Tag Archives: Emily Dickinson

June 19, 2009 · 1:51 am

Another Turn In the Wheel

Today is my birthday, and Emily has given me a lovely birthday gift. Her poem concerns each individual’s life purpose and . . . interestingly . . . reincarnation. See what you think.

It’s a longish poem so I’ll just give you the parts that hit me the hardest.

#680, c. 1863

Each Life Converges to some Center —
Expressed — or still —
Exists in every Human Nature
A Goal —

She begins by telling us that each of us has a special purpose, a reason for manifesting into flesh. Then she spends few more stanzas reassuring us that this goal may be too far to reach, that’s okay, it’s expected and no reason to stop pursuing the goal. Then here’s her kicker at the end. Emily goes for the gymnastic leap into another realm altogether at the very end. Her dismount is always spectactular.

Ungained — it may be —by a Life’s slow Venture —
But then —
Eternity enable the endeavoring
Again.

Again. Again, she says. You get to try it again after death. So now does that mean your soul gets to continue pursuing this goal after it leaves your body? Or does she mean that your goal may continue its existence with the next fleshy manifestation?

If you miss this train, Em says, it’s okay. There is another one coming down the track.

The poem makes me wonder what did Emily think that her life’s goal was. I mean the one she didn’t reach. Expressed or still, the goal remains. The girl who wrote a poem every day for years, almost all her life. If that wasn’t the center that her life had converged on, what was, I wonder. What did our wonderfully prolific and productive poet think she was supposed to be doing but then considered that would not be hers in this life time?

This sounds to me like divine discontent. She answers it with a suggestion that Eternity give us a chance to endeavor onward. The ending on that single word, “Again” is a shivery promise.

I don’t know if Em considers reincarnation a possibility. She may have meant that this goal is a spiritual perfection that is unreachable in this “Low Venture” we have on earth. That only after death when we are finally liberated from the limitations of our physical cage, can we achieve that goal.

She could go that way. It would be the conventional way to see this. But I don’t want to go the conventional route here.

I can’t get away from that shivery, solitary “Again” standing there at the end. Her solid dismount off the end of this poem lands on “Again”. This is starting over. Flipping back onto the wheel of life. Each time we may or may not come closer to that goal. What could it have been for her? Finding the right word? Was that it, Em? You wrote all those poems because you had to burrow down to the right word. Was each one a near miss? I can see her looking at this mass of work and thinking she had only come close to her goal. Clearly she never rested on the last poem. Another one had to come out because the last one didn’t do it. Didn’t come quite right to the point.

This is her existential crisis. She produced all those words in a mania to reach an unreachable goal. The perfect poem.

Or was it something else, Emily? What did you want that you didn’t get? I could guess, but I’m afraid my vision would fall short of yours. My dear friend, I hope you taste fulfillment where ever you land again.

Drunk on Joy

I might have to start calling this the “Emily Every Other Day” project. Sorry, I missed a day. Some mornings I just can’t get to it. The morning runs away. Or the poem I choose confounds me so that my pen doesn’t want to move. I know the page is there, humming on my hard drive, asking for my attention.

So today, you get two for the price of one because I was remiss yesterday. Interestingly, the two poems from yesterday and today, seem linked or progressed, even though I selected each of them completely at random.

The theme for these two days is fantasy or self-deception. For it? Against it? Me, I’m for it. I think Emily is too. Not without caution and some humor, but also a real appreciation for the benefits of dallying in Pretend Land.

The first is #981, c. 1864

As Sleigh Bells seem in summer
Or Bees, at Christmas show—
So fairy — so fictitious
The individuals do
Repealed from observation —
A Party that we knew —
More distant in an instant
Than Dawn in Timbuctoo.

Emily is playful. I love it when she does that. “Sleigh Bells in Summer or Bees at Christmas.” These are absurd possibilities. Just as absurd as her belief in a close relationship to “A Party that we knew.” Then after lightly teasing herself, she twists the knife in her own heart. The bloody tine in the midst of the jokey play. Not at the end. She won’t end with that hard phrase, “More distant in an instant.” Instead she ends with “Dawn in Timbuctoo”, which I read as light, again. It’s the line before that gets to me.

“More distant in an Instant” is the moment of fantasy crashing into a brick wall. Someone she believes she was close to her is, in an instant, not there. Some rupture has occurred. Now she calls it fiction. She questions her own grip on what just happened. This is the bewilderment that inevitably arises when one person shares space with another. Each is a foreign country to the other. The two will never share the same language or story. Em says it must all have been a fiction. If that bond breaks so quickly, how could it ever have been real?

She has sport with herself and this fictionalizing. But I hear that tine of pain. The shock! She can’t help it. Before the sober, sensible adult self steps in to explain things and make light jokes, first the child self has to experience the shock of pain. Oh, I thought that was mine. I thought that was really mine. Where did it go?

That “more distant in an instant” is the bewildering pained space in which the believer has to rearrange her sense of what’s real. She’ll do it because she can and because she has to. But for that instant she is the bereft and bewildered child, in pain and longing for that delightful, counter-rational fiction.

The next poem that leaped into my hand embraces fantasy and holds it up as the thing that makes everything worthwhile.

#1118, c. 1868

Exhilaration is the Breeze
That Lifts us from the Ground
And leaves us in another place
Whose statement is not found —
Returns us not, but after time
We soberly descend
A little newer for the term
Upon Enchanted Ground —

Here Emily adds another layer to the fantasy. That is pure joy. It’s clear that this joy is an unreality. But now she lands squarely in defense of La La Land, as the thing necessary for a sense of renewal.

Being joyful is like a nice two-day drunk, after which “we soberly descend.” When we return from joy to sobriety, we do not experience a loss of joy but a chance to bring some of that drunken enlightenment forward into the rest of the grounded sober life.

We can’t stay drunk forever. Can’t loft in those breezes indefinitely. She’s pretty clear that “other place” won’t support us. We must descend on our own. Joy doesn’t kick us out. We return on our own because we must. But our visit to the idealized realm of joy changes us and makes us better. Why? We get to see things when we are up in the clouds that we can’t see on the ground. Certainly joy expands our vision. It’s a crazy drunk sort of vision that relieves another kind of unreality brought on by a refusal of joy.

Taken as a pair, these two poems show a wonderful movement from pained self-recrimination—something along the lines of this: “How could I be so childish as to believe something I invented?” To a triumph of self-acceptance along the lines of this: “How could I not be so child-like! How could I not invent reasons to run and jump for joy?!” My ability to experience something I have invented as if it were real is my greatest gift. It makes me better and better.

Go Emily.

I am influenced perhaps by my reading of Jack Kerouac last night. In his list titled, “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose” he suggests to writers: “Try never get drunk outside yr own house.” Good advice that.

In the end, Emily and I agree that it is not always easy being the sort of person who can invent things with her mind. Such a talent always leaves a girl vulnerable to feeling foolish. However, the alternative is far worse.

I plan never to grow up.

Devil’s Work

The crape myrtle overhead has exploded with pink blossoms. Ah, guilt-free beauty. Here’s the poem (c. 1865) for today:

#997

Crumbling is not an instant’s Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation’s processes
Are organized Decays.

‘Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust—

Ruin is formal — Devil’s work
Consecutive and slow —
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping — is Crash’s law.

I have noticed, now that I am deploying the Genius of Random Chance in selecting a poem each morning, that chance gives me the freedom to land in Emily’s later, more mature work. So now that I am rolling in the meat of her career, I can’t give you a thumbnail synopsis of the poem. I have to reproduce the whole thing here for you because the later poems are impossible to summarize. They are so densely packed, each word is a stick of dynamite. As Emily went deeper into her own genius, she left behind more of whatever coughing and sputtering that most of us do before arriving at our first authentic word. She taught herself, through practice, to arrive instantly at the core knot, the nut, the still beating heart of whatever she was aiming for. She did this (I imagine) by shaving away, gradually and constantly, anything that smelled even slightly of preparation.

To my ears, this density rings of a crazed, elemental urgency. As if she had grown wildly impatient with anything unnecessary. I can almost see her experiencing the same impatient dismay toward the body that encloses the soul. It’s all preparation. Get to the center of it. Why waste words or time? Get to it!

My experience of today’s poem is to be reminded that I should not be surprised by any of my current destinations. Wherever I find myself now, at nearly 47 years of age, is a result of who I am, not outside forces.

If I don’t like my current destination, if I feel a failure, I need look no farther than my own habits of thought for the cause. What Em calls “Devil’s work” I call “habit of thought.” This “Cobweb on the Soul” begins small but gathers force and strength over time. These habits direct us toward a goal that we set for ourselves by not doing our own inner housekeeping. By not clearing out the rust and cobwebs that accumulate over time, we move in a certain direction. It’s the lack of attention to process that actually moves the process. It will move on its own. We have to recognize what we set in motion.

I do not think that Emily believes our failure in encoded in our DNA, or that character is destiny. I don’t believe she means to say we are fated to arrive at certain giant failures, but that we direct ourselves that way with our smaller failures and our neglect of the conditions that created them—by allowing the cobwebs to remain. A cobweb is a filmy thing, minor, easily cleaned away at first. The junk cluttering up the soul may begin with the Devil, some outside force, but if we allow it to remain, if we fail to clean away the first signs of decay—yes, then surely the later grand undoing, our Crash, is our own doing not the Devil’s.

Also this Crash is slow in coming. We can see it before it happens, or ought to. In slipping there is plenty of time to observe oneself about to crash and save oneself. If we don’t avail ourselves of that time, we can’t blame the Devil.

“Cobweb on the Soul” are habitual patterns of thought. These influence how we act and react, how we choose and how others respond. We all know when we’re having an uncharitable thought, when we’re being mean-spirited or irresponsible, not our best self. We all know when our thoughts are making us smaller not larger. This cumulative process of thinking is the slip toward the crash. Habits of thought are just that—habits. They can be cultivated or discouraged. They are grooves that go deeper with repeated use and become harder to get out of and harder to see. As we go deeper into the uncharitable thought groove, the sides of the channel rise higher overhead so we cannot see beyond this thought into another, different thought.

Before too long, we can become convinced that our thoughts are real. Now that’s the hell where the Devil lives.

I do think Emily means we have some control and choice in this slow decay. She doesn’t offer an explicit way out, but she does let us know who is allowing the decay. It’s all a process, therefore it’s a pliable thing. Human nature is not fixed but plastic. Her view is not hopeful but responsible.

Finally Emily says: Don’t kid yourself about who is really in charge.

Tag Archives: Emily Dickinson

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