Emily Dickinson — And an Invitation to Talk Together on Zoom
Emily Dickinson — And an Invitation to Talk Together on Zoom
A poem by Emily Dickinson
We grow accustomed to the Dark —
When light is put away —
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye —A Moment — We uncertain step
For newness of the night —
Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
And meet the Road — erect —And so of larger — Darknesses —
Those Evenings of the Brain —
When not a Moon disclose a sign —
Or Star — come out — within —The Bravest — grope a little —
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead —
But as they learn to see —Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.
This time of pandemic, coronavirus-19, carries great risks. The last poem I sent out, Jericho Brown’s, “Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry,” had as its major theme the condition of those who work in grocery stores or meatpacking plants: The frontline workers whom we do not see, and never thank. They bear the brunt of the burden of the coronavirus. As do the distant overseas families of marginal immigrant workers, families who survive on remittances and now live in ever more abject need.
So it is perhaps a bit out of line and self-centered to worry about people like myself, and many of you, often still with jobs, who face a new isolation and a new sense of ‘loss’ as we, too, deal with a virus that keeps us masked, in our homes and sequestered, cut off from much of the daily contact with the other people who have defined and shaped our lives.
But loneliness and self-encapsulation enmesh us, hold even the fortunate ones in thrall. Following are lines I have cited before, from a poet, T. S. Eliot, I do not really like and from his poem – the most important, alas, of the twentieth century, The Waste Land – that irks me greatly.
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison…..
Eliot tells us, I think, that we are captured in the prison of the self. Solipsism, that bane of our otherwise collective existence, means that we too readily accept our own reality as all there is. And so we are trapped inside ourselves. Which, when we like ourselves and find ourselves interesting, is perhaps a decent situation. But being in our own solitary reality is not sufficient when we are isolated by circumstance, when we are needful of the company of others to prevent us from being crushed by overwhelming loneliness, when we are bored. (Here is the wonderful first half of John Berryman’s great “Dream Song 14”:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have noInner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,…. ).
When isolated, we need other people. Boredom breeds a sense of insufficiency and inadequacy, as Berryman reminds us, and ultimately it breeds despair.
When I need other people, voices not my own, I sometimes turn to poems. And my sending out poems is an effort, small I know, to entice you into moving beyond yourselves to encounter poems and poets.
Now I want to try something new, something that I intend as an antidote to these strange times in which we find ourselves moored. (Hopefully, not for too much longer!).
For those of you willing, let’s try to get together to talk. Probably about poems, and in particular the Emily Dickinson poem with which this essay begins. What I hope is that some of you, wanting to talk with others, will join me in a Zoom discussion. About the poem, about Dickinson, about poetry. About anything except Donald Trump, who as a subject enters far too many conversations and always sucks the air out of the room. Here are three scheduled Zoom meetings, since I know that we are not all on the same schedules or even in the same time zones.
Zoom meeting 1: Tuesday, August 8 at 8 PM https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87545454630
Zoom meeting 2: Thursday, August 6 at 11 AM https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89226025276
Zoom meeting 3: Saturday, August 8 at 12 noon https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84064429406
Let me be clear: The purpose of these meetings is to come together, to have a momentary escape from the isolation we find ourselves in during these difficult times. Talking about poems is not a competition: As I keep insisting in these letters, we are not in a contest to see who understands a poem ‘best’ or who can cite the most poets. Talking about poems is a way to come together, to recognize that we live in a human world composed of all sorts of other human beings. Smartness, literacy, purveying insights: These are not what we come together for. Human companionship in a world that is too often distant, hostile, uncaring. That’s what we want and need and seek. I think.
Ah, that Dickinson poem, “We grow accustomed to the Dark – .” It is one of my favorite Dickinson poems. Simple, more so than some of her more gnomic expressions. Although the subject of this poem is anything but simple.
Her subject is great pain. The poem is built on a simile: We notice the “as” that begins the third line. We grow accustomed to dark, or pain, like we grow accustomed to dark when we leave a neighbor’s house and the light is behind us, and then no longer there at all as we keep walking into a completely dark night. We get used to the dark, Dickinson says in the second stanza, and walk as if things are regular, normal (“erect”).
Then she extends her simile in stanza three, turning it symbolic, for that outer darkness is like inner darkness, “Larger Darknesses—those Evenings of the Brain” when, likewise, all is darkness, only now darkness within.
We do manage to move along, through, darkness – although occasionally in the darkness we “sometimes hit a Tree.” Still, “we learn to see.” And she gives us two alternatives, “Either the Darkness alters/ Or something in the sight/ Adjusts itself to Midnight.” Either way, in darkness, we get along. Either it is not as dark as we thought, and something like moonlight or reflected moonlight helps us along outwardly and something inwardly does the same; or we adjust to this new inner reality of ‘darkness’ as our eyes, at night, adjust to the absence of light.
“And Life steps almost straight.”
Note that: “Almost.” Almost. Things are different, even though we get along, seemingly fine.
I know she is talking about pain, great pain. (“After great pain,” she begins one of her finest poems.) But she also recognizes that in the dark, because of the dark, everything is changed; we walk “almost straight” as we adjust to the world, or the world adjusts to us.
So too with this pandemic, I fear.
Fortunately, for some of us the coronavirus is not a “great pain.” But are we the same, living in this time of worldwide plague? Not only now, as we face the pandemic. But also, will we be the same afterwards as before? The poem says no, that “Life [will] step almost straight.” Almost. I am not sure if Dickinson is right about this, or wrong. I fear that she may be right.
Let me return, now to the Zoom meetings. I have scheduled three. Partly so that no one meeting will grow too large to be intimate; partly because we all have different schedules. [I think back to many years of teaching, not always with a sense that I did as good as I could. But one thing I did I find I now approve of: Long ago, when I was teaching large classes, I would meet all my students in small groups for breakfast. Each group would talk about different things. Often we did not talk about ‘literature’ at all but about self, existence, God, being a college student – or what was at the movies. I’m hoping these Zoom meetings will be similar. We can start with Dickinson (or not) and then move on to talk about anything (including, of course, Emily Dickinson, or poetry as it sustains us – or fails to sustain us – in these difficult times.)]
Ah, Zoom. If you have it installed on your computer, just click on the link at the appointed time. If you do not have it installed, you don’t need to install it. Just copy the link and paste the link at the appointed time into a browser like Google or Mozilla Firefox, and click.
It’s that simple. I plan to try to record each session – nothing nefarious, just so I can learn from what we have done to do things better the next time, if there is one.
Zoom meeting 1: Tuesday, August 8 at 8 PM https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87545454630
Zoom meeting 2: Thursday, August 6 at 11 AM https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89226025276
Zoom meeting 3: Saturday, August 8 at 12 noon https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84064429406
My web page: https://www.huckgutman.com/
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