Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “An Apodyterium”

Blogging Emily Dickinson

I’ve blogged about Dickinson for years. Did I learn anything?

I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson for about 8 years now. It started when I wanted short things to blog about. My idea was that a reader could glance over the poem and my writing, pick up a thought of interest, hold and maybe chew on it throughout the day. Ms. Dickinson was happy to oblige with a number of brief poems which I could briefly comment on.

To be sure, my blogging only occasionally did the poems any sort of justice. I tend to go for big ideas and tangle my prose up in knots. Having few readers means little feedback, and worse, I was writing on poetry. A lot of things have blossomed online — photography, film, drawing & painting, journalism, fanfiction, music — but poetry, while it nominally draws a category on any given site, doesn’t seem to have fared as well.

Still, a few close reads I did early on stayed with me. What fails in writing doesn’t fail as regards reading or thinking. “I dwell in Possibility” was a poem memorized accidentally by too much rereading. When Dickinson talked about “chambers as… cedars / impregnable of eye,” it hit me that she was talking about how choice necessarily blinds us to other choices. To even think about possibility, weirdly enough, is to be closed in some way at a given moment.

“There’s a certain Slant of light,” likewise, showed me more of Dickinson thinking about thinking. Aristotle talks somewhere about how education and pain are linked; the pain of wondering about the weightiest issues definitely shows in this poem.

Those early readings didn’t push me away from Dickinson as someone with too clever themes and morbid, painful riddles. Rather, they showed her to be a first-rate philosophic mind, “philosophy” in the literal sense of loving wisdom and trying hard for it. So Dickinson stayed with me. For a long while, I had stretches where I would read a poem of hers a day and jot notes down in my journal.

Attempts to try and find a central theme were multiple. I’ve pretty much given up on that now, despite the temptation to say “all of Dickinson is about blah blah.” The closest I’ve come is with “This is my letter to the world.” There, Dickinson says Nature gave her news. To make a gross understatement, “Nature” is a loaded term. Is it mankind’s “nature” to be a rational animal? Or are people prone to violence? That Dickinson has news is quite a claim.

It’s not that I’m not looking for the whole within Dickinson. It’s something like this: self-knowledge and a related knowledge of how human things work are less about “knowing” and more about seeing why the quaint notions we have developed over time or develop on the fly speak to us. This sounds like a really abstract definition of self-help, but I think you can see that self-help in large part is a caricature of this sort of reasoning. This is an inquiry that is much more personal and, strangely, a lot more careful than most. You don’t get easy answers, if you get answers at all.

The best example of it might be my best Dickinson commentary, on “I fear a man of frugal speech.” What I got out of the poem was a blunt, frightening question: Do you really want to be judged? Do you really want God to pass over you in silence? We can barely handle our own regret over sins and mistakes when we’re conscious of them. It is conceivable there is something a lot worse out there: someone who is exactly right about every moment in our lives.

Of course, it helps that human life does not work that way. We do have perspective, as Nietzsche helpfully points out, and we live within perspective. From that limit, we can reconstruct what matters bit-by-bit: we’re not trembling in the face of eternal judgment yet. I think that best explains the piecemeal approach of both Dickinson’s poems and philosophy prior to placing epistemology as “first philosophy.” For Dickinson’s poems, it’s all about taking a problem encountered every day and trying to get it into focus a little bit more, if possible. Philosophy prior to epistemology had metaphysics at its heart. One might be tempted to think of metaphysics as grand cosmological theories which tell us the order of everything in the universe. There is some of that, but there’s also the existential concern of wondering how one fits in to a whole that might have a certain order. That concern about one’s own wonder is a lot more intuitive than wondering if one knows whether one’s own hand is real or not. I like to think that for Dickinson, there is a metaphorical justification at heart, even if it isn’t comprehensive. Let’s say the world is eros, with “fish, flesh and fowl” commending “all summer long” and then some. What would it mean to be alone in such a world? Either one is nobody, or one is the erotic being herself.