Thursday, January 21, 2010

Emily Dickinson


For the longest while I knew not much more of Emily Dickinson than a single favorite quote: "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

To read her poetry and letters for me bears out this image of a life startlingly lived, of a mind ecstatic with the experience of existing--and of ceasing to exist.

...I'd like to look a little more
[the previous lines concern dying]
At such a curious earth!

To delve further into this mind, I will simply let her words speak for themselves. Below, then, are some snippets from poems and letters, taken from LL's book "Selected Poems & Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Robert N. Linscott."

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
_________________

Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains
Were I as tall as they?

Has it feet like water-lilies?
Has it feathers like a bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!
Oh, some wise man from the skies!
Please to tell a little pilgrim
Where the place called morning lies!
_________________

I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl,
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
...
_________________

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
_________________

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.
_________________

Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door;
Or has it feathers like a bird,
Or billows like a shore?
....
_________________

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

_________________

And finally this, which gives some insight into perhaps the loneliness of her mostly reclusive life. Emily Dickinson wrote a "letter to the world, that never wrote to me." Does all writing, that goes unheard, share some of the following sentiment?

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

And if that writing is heard after one is dead, as was the case for her, does she somewhere feel the accolades we express to her? I like to think so.

Monday, January 11, 2010

300


Please note: this is not about the movie “300”, which I have not seen.

Earlier (“Rebels”, 10/26/09) I have commented on our propensity—human?, American?, hypo-manic?—to try and do so much. Clearly I have not made any changes in my own behavior. Though initially posted with a single sentence on Monday night, I am now catching up with the rest of this blog on Wednesday, all because I’ve been unrealistic about how many things I can get done in 24 hours.

This is exemplified by my email inbox. It refuses to drop below 300 messages and stay there for any length of time.

More accurately, I refuse to let it drop below that number. I could delete every single one of those 300 emails and possibly be better off for it: as far as I know, the world would keep spinning on its axis. Things that are really important would get re-sent to me. I could more realistically tackle current projects without having this number hanging over me.

Most of these messages, however, represent connections that I would like to make or to re-establish with real people. It seems a bit rash to just toss them out without at least making an attempt. And many of the connections are ones that lapsed during my residency. In a way this is my attempt to reclaim, or redefine, that time.

One of my favorite bumper stickers says, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” I like to think that it’s never too late to make and re-make human connections. To whittle away at a number, and in so doing create something intangible, but infinitely valuable.

Even if that means, as by definition it must if so much of my time is spent doing, doing less.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Beginnings II


My head is spinning.

It is the beginning of a new year. It is just after 5:30 on a Monday evening and in 23 minutes I will have used the remainder of the time I have allotted myself for this blog. I had such grand ambitions of what this first post of the year would be. As the seconds tick away I watch these ambitions spin wildly, collide with reality, explode like overheated balloons.

In my head are two memories, their juxtaposition framing my dilemma. When I started this blog I wanted to at least pay homage to a sentiment of Edward Abbey at the beginning of Desert Solitaire: to try to talk about the real world. Not to anthropomorphize, as we are wont to do, but to describe nature as it is.

On New Year’s Eve LL and I find ourselves, improbably, boxing. She is Albert Einstein, I, Jackie Chan. It is not even a contest. Einstein over Chan, K-O.

This is the first memory. Is the memory of a virtual event—for we are playing on a Wii, owned by the host of our charmingly odd bed and breakfast—a virtual memory? While the experience may have been all in my head, so to speak, my arms are sure sore.

The second memory is more tangible, and, even apart from not (virtually) dying, much more pleasant. After checking out of the B&B the next morning, we drive a couple miles up the road, park the car, and step out into reality. I have yet to experience any part of the Oregon coast that is not awesome, but that morning it is particularly so. Awesome: inspiring awe.

The pavement slopes directly into a sandy beach. Huge waves pound the shore, carving away at dunes held up by bunchgrass. A salty wind whips seafoam into a beach cover several inches deep. Low clouds seamlessly become rain, but thankfully hold back to a light, albeit horizontal, drizzle. We step onto the beach, carefully selecting a moving target of clear sand between ocean, foam, dune and driftwood. At the north end of the beach a promontory of basalt and sandstone juts into the Pacific. We start up its steep incline, the wind now a gale pushing us onward.

At the crest of the huge dune forming the saddle of the promontory, we pause.

Around us the wind is sheets of sand. Where earth becomes sky is not clear; so too the line where ocean meets air is blurred. 500 feet below us fissures in the rock channel waves into enormous bursts of spray which over millennia have carved caves and channels into the shoreline. Scrub pine clings to the leeward side of the cliffs, its myriad trunks ever bending to the wind. Everything is sound and motion. We are part of it all, and we are alive.

The horizontal precipitation intensifies.

When Ed Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire his self-issued challenge was to be out in nature and describe it as it is. Now I find it enough of a challenge simply to be out there: to find wilderness. And this is not to say that everything human is outside of nature—in fact, far from it. Abbey himself returns to the city to work in soup kitchens and find community.

I do want, however, to be cautious about time spent in things which are further removed from the living, breathing earth. Which includes time spent here: it’s 6:37, and I still have to post. Until next week.