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.

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.

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.

HNY!

¡Próspero Año Nuevo!
Godt Nytår
×åñòèòà Íîâà Ãîäèíà
MELKAM ADDIS AMET YIHUNELIWO!
رأس السنة
Heri Za Mwaka Mpyaº
L'Shannah Tovah
農曆新年
Happy New Year!

Into the light

In South Africa I first heard a quote attributed to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural address. Mandela never actually said these words; they are from American peace activist Marianne Williamson. But the sentiment hasn’t been harmed by the association.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of a higher power that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

It has been a decade since I lived with a black South African family, but watching the township scenes from Invictus yesterday took me back there in a heartbeat.

At 6AM I awaken, shivering against the cold of the Highveld, and stumble into the kitchen. Ma is already awake. She scrapes out the last of last night’s ashes into the metal bucket and hands it to me. I carry it outside and exchange it for a bucket of the coal that is heaped between the concrete house and the concrete fence which encircles the property, the fence which separates our house from a maze of similar houses crowding each other like a heap of squirming puppies. Soon the water to bathe the little ones is steaming on the fire and I walk across the small concrete courtyard to the bedroom. Brian is already up and gone to work, Bongani is still snoring, and I am grateful for the chance to wake Zama, 8, and Wandile, 4. I try to wake them the way my own mother woke me when I was their age: tenderly. In the township, the “location” as it is called by everyone living there, there is precious little space for tenderness.

After bathing the children Ma serves them a hot porridge of oats. Wandile, having momentarily opened his eyes in the metal basin of bathwater, is now falling asleep in his oats. Zama pokes him and Wandile lets out a cry. Soon it will be time for school.

While the children eat I take my daily walk. Our house is close to the edge of the location proper, and soon I am crossing the earthen dam that serves as a walkway across the swamp. The location was built on a swamp. No: it was relocated to the swamp. As I climb the hill on the other side, I walk among ruins. These are the ruins of houses built before Apartheid, houses razed to create a separation between the current low location and the high Afrikaaner farming town. Now, 50 years later, the new Mandela government is trying to erase that separation by once again building on the slope, throwing up a restless but orderly row of brick dwellings.

From the crest of the hill where the railroad runs its load of coal I look upon my home.

In the crisp morning air a pall of smoke hangs over the location. It burns the eyes, dirties the pastels of the concrete houses, sullies the clothes hung to dry. It strikes me that the only thing about the township that is not black are its people. They know: they are children of God. They are not afraid to let their light shine. For generations they have waited for this day. And just as they did during the long years of Apartheid, they will start this day by taking care of their little ones. They will bathe them. Dress them. Feed them. Send them up the hill through the bones of their ancestors, to school, where against all odds some of them will make it.

The dark side

“All of us have this extraordinary capacity for evil, but equally we have this remarkable capacity for good.” —Desmond Tutu, from a speech on genocide

In one week the Northern Hemisphere will experience its darkest day of the year.

It seemed an appropriate time to look in the mirror and explore my own darkness. But this is hard to do with the lights off. I try closing my eyes, and that helps a little.

Desmond Tutu was speaking of the horrors that unfolded in Rwanda and of those that continue to unfold daily in the Sudan. He asserted that to understand these things we must explore the possibility that the perpetrators could be we the horrified. To understand this human capacity for darkness not in order to condone it, but to better bring about conditions in which it is less likely to happen.

And what is darkness but the absence of light?

What is evil? Is it merely the absence of good?

Do I even believe in the idea of good and evil? Certainly my conditioning is to seek out the unmet need behind every act of hurting. This is not to deny culpability for action, my own or others; rather, I find it more productive to think in terms of what might make us as humans more likely to play nicely together.

When I look inside, what do I see? In reflecting on times when I have acted in a way that hurt others, usually I can identify: I wanted food. I wanted rest. I wanted recognition. To be able to contribute, to be listened to, to listen and understand. Sometimes the need was concrete and I just couldn’t meet it. Sometimes it was intangible and I wasn’t able to articulate it.

Certainly it is easy to imagine that everyone would want these things, starting with “basic needs.” But Maslow himself believed that the idea of a hierarchy of needs falsely implies that those needs at the bottom are less important than those at the top, in terms of nurturing a healthy community and not just a living individual. Needs for love, morality, spontaneity, lack of prejudice, etc., are as essential to a healthy community as clean water. In the absence of any one of these, hurtful behavior is more likely to flourish. In the absence of several at once we see war and famine, poverty and exploitation.

My mind wanders into associating pairs of opposites with positive or negative feelings: light and dark, warmth and cold, sound and silence...
...but to a migraine sufferer, it is darkness, not light, that is soothing...freezing is necessary for ice cream.... noise can be music or cacophony...knowledge and ignorance...is ignorance ever good?...certainly knowledge can be used for harm...has our technology outpaced our ability to control our basic impulses...what are our fundamental needs—

—suddenly I look up and an hour has gone by and I’m still alone at the computer and I’ve not furthered my understanding at all with that last paragraph and, and, I really need to pee. I get up and pee. Having done that, I realize I’m needing the opposite of aloneness. I need connection and community.

After leaving a couple voicemails I connect with an actual person. In seconds we are laughing. A happy glow fills my stomach, driving away the winter darkness.

If forced to make a hierarchy and designate one need as the most important, I would say it is connection. Connecting lives, sitting down and sharing laughter and a meal and ourselves with others, has the potential to, if not heal the world, at least take it in that direction.

As Tutu says, “A person is a person through other persons. I would not know how to be a human being at all except I learned this from other human beings.”

Creativity Part Deux

(written Friday Dec.4th--posted today!) Last week I wrote about creativity. I stated that gratitude and curiosity are essential to creativity. But I did not explain why these things are so important. Nor, beyond offering some quotes and making vague references to the world needing some creative solutions to its myriad problems, did I explain why creativity itself matters.

It is not just that we have myriad problems. It is that we are stuck: our growth cannot continue forever on our finite planet. But we can get stuck in much smaller ways too, and creativity is just as necessary for getting un-stuck.

Right now I am stuck. I need creativity. LL and I just had a difficult conversation about family. I am sad and I am stuck and I want to feel something different. So let me apply my own approach.

I am grateful for—no;

I am curious about—no;

I am sad because—

yes, that's it. Gratitude must start with acknowledging why I feel sad. I am sad because my goal, my hope, is always to increase understanding between people. Tonight I think I did not do that. In what way did I do the opposite of my intention? Perhaps by talking more than I listened. That's often a clue. Perhaps by offering an example of my own sorrow. Instead of comparing, I could have been reflecting back what I thought I heard being said, asking for clarification, confirming that what I heard were the feelings being expressed. Comparison to someone else’s situation rarely helps anyone feel better.

So now I am both grateful and curious: grateful for this moment of reflection which has helped me to see why I did not contribute to understanding, and curious about what LL was and is feeling.

It is tempting at this point to jump from gratitude straight to exposition about creativity. But I somehow think that wouldn't be very creative. A sculpture is not crafted of thin air. It is crafted of thick stone. What is the stone with which I am wrestling here?

Suddenly I feel very small indeed. Like an ant, armed with a splinter from a toothpick, huddled at the foot of a granite mountain. This mountain, this stone, is our family, mine, LL's, ours. I have no more business sculpting something of it than an ant has to carve a sculpture out of a mountain--and thankfully, no more ability. Some things are not meant to be created. They are meant to be appreciated. They are meant to be listened to, explored, loved, allowed to grow, blossom, change with the seasons.

Now I have—

I—

I am so grateful for this family of ours. I am so grateful for each and every one of us. Sitting here at my keyboard crying, I am so curious. I am a tiny ant curious to know more about this daunting and beautiful mountain before me, at once familiar and unfamiliar. How does it change with the seasons? In winter how dark and cold does it get? does the wind howl off of jagged peaks? does the snow fall silently, gently, peacefully, bending the trees to snuggle together under a soft blanket? in spring do wildflowers shoot up daringly between rock and rivulet? on a sunny day is the water of the high lakes cool and inviting? what wondrous creatures call this mountain home? what lives here? what dies? what is everlasting?

Some things are worthy of a lifetime of observation and love. Among these are mountains, and families—and forgive me for such an awkward and potentially distant metaphor! I was fortunate to grow up knowing intimately the mountains above our tiny town, and the above paragraph cannot begin to tell of their warm and familiar wonder.

In such cases the creativity comes in the observing, the loving. The understanding.

As a footnote, this is probably applicable as a great start to our world problems as well: before we go about creating, we would do well to observe, love, and understand.