love//pain

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

YOU left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain 5
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.

~Emily Dickinson

On Thursday night, I wound up in the emergency room. I’ve had my share of ER visits, all of which were scarier than this one. This time, my back gave out on me and the pain was so intense I passed out. My G.P.’s after-hours doctor said that I needed to go to the ER, so I went. It’s nothing life-threatening, nothing super-serious–but it’s the most blindingly, breathtakingly awful pain I’ve ever experienced.

I’m doing much better now, out of pain and taking it easy as my back heals. Of course, I’m thinking about pain, and disposed to take Dickinson’s words on the subject quite literally.

My ER diagnosis is sacroiliac joint dysfunction. This is pretty common, apparently, particularly among women. The first cause listed on my discharge instructions? Pregnancy. I cannot think of a more visceral link between pain and love.

I’m about 200% sure that this Emily Dickinson poem is not about having children and the love and pain that are inextricably alchemized through that process, but right now, that’s where I’m at with this poem–that’s what it holds for me in this moment. And I don’t think it really matters–what Dickinson’s getting at is that pain is part of love, that pain and love are equally products of our relationships with one another. There can be no love without the possibility for pain, and I’ve never heard of a pain-free relationship that was worth anything.

Dews & sands

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Angels in the early morning
May be seen the dews among,
Stooping, plucking, smiling, flying:
Do the buds to them belong?

Angels when the sun is hottest 5
May be seen the sands among,
Stooping, plucking, sighing, flying;
Parched the flowers they bear along.

~Emily Dickinson

Over the past few weeks, our weather here in the Shenandoah Valley has fluctuated wildly, as per usual. The oppressive heat of August finally broke toward the end of the month. Storms lashed the mountains, spilling rain over the blue slopes of the Alleghenies.

Now the temperature is climbing again. The skies cleared by rain a day or two ago are clotted with white clouds piling on top of each other. (Sometimes, when I squint my eyes just so, I can imagine that the towering clouds are mountains, unbelievably tall, dwarfing the planet itself.)

Hurricane season is well underway, and it is strange to think that in this oppressive heat, a storm is barrelling down on us. The winds and rain in the Atlantic will strike us, dissipated a good bit, by the end of this week, tearing the first-golding leaves from walnut trees and flinging them in a damp scatter across still-green grass.

Autumn is coming. The flowers that are dew-soaked in the morning will soon be parched, or storm-torn. The wheel of the year spins on.

Portraits

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

PORTRAITS are to daily faces
As an evening west
To a fine, pedantic sunshine
In a satin vest.

~Emily Dickinson

Short and to the point, this one. Portraits–the ways in which we memorialize faces that are otherwise ordinary to us–cast a certain glow over their subjects. They romanticize them. The idealized ways in which we choose to immortalize one another, whether in paint or Snapchat filters, are not the stark realities of broad daylight.

“Place was where the presence was”

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

AT half-past three a single bird
Unto a silent sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious melody.

At half-past four, experiment 5
Had subjugated test,
And lo! her silver principle
Supplanted all the rest.

At half-past seven, element
Nor implement was seen, 10
And place was where the presence was,
Circumference between.

~Emily Dickinson

I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on exactly what it is, but ever since I first read this poem, I’ve been feeling that it had something to say to another poem by another poet writing in a different time and situation:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.|

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
|
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

~Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”

I think it’s because both of these poems seem to me on some level to be describing the way that artifact and experience can create place, can somehow reshape it. I’m not sure…but I’ll leave these two here so you can mull it over, too.

Sunset?

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Where ships of purple gently toss
On seas of daffodil,
Fantastic sailors mingle,
And then—the wharf is still.

~Emily Dickinson

My edition of Dickinson’s poems has the posthumously-added titles, and they’ve got me wondering–how is it possible to title someone else’s poems after her death? I’m a novelist, and wretched at titles. I dream of publication for many reasons, not least of which is the prospect of someone else telling me what my books ought to be called. A novel is a massive thing, and for me to distill my own into a single word or phrase is daunting.

But a poem is different. It’s shorter, generally, and more enigmatic, more open to interpretation in some ways. The title of a poem seems to me to matter in a way the title of a novel might not. A title can alter the entire meaning of a poem.

When I read this particular poem, I think, “Ah, lovely sunset metaphor.” But am I thinking this because of the title? The title, which someone else slapped on after Dickinson’s death, far past the reach of her intent, has already colored the poem for me. Maybe it’s not about sunset? Maybe it’s…something else? I don’t know.

I’m starting to feel the way about this posthumous titling that I feel about seeing the movie before reading the book–it can preemptively ruin the whole thing.

The griefs

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

I measure every grief I meet
With analytic eyes;
I wonder if it weighs like mine,
Or has an easier size.

I wonder if they bore it long, 5
Or did it just begin?
I could not tell the date of mine,
It feels so old a pain.

I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try, 10
And whether, could they choose between,
They would not rather die.

I wonder if when years have piled—
Some thousands—on the cause
Of early hurt, if such a lapse 15
Could give them any pause;

Or would they go on aching still
Through centuries above,
Enlightened to a larger pain
By contrast with the love. 20

The grieved are many, I am told;
The reason deeper lies,—
Death is but one and comes but once,
And only nails the eyes.

There ’s grief of want, and grief of cold,—
A sort they call “despair”;
There ’s banishment from native eyes,
In sight of native air.

And though I may not guess the kind
Correctly, yet to me 30
A piercing comfort it affords
In passing Calvary,

To note the fashions of the cross,
Of those that stand alone,
Still fascinated to presume 35
That some are like my own.

~Emily Dickinson

My first thought is that this is an uncharacteristically long Dickinson poem. That makes sense, given the subject matter. This is Dickinson’s jam, this dwelling on pain.

My next thought is that this whole poem is basically riffing on the old saw that “misery loves company.” That’s not it exactly, of course, but I think the poem and the platitude are touching on the same general human tendency. When we’re suffering, it’s a perverse kind of comfort to know that others are, too, and to wonder about the precise nature of their pain.

I am writing this on Day 3 of a particularly nasty head cold. Also Day 3 of my back going out. Also Day 3 since the realization that I am way out of shape and I need to get myself in gear unless I want to continue throwing out my back. Good times. In the vast scheme of things, these are very small sorrows. But they are mine, dammit, and they are eating my brain at the moment.

Dickinson’s poem is a reminder that we don’t suffer alone–well, that we do, but that we are never the only ones suffering. What saddens me about this poem, though, is the sense I get from it that we will never truly understand one another’s griefs, no matter how much we may try.

This is one of those poems that makes me want to go out and defy it. While the speaker doesn’t seem to ever succeed in understanding the sufferings of those around her, it also seems that she’s relying on observation alone–she keeps wondering, guessing–but never once is there a suggestion that she sits down with anybody else and just listens.

So I think, today, in the midst of my own small griefs, that that’s this poem’s lesson for me. Maybe we can’t ever really understand each other–but we’re certainly not going to get there without trying.

Infinite to venture

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.
For the one ship that struts the shore
Many’s the gallant, overwhelmed creature
Nodding in navies nevermore.

~Emily Dickinson
Image via Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ship-shipwreck-adventure-setting-1366926/

I love this one. The opening line is perfection–it perfectly captures something fundamental about human nature. We are made to try. The rest of the poem serves as a commentary and qualifier of this epigrammatic opening. For each individual success, there are whole navies of failures.

I just spent WAY too much time tracking down this column I chanced across yesterday, so I’m calling it quits for now and leaving you with that. Go out there and fail like a champ!

Lost Faith

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

To lose one’s faith surpasses
The loss of an estate,
Because estates can be
Replenished,—faith cannot.

Inherited with life,
Belief but once can be;
Annihilate a single clause,
And Being ’s beggary.

~Emily Dickinson

I’m with the speaker of this poem as far as the first two lines. Faith is more precious than any worldly possession, even the most extravagant inheritance. It’s in the third and fourth lines that she loses me. Her argument is that faith is more precious than earthly goods because it cannot be renewed.

In the second stanza, the speaker goes on to develop this thought. She argues that faith is “Inherited with life” and that “Belief but once can be.” This seems like a very extreme view. Once faith is lost, it cannot be regained?

One one level, this seems true. It’s certainly difficult to regain lost faith. Yet we do it all the time–we forgive each other. We question, and while some of us take divergent paths, others circle back to where we started.

I suspect Dickinson is talking about religion specifically, but I think the poem applies to all kinds of faith. If we read it as religious faith, there’s a very Puritanical slant to the poem. If we read it as faith in others, it works on a different level. I wonder, too, if we can read it as others’ faith in us–our faith in the sense that it’s something that’s been placed in us by other people.

In any case, lost faith is tricky to regain–but I don’t think that, as the speaker of this poem argues, it’s necessarily gone forever.

I learned its sweetness right

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

I had a daily bliss
I half indifferent viewed,
Till sudden I perceived it stir,—
It grew as I pursued,

Till when, around a crag,
It wasted from my sight,
Enlarged beyond my utmost scope,
I learned its sweetness right.

~Emily Dickinson

Yesterday evening, we took a walk around the field and through the woods. The stifling August heat of the past weeks had dissipated suddenly, and though it was still deep summer, the cool tinge in the air foreshadowed autumn. These are precious days, these days of aging summer. The garden pours forth a bounty, the bees cluster in the hive entrances, fanning away the day’s heat, and the leaves have not yet begun to turn, but there is a feeling of waiting that hangs in the air.

Yesterday, for the first time, it felt as if autumn was possible. Suddenly it felt right to be back in school. The year circles back around.

This is the first year in twelve years that I’ve gone back to school full-time. When Thing 1 was born, I finished out the few remaining months of the school year and then quit my full time teaching job to stay home with him. Then Thing 2 came along. I continued tutoring and teaching part time, in addition to stints at other work, but I haven’t gone back to full-time teaching until now.

It’s a mixed bag, for me. I love the students. I love the small school where I teach. My colleagues are wonderful. The energy of school is exciting, stimulating, fun. But I’ve given up my old every-other-day schedule, where I alternated full days of teaching with full days at home to write.

It’s a difficult transition. Full days around lots of people are completely exhausting. Writing time has shrunk from 7:30-4:30 every other day to an hour in the evening. I knew this would be hard. I’m feeling now just how challenging it is. And I’m looking back at those long writing days, those vast swaths of free time–to write, but also to ramble the woods and fields when the ideas wouldn’t come, to indulge in the soul-filling work of daydreaming, to have another cup of tea.

I think part of what’s so rich about autumn, what makes it the season of magic, is its complexity. It’s a season of harvest but also of loss, of richness and of letting go, of bounty and the certainty of future privation. This seems like a fitting poem for a late summer day as I look forward into a new season, a new normal, and allow myself a little grace to mourn what’s left behind.

The fathoms of remembrance

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Remembrance has a rear and front,—
’T is something like a house;
It has a garret also
For refuse and the mouse,

Besides, the deepest cellar
That ever mason hewed;
Look to it, by its fathoms
Ourselves be not pursued.

~Emily Dickinson

I’d never encountered this poem before, and I really like it. I love how Dickinson begins with the mundane–a house, an attic with space for the unwanted and uninvited. In the second stanza, she moves to a grander and more dire tone–“deepest,” “fathoms,” “pursued.”

There’s so much truth in this small poem. It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes’s explanation of memory to Watson:

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

~ Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Both Holmes and the speaker in Dickinson’s poem note the perils of an unselective memory, and both caution against them. Though Holmes’s is clearly an approach driven by professional need, both these descriptions of memory strike me as stemming from similar worldviews. The difference is that if Holmes clutters his brain-attic, he’ll have a hard time doing his work, while if the speaker in Dickinson’s poem allows unwanted memories to clutter hers, she will be forever “pursued.”