Category Archives: Emily Every Day

December 4, 2009 · 6:21 pm

Great Storm Is Over

Is it? Hope so. Or perhaps . . . a little stirring in the trees.

I have noticed that some folks trip across this blog because they are googling for an explanation of one of Emily’s poems. (No doubt grasping at straws in the middle of a Freshman Comp paper.) I am sorry to disappoint. No real explanations here. Mainly a deepening of the mystery or a detour into something just as circuitous.

Here we go again:

#619, c. 1862

Glee — The great storm is over —
Four — have recovered the Land —
Forty — gone down together —
Into the boiling Sand —

Ring — for the Scant Salvation —
Toll — for the bonnie Souls —
Neighbor — and friend — and Bridegroom —
Spinning upon the Shoals —

How they will tell the Story —
When Winter shake the Door —
Till the Children urge —
But the Forty —
Did they — come back no more?

Then a softness — suffuse they Story —
And a silence — the Teller’s eye —
And the Children — no further question —
And only the Sea — reply —

Here we pick up the pieces and wonder what’s left after the wind has settled. Is it really over? Is that it? She asks the same thing I am wondering. If the story itself has to subside before a thing is really done, then whatever it was that roiled before her eyes, continues to exist until the storytelling part—the noise bouncing off the echo chamber of memory—peters out. Then . . . nothing.

In fact, it is the prospect of nothing that often keeps the story going long past its natural death. No one wants to face the silence of no story. Few of us have the confidence that Something. Else. Follows. Nothing.

Even Emily, whose mind is as fine and sturdy a government as any, has to admit that some must slip away into silence beyond the gates of her fully imagined inner world. Some things she has to let slip into the sea and allow to be replaced with silence.

Dark Side Of The Moon

The moon is full today in Gemini. Skies sparkle with movement. When Uranus goes direct that means surprise reversals. And good news arrived last night.

I had talked in the afternoon with my friend Shaun, who was distraught. Her parents’ dog—a miniature dachshund named Emily—had been lost in the woods. Intrepid Emily was in the habit of going off by herself, but this time she did not return. Shaun feared Emily had fallen prey to a Great Horned Owl. After searching the woods and leaving messages everywhere, Emily’s human family sank into despair. Days went by with no sign of hope.

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” as my Emily would put it.

The not knowing what had happened, the mystery of Emily’s sudden and inexplicable absence was the cleaver that smashed everyone wide open. Then a few hours after I talked with Shaun, I opened my email to find a message from her. Emily had been found! Picked up on the side of the road by a nice family who had taken her to Banff. Emily, who had been having a rough time of it, would spend the afternoon at a spa, having a facial and a pedicure. Her humans would retrieve her soon. (Okay, I added this last part about the spa.) Shaun wrote: “I don’t know what to say.” I don’t know what to say either. Except maybe: Thank you. For all the Emilies, thank you.

My Emily has this to offer today beneath the Gemini Fool Moon:

#450, c. 1862

Dreams — are well — but Waking’s better,
If One wake at Morn —
If One wake at Midnight — better —
Dreaming — of the Dawn —

Sweeter — the Surmising Robins —
Never gladdened Tree —
Than a Solid Dawn — confronting —
Leading to no Day —

If you are lucky enough to be one of those people who lives in the world of daylight, waking is preferable to dreaming. Because in the daylight, you know what you’re dealing with. Everyone obeys the laws of physics. And the shocks are at least real, rather than surreal.

If you are not one of those people. If you are a poet, say, like Emily, and you are more alive and awake in the dark of midnight, then your reality clicks into place only when you are dreaming. Such a person is actually living on the dark side of the moon. She is more in her skin when her eyes are closed than open. Such an existence, says Emily, is only viable as long as each day leads her to another dream. Her life depends on the continued movement of the earth around the sun. Just like ordinary mortals. The difference is that she cannot grasp what is worthy in those daylight hours. Her hands only know how to pick up the nighttime knitting, when the rules change. Nothing is solid. The dead speak. Her mind stands in many places at once. And she can see through walls into the heart of any question. Furthermore, no one wastes her time with foolishness, lies or fear. No one else lives on the dark side of the moon with Emily. She’s out there by herself. Fortunately for us, she is willing to send us letters from where she lives, so we can know what it’s like over there. And we know she’s all right.

Wise As The Wind

Uranus stations direct at the end of Pisces. What does that give us? Lightning bolts shooting out of the fog. Like a haunted cloud. Dangerous and potentially deceptive. In the end, illuminating. Emily offers the following:

#417, c. 1862

It is dead — find it —
Out of sound — Out of sight —
“Happy”? Which is wiser —
You, or the Wind?
“Conscious”? Won’t you ask that —
Of the low Ground?

“Homesick”? Many met it —
Even through them — This
Cannot testify —
Themself — as dumb —

Something has died, a thing beyond her grasp. She was not able to resuscitate it. What ever this “it” is. The question in these lines that lingers in my thoughts is “Which is wiser — / You, or the Wind?” All these words “happy”, “conscious”, “homesick”, are conditions of human life. The poet wants to know, “So what?” It is dead, and if it is dead, then so what?

She scares me sometimes when she does this. She renounces common grammar along with ordinary human attachments. You know the ones I mean. The hunger we have for meaning, for the happy ending where it all comes out right and proper.

Instead Emily bores down into the words to a level so unadorned that she rids them of any influence or prejudice. Sentence structure always has an ulterior motive. Some yearning or unseen agenda. She is trying to boil the language clean of all that. To set the words on the page with the same direct purity as the wind blowing across the hillside.

She’s doing this, I fear again, because there is something in Emily that dreads being human. That seeks an utterly unadorned existence. Why? Partly she is driven by her own neurotic curiosity. She needs to see what it’s like. And because she can. Sheer talent drives her. She has to explore the extent of her own power and courage to descend into purity of expression. If nothing else, for the sake of finding the outer boundary of her own genius. Because it’s there.

Also she dreads and sheds these adornments because they are too sweet for her. The pain of losing this sweetness is unbearable. The shadow side of her genius.

Grammar makes suffering of us all.

So who is wiser? You or the wind? Who would you rather be? Your self with all your sticky, stinky assumptions? The creases that hold decaying matter that rots your soul as surely as the teeth drop from your head? Or would you rather slip across the page like the wind? Like air moving in a smooth, unending stream that catches nothing in its way because it is as no thing itself? Which of these possibilities seems the wiser? She poses the question as if we had a choice. To be wise as the wind. Or remain as foolish as we are born.

Oddly or maybe not, the wind this morning is bringing down all the red leaves from my crepe myrtle tree. The flowers are long dead. We move toward the winter solstice, burrowing into the dark. Who says we don’t have a real fall here in New Orleans?

Category Archives: Emily Every Day

Great Storm Is Over

Dark Side Of The Moon

Wise As The Wind

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