Category Archives: Emily Every Day

Sorry, I have not been back for a few days. I have been lolling at the Jersey Shore with all five (count ’em! five!) nephews. No nieces for me in this family. It was mayhem. Joyful, peanut-butter-mixed-with-sand mayhem. Emily sent this message:

#928, c. 1864

The Heart has narrow Banks
It measures like the Sea
In mighty — unremitting Bass
And Blue Monotony

Till Hurricane bisect
And as itself discerns
Its insufficient Area
The Heart convulsive learns

The Calm is but a Wall
Of unattempted Gauze
An instant’s Push demolishes
A Questioning dissolves

I love spending time with my old childhood friend, the Atlantic Ocean. The water is warm and rough. As I battle the chop out to deeper water, I dive under the oncoming wave. Sightless, I go head-first into churning, green chaos. The water pushes and pulls me in all directions at once, tosses me around like a piece of seaweed. Beneath the wave, I can’t tell up from down or where the sun lies. I feel the tug on my body, dragging me away from land, as the wave rears back on itself gathering strength for the next rush. My head emerges on the other side. I shake out my hair and spit. Ocean streams down my face into my mouth. I exhale deeply, emptying my lungs, spitting an arc of water into the air again. The next pile of white froth rolls toward me. I must do something or it will crash in my face and throw me over. Don’t think. Act fast. I dive again.

During this visit, I found a old photo of me at age 15 or 16. I am wearing my grandmother’s wedding dress and dancing in our garden with the pine trees as a backdrop. The back story to this photo is that my sister and her friend Pam had come home from their first year of college where they were both studio art majors. They cooked up an arty photo project and chose me as their model. We had discovered my grandmother’s wedding dress, already starting to unravel from age, in a cardboard box at the back of a closet. Somehow, they convinced my mother to let them use it for their project. So the two studio art majors put me in my grandmother’s wedding dress, took me to the garden and told me to act like Ophelia.

(For the second half of the photo shoot, the artists took me out to the dock behind our house, stripped me down to my underpants and draped me in yards and yards of filmy white fabric—the curtains from my bedroom—that wafted on the wind with the Intercoastal Waterway in the background. I looked like a combination of Mrs. Havisham and Ariel. This was how we girls spent our summer vacation.)

I am a beanstalk compared to my tiny Italian grandmother, so her dress was tea-length on me, and the tight sleeves stopped three-quarters of the way down my arms. On my grandmother’s wedding day, the dress had dragged behind her in long train. Her sisters, expert lace-makers, had crocheted the entire dress, which consisted of a slim bodice that spread out to a lawn of leafy discs held together with small loops of thread.

In this photo, my face is tanned, and my sun-bleached hair falls, like the roof of a thatched hut, almost to my waist. I am bare-footed, brown and unruly, all elbows and teeth. Nothing like the petite, elegant woman who had worn this dress fifty years earlier.

Since the artists had instructed me to act like Ophelia, I swanned about the yard with a tragical air. To accentuate this effect, my sister knotted my hair in the branches of the pine trees. Then I rebelled. I wanted to dance. Using my grandmother’s long veil as a prop, I twirled and swirled. My grandmother’s dress fanned out in a white trumpet around my legs. I carried her veil like a banner over my head. Someone, either my sister or Pam, clicked the shutter at the precise moment that I looked up over my raised arms to see the energy of my dance, unfurling the lacy veil in the air. The hem of my skirt reaches outward in counterpoint to the flight above. My lips are pursed, as though I am whistling. Or about to kiss someone. The dance, the girl, the dress, all caught in one movement. Frozen in time.

More often than not, boys never get to have this experience. They don’t know what they’re missing. There is a distinct pleasure in being at the center of a long full skirt and twirling yourself so the skirt floats up and away in a buoyant circle around you. To be at the center of all that energy and see it manifest in the ballooning fabric is more fun than anything . . . especially if it’s a pretty skirt. Put a girl in a long full dress and she knows immediately what to do with it. She twirls and whirls and makes it fly all around herself. No one has to teach her. The knowledge is encoded in her DNA.

When I look at this image of myself from so long ago, the narrow banks of my heart are flooded over. This ragged, wild creature. This girl in flight. The ocean rolls in, and I am overcome by the green chaos. The past comes roaring at me in a churning wave. I can try to go over it or under it, but I must dive in and swim because the wave is coming for me, and I can’t stop the ocean.

I am on an aeroplane, heading toward New Jersey for a visit with my family. (Ah, New Jersey! My New Jersey! Cradle of my girlhood!) The pilot apologizes for the failed air conditioning and also tells us that we are cruising at 30,000 feet. Emily wants to talk about the persistence and the inadequacy of memory.

#1259, c. 1873

A Wind that rose
Though not a Leaf
In any Forest stirred
But with itself did cold engage
Beyond the Realm of Bird —
A Wind that woke a lone Delight
Like Separation’s Swell
Restored in Arctic Confidence
To the Invisible —

What sort of wind blows without stirring a leaf? The swift flight of unbidden thoughts racing across the poet’s inner landscape. In Emily’s case, this is the forest between her ears.

The Invisible appears again here. Now it gives cold comfort. She changes her mind on a dime, this girl. Her prerogative, I guess. The power of thought sweeps her back into memory of a “lone Delight.” This ability to summon delight from the past, from an airy place where no bird can fly, is sealed in cold secret. This is the “Arctic Confidence.” No one will ever know. A girl’s mind can be a fortress. Be warned. Emily herself may not grasp it in warm living form. It remains out of sight, shut away, frozen in time.

Such delights yield no real pleasure, only the memory of pleasure. Something like pleasure, but not the real thing.

Memory gives a transient sensation, caught in the net of time, one may brush up against a passing ghost from history. It lacks the warm shock of the new. The tangible now. Memory is a chilly place of no up or down, or side to side. It is a sterile atmosphere. It engages only with itself because no one else is there. Nothing may grow because there is no rude intrusion of the other. Only the cold, clean remembrance of things past, sealed and fixed as in ice.

What I find remarkable about memory is that it is so intoxicating. A memory, whether of past delight or past pain, draws me in as if it were a drug I can’t resist. Like most addictive substances, the rush of sensation from wallowing in the memory is over, almost before it has begun. Finally, it fails to satisfy. It is engaged only with itself. There is no helpful cross-pollination. No movement of solid forms through space. Only the pale flickering images on the mind-screen.

When Emily closes by returning to the Invisible, she’s asking us to think about where these memories come from. Or go. Or what is their purpose. To think again and again, no matter how this chilly wind fails to love the soft animal, still it draws us toward that ineffable thing — the Invisible. The web of divine intelligence that animates the world may not be perceived with eyes open.

I hear a woman, gazing within her own superb mental and imaginative processes, who sees that profound strength. She sees it for what it is, while also recognizing — cold comfort there.

Today brings a peppery dismissal of the dirty business of publishing. Emily does not favor it.

#709, c. 1863

Publication — is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man —
Poverty — be justifying
For so foul a thing

Possibly — but We — would rather
From Our Garret go
White — Unto the White Creator —
Then invest — Our Snow —

Thought belong to Him who gave it —
Then — to Him who bear
Its Corporeal illustration — Sell
The Royal Air —

In the Parcel — Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace —
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price —

Emily, my goodness, why such a snoot? It’s okay to publish. Try not to think of it as selling your soul, but sharing your soul. Sharing is good, right?

Okay, I know why this bothers her. It bothers me too, but not for the same reasons. Furthermore I don’t entirely buy Emily’s rejection of publication as somehow a degradation of her poems as emanations of her spirit. After all, she did send a parcel to the learned reader Mr. Higginson to ask if her poems “breathed”. She wanted to know if they were alive. I love that she made her poems into living entities. Clearly she saw them as beings separate from her, that she would send out to live in the world on their own. Did they breathe? Did they have legs? Could they be published?

Writing is a tool for communicating one person’s ideas and experiences into the mind of another person. The symbols have meaning, and the system of symbols we’ve conceived as writing is the way one idea gets to its destination into the mind of another person. Without that tool that makes a record of the thoughts, no one else would get it. Publication is just the next step in the process that begins when any one of us picks up a pen and a notebook. Publication moves that record farther out into the wider world so that more people may receive what the writer has recorded. The mistake is thinking that publication matters more than the initial writing in the notebook—the quiet private conversation between writer and page.

What begins in privacy will want to move into the larger world. A child is conceived and nurtured in the dark, out of sight. Eventually that child must enter the world and be seen. The same with the poems.

Some say: Why bother trying to publish at all? Just write what you want. Forget about publication. It’s all a trap anyway. Just write and enjoy! Writing for money is like having sex for money. It takes all the joy out of it. Hmmmm . . . . not sure what I think about that. Will let it stand for the moment.

Emily’s point is a good one, the one about reducing human spirit to disgrace of price. The money part of publication is sticky. As soon as money enters into the process, the excitement of pure creativity deflates. Money sets up a standard that has nothing to do with telling a good story. That makes it hard to accept money for your writing and still preserve the living, breathing center of the work. Like selling your baby.

Unfortunately writers do not live on air and sunlight. They live in homes, wear clothes and eat food just like regular people. It’s troubling, I know, but true.

Also I can’t help but think that Emily speaks from a rather privileged place. She lived in her father’s house all her life and was not required (as far as I know) to do anything in the world to earn her keep. She was free to follow the wanderings of her imagination because someone else was providing her livelihood. I am grateful to Emily’s father that he was willing and able to support her because if he had not, we would not have this big, fat book of poems now. It is an ugly fact of writing that it must be subsidized or the writer will perish. (I hear Virginia Woolf humming in the back of my mind right now. That’s where she keeps her room of her own.)

At this writing, I am mindful of the fact that two of my former students from my creative writing workshop recently had their work published. One wrote the cover story for our local weekly paper. The other has published his first novel. Both are over the moon. Happy. Simply joyful to see their work realized in the world. I know how that feels. It’s a total rush. No doubt about it. There is something undeniably magical and purely pleasurable in seeing your “baby”, something you crafted from your own imagination . . . (I would argue that everyone, even the journalists and non-fiction folk are crafting from imagination) . . . out there, externalized, whole, complete . . . and making sense to someone else. That’s what we live for. It never gets any better than that.

The first time this happened for me was in the third grade. I wrote a poem for the school newspaper. The poem described a sunrise, comparing it to a newborn fawn while hundreds of dewdrops greet the dawn, etc. It was a work of genius, rhymed and everything. When it was published, my mother read it aloud at the dinner table for my family. She smiled as she read, her gaze directed downward to the page. I still have a visual memory in my mind’s eye, an image of her lips as they spoke the words I had written. In that instant, it all clicked into place. I come up with the ideas and the words, those go onto the page, someone else reads it. And likes it! Gets it! This was power. Immense. I was eight years old, and I had found my calling. This is what I would do with the rest of my life. I have never been more happy or more tortured since.

(Writing is like a mad, bad boyfriend that I am besotted with and can’t get away from. Still, it works for us.)

I’ll close by saying that Emily is privileged and so can afford her lofty refusal to “Sell/ the Royal Air”. The rest of us are not so fortunate. Yet, I am glad to have Emily, once again, glad that she has enjoyed her privilege, her safety, her tidy home life. All that made it possible for her to remain faithful to an ideal the rest of us can’t afford. We need her and her sterling clarity, to hold something pure at the center. The reason we do this. Otherwise we might forget.