Tag: the mind

A Thought

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A Thought went up my mind today —
That I have had before —
But did not finish — some way back —
I could not fix the Year —

Nor where it went — nor why it came
The second time to me —
Nor definitely, what it was —
Have I the Art to say —

But somewhere — in my Soul — I know —
I’ve met the Thing before —
It just reminded me — ’twas all —
And came my way no more —

~Emily Dickinson

This isn’t the first poem we’ve encountered here that deals with the elusiveness of thought. I love that this is something that seems to preoccupy Dickinson. She’s known for poems about love and God, but my favorites, as a group, are her poems about thinking. I love how she grapples with the nature of thought itself, with its seeming randomness and propensity to appear and disappear on a whim. Good stuff.

In this poem, the thought that eludes her is a character unto itself. It appears, reminds her of its existence, and flits away–it’s a perverse little thing, annoying and teasing. She isn’t able to say when she’s encountered it before, where it came from, why it came, or even what it is. All she can do is record that feeling of vague frustration in poetry.

The fathoms of remembrance

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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.”

So dense a fuzz

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To hang our head ostensibly,
And subsequent to find
That such was not the posture
Of our immortal mind,

Affords the sly presumption
That, in so dense a fuzz,
You, too, take cobweb attitudes
Upon a plane of gauze!

~Emily Dickinson

This is a tricksy one, and much is unclear. Who is the “you,” the “we”? What Dickinson seems to be saying for certain is that sometimes we “hang our head ostensibly”–we discredit ourselves, or act humble–when what we want is not to be humble, and when we are not feeling humble at all in “our immortal mind.” The “immortal mind” suggests the notion of the higher self, and so I think Dickinson’s message in the first stanza is fairly clear. Sometimes we’re humble when we don’t need or want to be. Sometimes we’re right, dangit.

The second stanza, to me, is best summed up in the phrase “so dense a fuzz.” I’m not sure what exactly Dickinson means with any of the second half of this poem. Line 5 is decently clear–when we know we don’t need to be humble, when we know we’re right, we feel a sly presumption–but what exactly is that presumption? “Cobweb attitudes” and “a plane of gauze” suggest that the opinions of the enigmatic “You” are insubstantial. But what’s the dense fuzz? The internal tug between wanting to be humble and wanting to be right?

Perhaps at 6am on a Friday, I’m just in too dense of a fuzz to make sense of this poem. But maybe this is part of what Dickinson is doing–making the reader doubt herself to prove a point. As I read through this poem, and reread it, I find myself doubting my own ability to parse any sense out of it. Dickinson has planted me squarely in the midst of the dense fuzz that is the syntax and word choice of this poem.

Well-played, Emily, well-played.