evaluate. Nor can we refuse grace if it comes to us by way of a character we do not admire. It would be hubris for us to decide what is the proper form grace should take. Our role in relationship to grace is to receive it. Allow our soul to be pollinated by the visitation, and let it go.

3 Comments

Filed under Emily Every Day

Tagged as , , , , ,

February 3, 2010 · 10:06 am

Perfect In Her Flaws

Thick and fast, these brief notes come flying out of the dark. Emily shoots bullets from the hip on love and other difficulties. First, the following came to hand.

#462, c.1862

Why make it doubt — it hurts it so —
So sick — to guess —
So strong — to know —
So brave — upon its little Bed
To tell the very last They said
Unto Itself — and smile — And shake —
For that dear — distant — dangerous — Sake
But — the Instead — the Pinching Fear
That Something — it did do — or dare —
Offend the Vision — and it Flee —
And They no more remember me —
Nor ever turn to tell me why —
Oh, Master, This is Misery —

This could be one of her “Master Letters”, that direct address to the person she calls, “Dear Master”. Never identified, this faceless, nameless object of her love provoked great passion in the poet and as we see here, misery as well.

The “it” of the opening lines, I read as Emily’s love-filled heart. Its “little bed” is her breast. This delicate organ grows sick and dies if tainted with doubt. The “Pinching Fear” that kills her poor dear heart is the shock of seeing her own bold offering (“it did do — or dare—”) of love refused. No passive flower, Emily asserts her will in this love drama. This Master is the ruler of her heart because she anointed him. She hands him the keys to the kingdom and then holds him accountable when he brings it all to rubble. Understandable. A failure is still a failure even if he didn’t exactly ask for it. Besides . . . what is he . . . nuts?

I have been carrying around this poem for a couple of days because it bothers me. I didn’t feel like writing about it. (I’ve been at this long enough to know that I should not trust my own resistance to a poem. Now I wait with the poem and let it uncurl itself to me.) This is such an old story, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then this morning, I picked up my book, and the pages fell open to the following four-line sledgehammer.

#826, c. 1864

Love reckons by itself — alone —
“As large as I” — relate the Sun
To One who never felt it blaze —
Itself is all the like it has —

Emily boomerangs right back into her power center. Her love is like the star at the center of the solar system. Accountable only to itself, her love is the beginning and the end all at once. The organizing principle, it is both the source of all life and the reference point that shapes all life. All meaning orbits this provenance. This star, this love does not have to explain or justify or answer questions. Everything else has to measure itself against this love, not the other way around. The matter of acceptance or return does not exist for the center of the universe. Finally love doesn’t do anything or go anywhere because it is all that is.

She leaves us with one caveat. All this is true for “One who never felt it blaze —” She would like to be the star at the center of the universe. And she’s big enough to see herself that way, the source of unconditional, life-giving love. That’s not just a foolish idea either. It’s true until she’s hit with a meteor and knocked off her center. Emily is human like the rest of us, perfect in her flaws.

1 Comment

Filed under Emily Every Day

Tagged as ,

January 30, 2010 · 10:32 am

Double Dare

Emily launches yet another broadside in her campaign to prove her love. This confrontation is heating up. And she leaps from the cliff of heresy . . again.

# 456, c. 1862

So well that I can live without —
I love thee — then How well is that?
As well as Jesus?
Prove it me
That He — loved Men —
As I — love thee —

This sounds like another attempt to convince. Someone is not buying Emily’s particular brand of flummery. So she crafts this trenchant argument to her lover. I parse it this way: Emily loves so well that she can accept her lover’s absence without allowing her feelings to curdle into hatred. And yet . . . and yet . . . the poet can’t help one last parting shot. She wants to make sure this erstwhile, unconvinced lover knows that her love is better, greater even than Jesus’ love for all of mankind. Emily, the superior lover, declares that her love is not some cool, distant abstraction that one reads in an old book and must take on faith. Jesus and his story-tellers, offered a love diffused into metaphor over the entire human species. Emily has something a great deal more local and concrete in mind.

Emily’s heresy is to suggest that hers is the greater love because it is more difficult. She implies that it’s relatively easy for Jesus to love us. He’s dead anyway. And safely tucked up in Heaven with God the Father, where everything works out just fine. She’s impatient with this sanctified love. Too safe. Too neat a dodge to displace that desire for love onto a dead guy. How much more complex and interesting and demanding of the self to evolve in spirit while still cloaked in this soft, decaying, glove of skin—to cultivate a love here on earth. Emily throws this challenge to her lover: “I dare you to love now, while we live as mortal beings with all our sweat and mess and looming death. Try that before you give up on me.”

If you had asked me last week where lay the answer to all my prayers, I would have said the West Bank. (Because that’s where I found what I need for my Mardi Gras costume.) Turns out that is not entirely true. Today Geoff and I embark on an expedition to New Orleans East because that is where you find junk yards with the remains of old Toyotas that can be mined for treasure, obscure car parts that would be costly if purchased directly from the dealer. So we go east in search of our heart’s desire. Typical me, I was rooting about in the wrong quarter of the compass for my heart’s desire. I need a new map, too.

Leave a comment

Filed under Emily Every Day

Tagged as , ,